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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soloracerx - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link
NewEgg just put up the pre-orders today for the MSI line 12th gen lappys. Staggered release from Feb through April. The one reviewed here will be available 3/28/22 for $4199. https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=12th+gen+laptopmabellon - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link
“The new Alder Lake system could only average 83% of its original frames per second, because that task was deprioritized by Thread Director to free up additional resources for the foreground jobs.”Foreground and background detection is provided by the OS. The CPU alone has no way to identify which threads are rendering on screen, the OS and window management tracking is responsible. This window tracking, and more, are critical for hybrid scheduling, favored core scheduling, etc. Https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/procthread/quality-of-service
If you want to test Thread Director you need to test workloads with multiple concurrent workload classifications by Thread Director. A complex workload (or multiple concurrent workloads) with different thread execution (I.e. some AVX, some not). For example, if you have two on-screen workloads (I.e. both prefer performance), but there are more concurrent workload threads to schedule than there are P-Cores, which subset of those threads will get the most performance out of the limited set of P-Cores?Homogenous workloads where all threads are roughly equivalent and running the same instruction mix are unlikely to have much impact (e.g. Cinebench, Handbrake). Workloads that fit entirely on P-Cores are unlikely to have much impact as there is no overflow to E-cores.
Another alternative would be if a particular workload classification was inverted versus the norm. For example, normally one would expect E-cores to be the most efficient. On a laptop you might want background services and apps scheduled to the most efficient cores for battery life. But what if the workload running happens to heavily exercise instructions that are actually more efficient to run on P-cores?
Those are some examples of how Thread Director plays a role.
kenansadhu - Thursday, January 27, 2022 - link
Will it be where the AMD's design win out? Because there wouldn't be any risk for the user of any OS or scheduler's mistake (since all cores are the same).Da W - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link
I remember back in the days when AMD GPU was beating NVIdia but with 50 watt more power draw, they were discarded as crap!How things change. Wattage does not seem to matter anymore.
Calin - Wednesday, January 26, 2022 - link
I chose nVidia because I didn't had a PCI-E power cable (or the wattage). At roughly similar price and performance, AMD broke the 75W limit and nVidia didn't.With processors already installed in systems, the equation changes a bit - you can still get the performance, at a lower battery life.
Spunjji - Thursday, January 27, 2022 - link
Generally speaking, you can assume that watts are important when AMD draw more of them; not so much when Intel or Nvidia draw more and win.TheinsanegamerN - Friday, January 28, 2022 - link
Nobody disregarded AMD's hawaii GPUs for pulling more power, tech media was singing their praises from every rooftop.They slammed the 390x for being just a rebranded 290x that drew even more power but couldnt keep up with nvidia's high end.
But context is the enemy of the fanboi.
BillBear - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link
You guys really need to start posting performance numbers when the laptop is unplugged, now that power draw figures have become so ridiculous that laptops immediately have to throttle down when unplugged.TekCheck - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link
Benchamark tech-tubers and tech website should follow Anandtech's practice and start publishing performance+power benchmarks for laptops, to give us better context behind high bars in any test. This is less important for desktops, but as laptops are usually portable devices, it is paramount that we know the power behind performance.If 12900HK is winning in any bars, say 20% over 6900HX, we need to know at which power level. Is it at 45W? At 60W? At 115W? If the win is at high wattage only, users will have a wrong impression that such CPU has "better" performance, which is untrue without knowing the power needed for such performance.
Brett Howse - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link
Mentioned this in the review. The AMD 5900HX system also draws the same power at load.