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
But for how long?How many Joules of Energy did it consume to perform the same task in the same time period?
TekCheck - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link
Benchamark tech-tubers and tech website must 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.
Kamen Rider Blade - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link
AlderLake is "American Muscle Car" with max performance with no regards to Fuel/Energy Efficiency or Heat Output.Ryzen 6000 is European / Japanese thoughtful design that cares about Energy/Heat Output Efficiency
TekCheck - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link
Well put.BillBear - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link
Which is another way to say that AlderLake is a chip to use in a luggable computer, but not a laptop.Kamen Rider Blade - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link
It should be considered a "BagTop" computer.You're going to need a Large 'BackPack' or 'LapTop Bag' to carry it around.
It's not designed to fit or sit on your Lap.
drothgery - Wednesday, January 26, 2022 - link
Adler Lake H. Just like every 45W+ notebook chip before it (though that we're now calling sub-7 lb machines 'luggable computers' instead of laptops is a mark of how much has changed on that score).Adler Lake P and U are much lower-power parts (on basically the same die).
Brett Howse - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link
That's a very poor analogy. I wrote in the review that the AMD system also pulls the same numbers at load.Kamen Rider Blade - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link
You wrote this: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.
You showed the results.
The battery is piss poor compared to the AMD equivalent when doing similar work loads.
Brett Howse - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link
Yes exactly. Alder Lake doesn't have much to do with the battery life in the Raider GE76. There is a massive amount of power being used by the display/GPU/memory/storage which is masking any impacts Alder Lake can or can't have. As I said, we need to wait for different systems to get a better feel for how Alder Lake impacts battery life.