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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
153 Comments
View All Comments
Timoo - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link
Yes, and if you want your gaming rig to be portable, because you love gatherings and hate to drag around your 36" screen, case, cables, mouse, keyboard, etc., then this is a good solution.melgross - Wednesday, January 26, 2022 - link
Sure, and when ten or more people are together, they find that they can’t all plug in at the same time. Wonderful!TheinsanegamerN - Friday, January 28, 2022 - link
And when 100 get together they'll find they cant talk over each other! I love strawmen arguments!PeachNCream - Friday, January 28, 2022 - link
Its more of a kids oriented laptop than performance oriented given the branding, colorful light bulbs, and other presentation methods for the hardware. Something designed for performance in the laptop space is more along the lines of a Dell Precision for example. This is instead a toy for little boys that want to be gamerz0rz.TheinsanegamerN - Friday, January 28, 2022 - link
Kids are not buying several thousand dollar RGB PCs. Adults are.Just like games. It's not kids buying microtransactiosn by the billions. It's adults in their 30s. They're the biggest market.
Millenials never grew up.
vlad42 - Friday, January 28, 2022 - link
You're right adults are buying them...for their kids.vlad42 - Friday, January 28, 2022 - link
The overwhelming majority of the target market for these types of laptops are people in middle school through undergraduate. The thing is, most grow out of this aesthetic and, because they have more disposable income as they get older, are likely to have a lighter laptop/tablet paired with a console/desktop for high performance computing/gaming.Think about, if the millennials who were interested in this type of device/aesthetic when they were in middle school to undergraduate were generally still interested in it, then there would be far more devices like it available from Dell, HP, Lonovo, etc. Instead, for every device like this one, there are a dozen(s) ultrabooks with more of a MacBook/ThinkPad aesthetic.
Ananke - Tuesday, February 1, 2022 - link
Intel H series targets portable workstations aka HP Z Book and Dell Precision. It's irrelevant to compare this MSI to a corporate market class laptop. I would prefer this 12900H instead of the Xeons in my Z-Book for example. This is what large corporations are buying, none of them buys AMD regardless any performance. Priority is security and manageability. A comparison to M1Pro would be somehow relevant, it falls in the same price segment and corporate market.vladlazlo - Wednesday, February 2, 2022 - link
Intel and security... That's a good one...Haven't heard that since the last time there was a news about 240+ security vulnerabilities that you get for free with intel processors. AMD and all the ARM based processors combined can't put a dent on that record, even if you triple the number of vulnerabilities they 'offer'.
Maybe these adventurous people you speak of want more vulnerabilities?
vladlazlo - Thursday, February 3, 2022 - link
You might want to read this...https://www.tomshardware.com/features/intel-amd-mo...
Or this
https://www.zdnet.com/pictures/all-the-major-intel...
before you start talking about security.....