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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hsew - Friday, May 13, 2011 - link
Wow, I must have been asleep longer than I thought! Does it support DirectX 47 and come with 24 EB of GDDR29 like they said it would? All while consuming 14nW at full load?JarredWalton - Friday, May 13, 2011 - link
I could tell you, but then the time travel police would be all over me. Sorry for the spoiler; please check back in 60 years for the full review!hsew - Friday, May 13, 2011 - link
I second the hopes that you get your hands on a G53SW. Specifically the XN1 model. I am curious as to whether or not it supports dual hard disks.z3r0slugfm - Saturday, May 14, 2011 - link
The G53SW does support dual hard drives and specifically the XN1 models come with the 2nd hdd caddy already installed.Iketh - Saturday, May 14, 2011 - link
I've been eyeballing the dell XPS 17" with a GT555M for a few weeks now... you can upgrade to the 2720qm and XFi sound as well as a few other upgrades and it comes out around $1550 (back-lit keyboard is stock)... please, please, PLEASE include results with a GT555M, I'm just not ready to pull the trigger yet (since I'd love to get this laptop with a 6970M instead). Screw optimus...Iketh - Saturday, May 14, 2011 - link
I'd like to add also that the G73 has superior cooling and may contribute to the higher scores from higher turbo clocks... it vents the entire chassis...JarredWalton - Saturday, May 14, 2011 - link
True, but in looking at the individual subtest scores, it's the storage benchmarks that are all about twice as fast on the ASUS G73SW and K53E. It makes me wonder if somehow the other laptops are only running the SATA drives in a reduced performance mode. Anyway, nothing I tried improved scores on any of the laptops, but ASUS consistently came out on top. I don't think the U41JF had the same performance benefit, though... I'd have to rerun the tests to verify.DanNeely - Saturday, May 14, 2011 - link
With the weaker clocks and lower core count the 555 is only going to have above 55-60% of the 560's performance in shader intensive games, and you take a similar sized hit from DDR3. Going the other direction its shading power is only about 20% higher than the 550. On paper it looks rather disappointing.JarredWalton - Saturday, May 14, 2011 - link
I think you got your numbers a bit mixed up, and you're probably talking about the GTX 460M and not a non-existent (an laptops) 560M. Anyway, the GTX 460M has 52.5% more *theoretical* shader performance than the GT 555M, and if you're looking at the GDDR5 model of the 555M, it has 20% more memory bandwidth. Or the reverse is that the 555M has 65% (worst case) of the 460's core performance. In actual games, you can see that the GT 540M (which is another 20% slower than the 555M) does reasonably well at moderate settings.DanNeely - Saturday, May 14, 2011 - link
I went off of the table in wikipedia, with a bit of extra googling the 560m appears to've paper launched last month with the first laptops using it expected at the end of this month. The main difference appears to be that the 560m will have shaders 100mhz faster.