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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deil - Friday, January 28, 2022 - link
Does anyone have info of idle power of this thing/clocks it has on idle on p/e cores ?Just curious.
Spunjji - Friday, January 28, 2022 - link
No idea yet, everyone seems to have been seeded the same platform and its mediocre idle power characteristics have more to do with the way it's configured than the CPU / chipset combo.Rezurecta - Friday, January 28, 2022 - link
Agree with this article. This processor isn't too interesting. It is basically a full desktop part and we've seen that Intel is nice and fast with Alder Lake. Show me the U parts we'll see in normal laptops!PeachNCream - Friday, January 28, 2022 - link
Killer-branded network adapters. Disgusting gimmicky software is a no thanks.Vitor - Friday, January 28, 2022 - link
360hz is useless. No game came close to achieve that. 144hz with better colors and/or 1440p would be much better.Samus - Saturday, January 29, 2022 - link
It's like Prescott all over again, except Intel actually edges out AMD in performance too, but at what cost? Nearly double the power draw for 10-20% IPC improvement?ciparis - Monday, January 31, 2022 - link
When will this laptop be available?IUU - Tuesday, February 1, 2022 - link
Intel's processors are fine. It is just that Intel had possibly to pretend they can't move from 14 NM , so they don't kill the entire industry, which had not been competitive for ages. At 55 percent the transistor density they already beat Apple , of course by employing more wattage. Can you imagine what would happen if they were a whole node ahead, that is at a lithography comparable with TSMC' 3 NM. Desktops and laptops with performance x3 to x5 that of Apple's or AMD's at the same higher or lower prices.PS Don't Tell me you believe Intel could not transition to a new node all these years? You really believe that?
TekCheck - Friday, February 4, 2022 - link
Sounds like an industrial conspiracy against progress, something similar to what Edison did to prevent Tesla's innovations moving the world forward and faster.Except, it is not true in Intel's case. What would be a good reason to allow TSMC to rapidly gain a competitive edge by stifling own progress? Interesting hypothesis, but silly. They got complacent, their previous CEOs made several bad decisions and now they are forced to buy TSMC's process to stay in the game.
IUU - Tuesday, February 1, 2022 - link
or to put it another way they were able to efficiently or less efficiently compete with whole industry while using the same lithography for 3 Moore cycles; that's centuries in computer time. Regarding money , they have never really faced a real problem. They have their way of squeezing a river of dollars out of thin air.