MSI GE60 Review: Mainstream Mobile Maxwell
by Jarred Walton on July 17, 2014 5:00 AM ESTMSI GE60 Battery Life
As I mentioned earlier, battery life is the one area where the GE60 doesn't do so well. I wanted to spend some additional time investigating NVIDIA's Battery Boost technology, but with a relatively low starting point I'm not sure how much it can really help. Anyway, I'll get to that later. As usual, we have our Light and Heavy workloads.
One oddity is that the Heavy workload was consistently causing a BSOD with a VIDEO_SCHEDULER_INTERNAL_ERROR message after updating drivers. I'm not sure if the Intel or NVIDIA drivers are to blame, but I suspect it might be Intel's drivers as H.264 offloading tends to work just as well on Intel as on NVIDIA GPUs these days, so there wouldn't be much point in powering up the dGPU for video decoding. (Oddly, I haven't encountered this error on other laptops with Intel + NVIDIA solutions, so perhaps the problem is related to Maxwell and the specific workload we're running.)
The 49Wh battery isn't exactly large compared so other 15.6" laptops, but even so the battery life from the GE60 is pretty disappointing. Last year's GE40 managed to hit nearly nine hours with a 65Wh battery, so I was hoping to see at least more than six hours out of the GE60. I'm not sure if the root cause is BIOS/firmware related, or if some of the components (e.g. the LCD) simply consume a lot more power. Regardless, the GE60 manages 4.5 hours in our Light test and 3 hours in our Heavy test.
Power draw in the Light test looks to be around 10.75W (give or take), which isn't all that bad, but Dell's XPS 15 manages to support a QHD+ touchscreen LCD and still only consumes 9.9W in the same test, so there's definitely room for improvement. Dell also wisely chose to stuff in a 91Wh battery in their SSD-only XPS 15 model, which is nearly twice the capacity of the GE60's 49Wh battery. Things do improve a bit in the Heavy test, with the GE60 managing three hours compared to 4.38 hours – that means at a higher load the GE60 is drawing roughly 16.33W compared to the XPS 15 drawing 20.75W. And if you're curious about the current best result for power use, Sony's 13.3" VAIO Pro 13 only used 4.6W during the Light test and 11.4W in the Heavy test.
As for gaming battery life, without Battery Boost being enabled, you're looking at around 40-60 minutes, depending on the game and settings you're running. With Battery Boost, in some situations you might get close to two hours of gaming, but in most of my testing it looks like 60-75 minutes is a better estimate.
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Khenglish - Friday, July 18, 2014 - link
SLI class laptops already do not support optimus because nivida does not allow it with SLI, so these could do G-sync just fine.As for strong single card laptops then yes the iGPU is in the way. Alienware laptops allow you to run in optimus/enduro mode or in dGPU only mode which connects the dGPU directly to the display, but ASUS, Clevo, and MSI do not. Alienware actually has every display output directly drivable by the dGPU, so I feel it would not be very difficult for other makers to at least route the internal display with a BIOS option for iGPU/dGPU mode, or dGPU only mode.
yankeeDDL - Friday, July 18, 2014 - link
This is a good machine. I am looking for an upgrade and this looks fast and with a spacious HD, which is a plus.That said, I wish start seeing laptops (especially in this size and price range), using an SSD paired with an HDD (less than 1TB means that you need to find some creative way to keep music, photos and videos with you, and 1TB SSD is still way too expensive).
Maybe some of the Kaveri parts can compromise on the CPU while provide similar GPU power, all combined for a much lower cost. Let's see: so far Kaveri has been MIA.
Hrel - Friday, July 18, 2014 - link
I picked up the GE60 i7 and GTX765M GPU for $800 off neweggflash a few months back. Couldn't be happier with it. Really amazing laptop, for that money I wouldn't expect a backlit keyboard, yet it has one. a 720p camera, stereo mic, Optimus, fantastic keyboard feel, though the layout could use some work. Some things are in odd places and there's some completely unused keys that could be replaced with nice keys, like a Windows key to the right of the spacebar. I'd also like the spacebar moved left some as it sits directly under my right palm. The Del key is also oddly far to the right, so that should be put back where it belongs.Nit picky stuff though, it's an amazing laptop. Seems completely wasteful to get anything more expensive considering what is offered in the GE series. I guess if you need something .5" thinner, for some unkown reason, the GS series makes sense. But I cannot fathom a function for the GT series besides just wasting money.
Taurus229 - Friday, July 18, 2014 - link
Mainstream at $1200.00. Who's kidding who ?grayson360 - Saturday, July 19, 2014 - link
The Physx issue is because Metro Last Light installs an older version. If you install metro, then install the drivers, it runs beautifully. I had the same issue with my SLI'd 780's. The fps would plummet to single digits. After the fix, I had perfect smooth gameplay with zero slowdowns.GreenMeters - Sunday, July 20, 2014 - link
Is it possible to remove the tacky badge from the top cover?DaveLikesHardware - Sunday, July 20, 2014 - link
I prefer using a touchscreen to navigate Metro UI.Are GTX-class mobile GPUs and touch screens mutually exclusive?
I was looking forward to the Y50 - thinking it'd be touch screen.
How about the GS60 Ghost or GS60 Stealth? Neither are, are they?
I'll keeping waiting...
Dave
CommandoCATS - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
I think there's a Lenovo Y50 Touch with a GTX 860M and touchscreen. Was that what you meant?DaveLikesHardware - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
Yes, Commando, it is. Thanks - I missed it and only saw the Y50 non-Touch.That is the fastest GPU paired with Touch screen that I've seen so far.
Dave
romba - Thursday, July 24, 2014 - link
On storage, on the other hand, this is the only laptop at this price with 2 msata ports. My GE60 is equipped with 2 x 1TB Sams SSD and 2 x 1TB HDD (one in a caddy in the optical drive). So if you are willing to get your hands dirty and self upgrade, this baby is for you.I dare you to find a laptop at this price that can house 4TB of storage.
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