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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lmcd - Wednesday, January 26, 2022 - link
(To be clear, point is that they probably had wind of the upcoming release's significance in 2012 and started planning then. 2013 the A7 release, 2014 is the last Intel smartphone SoC, which was probably mostly done and committed to at the point that the A7 was released.lemurbutton - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link
People still compare this to AMD? AMD is far behind.Let's just compare Apple and Intel. At this point, Apple is far far far ahead of Intel which is far ahead of AMD.
web2dot0 - Wednesday, January 26, 2022 - link
Now we know why Apple left Intel. Intel’s direction going forward is simply different from Apple.Their power performance curve just don’t match and it seems Intel has no interest in satisfying Apple.
End of relationship
corinthos - Wednesday, January 26, 2022 - link
Apple also left Intel because it failed to deliver and failed to deliver on time.corinthos - Wednesday, January 26, 2022 - link
that is overly simplistic. there are some workloads at which AMD Ryzen laptops excel, blowing Apple out of the water. It is workload dependent. know your needs to make the appropriate choice for you.Spunjji - Thursday, January 27, 2022 - link
People compare it to AMD because AMD is not actually "far behind" and is the only other option for a Windows platform. If you'd like Intel to charge whatever they want for their products then go ahead, ignore AMD.maroon1 - Wednesday, January 26, 2022 - link
12900HQ sustained power consumption is 85w in extreme performance mode and 75w in balanced mode but you only lose 3% performance in cinebenchSo, the huge gap between 5900HX and 12900HQ gap in power can't be coming from the CPU only. 12900HQ laptops has 3080 Ti, faster SSD and difference display. So those likely played factor
I wish to see power consumption difference between the CPU only. Not the whole laptop power consumption
ddhelmet - Wednesday, January 26, 2022 - link
What's the difference between 6+8 processors? Better binned or just clock speeds?Otritus - Friday, January 28, 2022 - link
6+8 processors means that you have 6 high performance cores and 8 high efficiency cores. In Alder Lake 4 high efficiency cores is about equal to 1.5 big cores in multi-threaded performance, allowing Intel to achieve about 9 cores of performance with 8 cores worth of die size. It also helps boost battery life because Intel big cores are incredibly bloated. Different 6+8 processors will be binned and clocked differently.Hulk - Wednesday, January 26, 2022 - link
For us tech heads it would be nice to know the P and E average effective clocks during testing at the 3 power levels reported?