MSI GT70 Dragon Edition Notebook Review: Haswell and the GTX 780M
by Dustin Sklavos on June 18, 2013 12:01 AM ESTGaming Performance
I had been hoping the MSI GT70 Dragon Edition would be an able demonstration of the performance of Intel's Haswell and NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 780M. While we can isolate the CPU performance easily enough, isolating GPU performance is much trickier. NVIDIA is using boost clocks on the GTX 780M, which means it's able to turbo up depending on thermal and power headroom, and there's actually a healthy enough variation in clocks that different chassis will be able to produce different levels of performance.
There's also the cooling system of the MSI GT70 Dragon Edition, which either doesn't have or just barely has the capacity to handle a combined 150W of heat.
Entry-level gaming results are in Bench, but suffice to say the GTX 780M is more than adequate for those settings, and so for the review I'm going to stick to Mainstream and Enthusiast level benchmarks.
In situations where the CPU is not a limiting factor, the 780M is able to boast a healthy lead on the 680M. But you'll notice that the GT70 Dragon is actually underperforming in certain cases; the CPU is getting throttled due to heat. The superior cooling system of the Alienware M17x is able to dissipate far more heat than the GT70's is.
Situations that stress the GPU more exclusively can result in healthy gains over the 680M, but overall stress on the CPU stemming from processor-intensive games like Skyrim and StarCraft II, as well as the hit from TressFX in Tomb Raider, effectively keeps the 780M from really stretching its legs.
Remember that on paper, at stock clocks, the 780M has at least 22% more shader power than the 680M and 39% more memory bandwidth. That means that, bare minimum, the 780M should be roughly 15%-20% faster than its predecessor. We're getting that in the traditionally GPU intensive Sleeping Dogs and Metro: Last Light, and most of it in BioShock: Infinite. But other games see lower gains, or are even slower on the GT70 Dragon Edition despite it having directly superior hardware.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
115 Comments
View All Comments
Darkstone - Wednesday, June 19, 2013 - link
Of course it can throttle at 70°. Notebookcheck recently tested a clevo with haswell that throttles at 70°A classmate of mine uses to have an low-end HP with A6 APU. The part throttled as soon as it hit 70°. The throttling temperature is a choice. The thinkpad's throttle at 100°, the XPS 15 (l521x) does not throttle at all (shutdown) with early bios.
JarredWalton - Monday, June 24, 2013 - link
Excuse me, huaxshin, aka Cloudfire/Cloudfire777 from our forums, aka Cloudfire over at NotebookReview forums:One, we're not looking at the Ivy Bridge i7-3610QM with GTX 680M, are we? Two, we don't fix problems caused by the manufacturer of a notebook (though we do tend to email them and say, "this is underperforming...."). Three, I said "I'm wondering..." not "this is happening"; on further investigations, it appears to be mostly Enduro/APU related. Four, no other review out there is showing results with the GT70 Dragon Haswell+780M edition that are actually significantly different than our numbers; oh, they test different games, and when the CPU isn't taxed as much and therefore doesn't get as hot and therefore doesn't throttle, performance of GTX 780M can be higher than GTX 680M, but that's not what happens in a lot of games.
Are we done here? You appear to like MSI a lot, having owned one of their laptops and having also commented extensively on forums under the name Cloudfire about MSI hardware. Maybe you own some other notebooks as well, maybe not. The fact is, we report on what we are sent, and if a manufacturer wants to fix a problem they can get in contact with us. When hardware is shipping to end users, though, it's not time to delay for several weeks or more to get an even better cherry picked sample; it's time to post findings. Our findings right now are that MSI's latest GT70 Dragon with GTX 780M and Haswell has some serious problems. Until/unless those get fixed, we cannot recommend this notebook.
Show me a review that has the same notebook hardware (not a "similar" notebook that has Ivy Bridge or GTX 680M!), and they have some figures that show much better performance and lower temperatures under similar tests to what we have posted, get back to me. Notebookcheck, incidentally, has not actually reviewed this particular laptop. Neither has NotebookReview. Most places that have reviewed it only have one or two gaming tests, often with substantially inferior hardware on a "comparable" system -- like, using GTX 675MX vs. GTX 780M instead of GTX 680M. The fact is that we ran a full suite of tests with the 780M and several other laptops, even going so far as to delay the review a bit to get a full set of up to date GTX 680M numbers. No one else even tried to do that, and at best I've seen reviews with three games and numbers from three or four laptops.
huaxshin - Wednesday, June 19, 2013 - link
Sure, compare motherboard with a notebook. That makes sense.You have an axe to grind against MSI, so you jump in with this childish comment.
BobBobson - Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - link
A good honest review, the first of its kind I have read. This review corresponds to the behavior of my own GT70 notebook.Perhaps MSI somehow got a GT70 intended for the masses mixed up with a cherry picked GT70 intended for the Anandtech review.
landsome - Wednesday, June 19, 2013 - link
Well, no intention here to fan the fire, but I find it all of this ironic. I own a GT663R and it performs admirably cool with a 920XM (55w) and a replacement videocard of the (now almost) last generation - a 7970M. At stock speeds it's 89C max for the CPU and 83C max for the GPU in prime+furmark - and all that on a Delta 150W psu, on a moderately hot summer day, no throttling, no other cooling except a few holes drilled below the single fan (not my doing). Both CPU and GPU are supposed to be powerhogs and pretty hot too.So while it's pretty obvious huaxshin has a big axe to grind (if only in light of his persistence), I would also assume MSI has done an improper paste job on Dustin's sample (not their prerogative exclusively - I once gained an amazing -13C by repasting a Dell M6600). What this says about QC @ MSI is another matter entirely...
pinkyswear - Wednesday, June 19, 2013 - link
In the review, you said the system fan pulls air in from the back and exhausts it through the side vent. The fan would actually pull in air from the bottom and exhaust it through the side and the back. If it felt to your hand like air was cool in the back and warm on the side, it means the heatsink for the 780M was working and the 4700MQ was not. When you opened up the machine to take pictures, did you remove any part of the CPU heatsink? The fact that no warm air is blowing out of the back means that something is wrong with the CPU or the heatsink installation.Khenglish - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link
Yes there is no way that air is coming in through the CPU radiator. It may seem that way though because since the fan spins clockwise (when looking at the laptop with the bottom plate off), it will build up air speed for the 270 degrees that there is no radiator and blow that out the GPU radiator, while the CPU radiator does not have any air buildup, and thus the air move through it much more slowly and is hard to feel.If you guys put you hand to your laptop fans you will notice that far more air blows through one side than the other.
One fan just does not cut it with these high power components. Then when you add on that MSI uses aluminum radiators, you just have disaster.
secretmanofagent - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link
Just wanted to say, great review, ignore the spam flying around.watzupken - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
Having done some homework back then while looking out for a gaming laptop, I do agree that the cooling does look insufficient for a high end gaming laptop. I really doubt the blower fan is pushing out sufficient air through both the heatsinks.michael777 - Monday, June 24, 2013 - link
I would like to refer in this discussion for a moment to MSI GT70H-80M4811B which was mentioned somewhere above. The cheaper dragons brother was on my shopping list until I read this massive discussion here. To remind it it has the same CPU and GPU with only one SSD and 8GB Ram, rest stays the same. In most of the german webstores the above costs approx 2000 euros and unfortuantely nowhere you can have an alienware with i7 and 780GTX for that price. So there goes my question: if you not willing spending on a gaming laptop more that 2000 does that underperfoming is really such an issue? Isnt it still the best laptop speaking of gaming performance for that money? Am I risking anything more then few frames less in few games compare to actually more expensive competition? Thanks for advice and lots of professional info here.