Intel Alder Lake-H Core i9-12900HK Review: MSI's Raider GE76 Goes Hybrid
by Brett Howse on January 25, 2022 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- MSI
- Laptops
- Alder Lake
- GE76 Raider
- 12th Gen Core
- Alder Lake-H
Battery Life
Built on what Intel now calls Intel 7, the new Alder Lake processors do not get a completely new foundry node to reduce power consumption. The idea of having P-Cores and E-Cores though is an interesting one for the laptop space, as in theory the E-Cores could lower power consumption quite a bit. However, that discussion will need to likely wait for the thin and light notebooks to arrive with U-Series and P-Series processors as a H-Series device with a massive RTX 3080L Ti GPU, DDR5-4800, multiple PCIe 4.0 SSDs, and a 360 Hz display are not going to be a showcase for power efficiency of a processor.
As always, our battery life tests have the display set to 200 nits brightness and the system set in its most efficient mode.
Web Battery
Our first test shows that the Raider GE76, despite a 99.9 Wh battery, performs very poorly if used as a portable computer. Thankfully it is not really intended to be used this way, as it is big and heavy to carry around, but the regression over the outgoing Tiger Lake model is clear. What is also very clear is how much better AMD is able to power-gate its large discrete GPU compared to NVIDIA, as the AMD gaming system dominates in the battery life tests.
The normalized results remove the battery size from the equation and drops the new Raider GE76 to the bottom of the results. There are several variables, so it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what is causing the power consumption regression, but likely DDR5-4800 is a part of it.
PCMark Modern Office Battery
The PCMark test will run a series of workloads in a ten-minute window, and if a device finishes the work quicker, it is able to idle for a larger percentage of the ten minutes, which probably assists the new Alder Lake system here as it is overall a more performant device compared to the outgoing Tiger Lake laptop.
Movie Playback
The battery life regression is even more pronounced in the battery life playback time. Clearly there is a significant amount of passive power draw in this system.
Looking at the Tesseract score, which divide the movie playback time by the length of the movie The Avengers shows that you would run out of juice halfway through your third viewing.
Battery Life Summary
In a word the battery life could be summed up as "unimpressive". The Raider GE76 is not an ideal test bed to determine CPU efficiency under load since the underlying power draw is significant. To see how Alder Lake compares we will have to wait for more power efficient platforms to get more meaningful results.
Storage Performance
Unlike with the desktop counterpart for Alder Lake, the laptop variants are limited to “just” PCIe 4.0 storage. The Raider GE76 offers support for two of them, and the system shipped with two Samsung PM9A1 PCIe 4.0 drives at 1 TB each.
The drive performance is class leading, with the highest results we have ever achieved in the PCMark Full System Drive test.
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Kamen Rider Blade - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link
So the ASUS G513QY w/ it's Ryzen 9 5900HX + Radeon 6800M + It's display / Memory don't also impact power consumption?That the ASUS that you chose wasn't similar enough?
Brett Howse - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link
Of course they do. AMD does way better on battery life but not because of the CPU. That's the point I've been trying to convey.AMD's power gating on their GPU is very impressive.
You said Alder Lake is "max performance with no regards to Fuel/Energy Efficiency" but in both the AMD system and the Intel system, neither CPU is the determining factor for battery life. They are almost irrelevant. Even in a thin and light system with no GPU, the display draws more power than any other component including the CPU.
I would love an apples to apples comparison but I don't have a Raider GE76 with RTX 3080 Ti and Ryzen 5900HX. Sadly we are constrained by what we have been provided to test, and what manufacturers build.
Kamen Rider Blade - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link
=(Kamen Rider Blade - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link
MSI Raider GE76CPU = Intel Core i9-12900HK w/ 85 Watts TDP
GPU = NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti for Laptops
RAM = 32 GB DDR5-4800
Display = 17.3" 2K | 1080p @ 360 Hz
Battery = 99.9 Wh
Asus ROG Strix G15 G513QY
CPU = AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX __ w/ 45 Watts TDP
GPU = AMD Radeon RX 6800M
RAM = 16 GB DDR4-3200
Display = 15.6" 2K | 1080p @ 300 Hz
Battery = 90.0 Wh
IntelUser2000 - Wednesday, January 26, 2022 - link
5900HX in the G15 isn't running at 45W, that's his whole point, but either you are choosing to ignore it or didn't see it."The ASUS G513QY with the AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX has a similar system, and it also draws around 85 Watts in its maximum performance mode on a 45-Watt processor."
That's the *same* power as Alderlake-H.
undervolted_dc - Wednesday, January 26, 2022 - link
alder lake it's not at maximum performance mode 85w, it's 115w a good test should account for power and price, a cpu which cost 2x because it's the super top 1% binning for 10% median better perf in benchmarks or that consume 2x for the same should be accounted in each bench results, top performance is a factor but the most important one for laptops are perf/watt/price and for servers is perf/TCO , perf alone is useless ( or useful to reach a certain wanted point from the press.... )Kamen Rider Blade - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link
The specs are similar enough, the only difference is that extra 1.7" display diagonal and extra 16 GB of RAM, but MSI has the more efficient DDR5 instead of older DDR4.MSI also has an extra 9.9 Wh to it's advantage.
Yet the AlderLake laptop was "UnImpressive"
jjjag - Wednesday, January 26, 2022 - link
Brett you are hilarious trying to reason with a fanboi. It's like trying to convince a trumper to get vaxxed because of all the past success we've had with smallpox and polio. For them, it's a religious argument. "Religious" because it ignores all real data and observations, and it just makes them feel better about themselves to hate something. But A+ for trying!TheinsanegamerN - Friday, January 28, 2022 - link
Funny, I didnt know the black community was full of trumpers. Or the hispanic community, for that matter......Sunrise089 - Wednesday, January 26, 2022 - link
But Brett, you’re giving the Intel system credit for the GPU+memory+storage. I don’t understand the rationale behind crediting the PCMark scores to Alder Lake but ‘crediting’ the poor battery life to MSI.