Turkey's Monster Notebook Looks to Do Battle With US Laptop Makers

It's not often that you see an all-new notebook brand pop up stateside, but Monster Notebook has two laptops and a discrete Intel Arc graphics card set for launch later this year.

Turkey-based Monster Notebook has announced plans to bring its gaming PCs to the US.

The company—no relation to the cable maker or energy drink—was at CES this week to show off two laptops and a discrete Intel Arc graphics card, and to tout its plans to enter the US market later in 2024.

First, the products. The 14-inch Monster Huma H4 laptop, a productivity-focused model, runs the latest Intel Core Ultra 7 processor and relies on the CPU's built-in Intel Arc graphics silicon. The Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" chips also incorporate dedicated neural processing engine (NPU) elements for local artificial intelligence (AI) processing, one of the big trends from CES 2024.

(Credit: John Burek/PCMag)

More in keeping with the company's gaming-laptop focus is the 16-inch Tulpar T6 V1.2. Intel unveiled new 14th Gen Core "HX"-series mobile CPUs at CES, and the Tulpar runs one of them, an Core i9-14900HX processor with 24 cores (up to 5.8GHz max turbo frequency). That's paired with punchy Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 (12GB VRAM) graphics. There's also support for DDR5 memory and a 165Hz refresh rate for what Monster says is "an unparalleled gaming experience."

The discrete graphics cards, meanwhile, are based on the 16GB Intel Arc A770 and 8GB A750 and feature support for AV1 video encoding, as well as Intel XeSS hardware-upscaling technology, which helps boost frame rates while maintaining image quality. The AI infusions here also promise to streamline photo and video editing. (The 16GB version of the card offers an RGB lighting option, in a space where Arc partner cards are thin on the ground.)

Here Be Monsters (Soon)

Monster is Turkey's leading brand for gaming laptops (it has a significant retail-store presence there and in Berlin) and works with a variety of OEMs on its laptop designs. It also holds significant market share in Germany, and maintains support offices in London and Dubai to service their respective regions.

The company recently established its US presence with offices in Portland, Ore. (no coincidence, given proximity to Intel and its Hillsboro, Ore., operations), and it also now employs a handful of former Intel executives. One of them, whom PCMag spoke with at the show, is Justin Whitney, the company's new director of global strategy and business development. He's an Intel veteran who most recently was with the Intel NUC group, which was wound down last year.

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