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
Battery Life and Power
The battery life results again fall right where expected. Without Optimus Technology, the GTX 460M puts a major dent on battery life, so even with 75Wh and larger capacities the best such notebooks can manage is just under four hours of mobility. In reasonable workloads like surfing the Internet, that drops down to about 3.5 hours (give or take), and H.264 decoding will last through most movies but not much more. MSI did make some changes to their power management, apparently, as our initial testing of the GT680R a few months back did worse than the P151HM and G73SW even though the battery capacity is 13% greater. The MSI also gets slightly less relative battery life, but that’s easily explained by the presence of a second hard drive.
We also ran some additional battery life tests, for those who want to do something like play a game while on battery power. The GT680R managed 100 to 125 minutes while looping 3DMark 03/06, and the P151HM lasted 130 to 140 minutes in similar testing. Recharging time on the MSI was 183 minutes (with the laptop powered on but sitting at the Windows desktop), and 143 minutes for the Clevo. Note that the Clevo battery consistently reported 0% wear while the MSI battery wear ranged from 6% to 9%, so that could also affect the battery life as well as charging time. Finally, idle battery life with the LCD at maximum brightness is 190 on the Clevo and 213 on the MSI. That represents an additional power draw of 3.2W for both the Clevo and MSI notebooks, but the interesting thing is that the P151HM manages nearly 330nits compared to just 230nits for the MSI at maximum brightness. We’ll get into the LCD differences in a moment, but it appears that the low contrast on the MSI is a result of the same backlight intensity letting though more light when it’s supposed to show black and less light when showing white—a double whammy with no benefit to the end user (other than cost).
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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.