CyberPower's X6-9300 and MSI's GT680R: Fighting for Your Mobile Gaming Dollar
by Jarred Walton on May 13, 2011 10:59 PM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
- Intel
- MSI
- Clevo
- Sandy Bridge
- CyberPowerPC
- NVIDIA
General Performance and 3DMarks
Here are the remaining application benchmarks, most of which remove the storage subsystem from the equation.
PCMark Vantage echoes what we’ve shown with PCMark 7 above, so we’ll just refer to the commentary we’ve already made. The remaining tests mostly focus on pure CPU performance, so all of the i7-2630QM notebooks fall in a tight cluster. The only systems that consistently come out ahead are those with faster Sandy Bridge CPUs, or the hex-core Clevo X7200.
Turning to 3DMark, we’ve dropped the 03 and 05 versions from our benchmark list, added 3DMark 11, and for higher end notebooks like these we are including 3DMark Vantage’s Performance preset. In all four tests, the performance falls out just as you would expect, with the GTX 460M notebooks all close together. MSI’s GT680R shows us two other interesting pieces of information. First, the latest 270 series NVIDIA drivers appear to have helped 3DMark performance slightly, bumping performance up a few percent. (I can’t say for sure whether I used Turbo on the original MSI GT680R when testing 3DMark performance, so it’s possible much of the increase in performance comes from that.) That already gets into the second point: the slight 5% GPU core overclock does show up in 3DMark; it’s not a major improvement, but it’s free so there’s no harm in including it. The same slight boost in performance generally carries over to gaming as well, which we’ll look at next.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
44 Comments
View All Comments
strikeback03 - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link
One of the grad students I work with just bought an XPS 17 with the 3GB 555M for doing CUDA work, it has the 144 shader/DDR3 version of the 555M. Also, there don't seem to yet be proper drivers for using CUDA 4.0 with OptimusBolas - Saturday, May 14, 2011 - link
I'm waiting for a high end gaming notebook with a sandy bridge core i7 quad core cpu, dual high end gpu's, and a 120 Hz IPS screen. Is that so much to ask?tmacfan4321 - Saturday, May 14, 2011 - link
Is the Alienware M18x not good enough for you?BTW, 120Hz IPS displays are rare in monitor form. You're dreaming if you think that laptop manufacturers are going to be able to pull that one off.
Bolas - Saturday, May 14, 2011 - link
and of course, a backlit keyboard.Gnarr - Saturday, May 14, 2011 - link
holy jeebus MSI GT680R is one ugly computer... :SAnd on that note, I really like the simplistic and clean "no design" of the Cyberpower's case. If they had only skipped the glossy besel and had a backlit keyboard and maybe a little bit bigger touchpad, it would have been a really nice computer.
tmacfan4321 - Saturday, May 14, 2011 - link
If I owned an HM150, I'd probably take out the LCD and sand down the bezel. It would make the laptop a lot more aesthetically pleasing.jefeweiss - Saturday, May 14, 2011 - link
Looks like there's a missing paragraph under the photo gallery on the first pagejefeweiss - Saturday, May 14, 2011 - link
Oops, sorry it's on the Doing the time warp page....kevith - Saturday, May 14, 2011 - link
Why is it, that RAID 0 constantly is referred to in reviews like this, when every article or test I have ever read - your own here at Anandtech inclusive -ends up stating, that it has only theoretical effect, if any.tmacfan4321 - Saturday, May 14, 2011 - link
The Lenovo W520 hits on about all of those features that the author wants in a laptop with the exception of the price and sound quality. I ordered a heavily discounted W520 for $1500. The specs were as follows: i7-2720QM, NVIDIA Quadro 2000M with Optimus (GTX 460M with 128-bit bus), matte FHD screen with 95% color gamut (same panel as the RGB-LED Dell LCD), 4GB of RAM, 500GB 7200RPM HDD.The backlit keyboard isn't there, but there is the ThinkLight on the top of the display. The GPU is slightly slower than the GTX 460M because of its 128-bit bus and its Quadro BIOS. The battery life is awesome, due to Optimus. The build quality is stellar because it's a Thinkpad.
Normally that config will run you around $2000. That's the only problem.