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.
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Hrel - Sunday, May 15, 2011 - link
Made by CompalLarries - Sunday, May 15, 2011 - link
How about the HP Envy with 6850M? Is that any good for gaming?Thanks.
Hrel - Sunday, May 15, 2011 - link
6850M should be better than the GTX460, so yeah, it's good for gaming.JarredWalton - Sunday, May 15, 2011 - link
I disagree. The 6870M would probably be close, but remember that the 6870M is actually slightly slower than the 5870M, and there are plenty of cases where the GTX 460M already beats the 5870M. (Note: yes, I know 5870M isn't the official name.) The 6850M will probably be similar to the 5850M in performance, which we have results on several of the gaming tests using the Envy 17. The HD 6950M would be the better chip compared to 460M, but I don't know of anyone using it yet.aguilpa1 - Sunday, May 15, 2011 - link
my kingdom for a real gaming laptop that sports a 6970m or equal.. I just looked at the new Alienware 18" and it used to be that brand had choices of GPU now you only get one, the tired old 460m, whatever, like a fighting bull with no balls.Rumpelstiltstein - Monday, May 16, 2011 - link
Just get rid of the damn glossy bezel and 10-key and you actually have something.littlemaddystar - Monday, May 16, 2011 - link
um, wel, i kinda have no clue about what you guys are talking about, but Anand was in my teasting booklet. I read about him. And I had to awnser questions. I have to say that his company, (if that's what you want to call it,) is very impressive. And I just wanted to say something. :) sorry to bother your techy conversation. continue as if I never said anything.Zoolookuk - Monday, May 16, 2011 - link
What a fugly laptop!toschek - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 - link
I've been using one of these (Sager branded) since late Feb. and I really love it.I don't give 2 solid shits about the speakers since I use this as my music production workstation and everything goes through an external audio card, but I can see how you might ding it for that. What's more annoying to me is the soft-touch rubbery trackpad and overall the finish seems to get pet hair stuck to it quite easily.
Overall for a desktop replacement it's working out great for me and all the complaints I have are extremely minor.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 - link
Wait, so you got a P151HM and it has the soft-touch plastic coating? Because the P150HM I tested had that but the P151HM is straight up ABS plastic with no coating whatsoever. I suppose there are probably P150HM with the all-plastic shell and P151HM with the soft-coating, then.