AMD's A10-5750M Review, Part 2: The MSI GX60 Gaming Notebook
by Dustin Sklavos on June 29, 2013 12:00 PM ESTConclusion: The Value of Balance
On paper, the AMD-powered MSI GX60 had to seem like a good idea, and I'm not even convinced it actually isn't one. Using a less expensive CPU to force the price tag down and going whole hog on the GPU isn't that uncommon among custom built desktop PCs, so as long as the gaming performance is there in a notebook, it's certainly worth a shot. The A10-5750M is nowhere near as powerful as an Ivy Bridge quad core, let alone a Haswell, but if it doesn't need to be, that's not an issue. Of course, it does need to be, but we'll get to that.
I feel like I've reviewed this chassis a hundred times by now, but at least shrinking it down to a 15.6" gives me both a better perspective and feels different. Knowing what I know now about how MSI seems to be designing and building their gaming notebooks, I can't under any circumstances recommend their 17.3" notebooks. The only reasons to buy one are if you somehow find a better deal than on its 15.6" equivalent, or if you just really want that larger display. You're not getting more pixels or better thermals, you're just getting two more pounds of bulk. But the hardware is almost identical.
There's the sweet and the sour. The chassis is bulky but at least reasonably tough, and the SteelSeries licensed keyboard really is very comfortable to type on if you can get used to MSI's goofy layout. They're able to cram a healthy amount of power and cooling potential into a 15.6" chassis as well, and you still get two 2.5" bays.
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The AMD model of the GX60 is cute in concept, but in practice has problems. The single biggest reason not to buy it is that for the same price, MSI will sell you a Haswell-based system with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 765M. While that GPU is most definitely slower than the AMD Radeon HD 7970M, the brakes the A10-5750M APU puts on the 7970M keep it from hitting its true performance potential, and as a result I suspect the more well-rounded GE60 will ultimately make a lot of end users much happier. While $1,199 is a fantastic deal for an AMD Radeon HD 7970M, you're not really getting one. Looks fantastic in marketing material, though, no doubt.
What the GX60 really needs to be is a $999-or-less gaming notebook. That potentially means cutting the 7970M, but we need a more balanced combination of CPU and GPU anyhow. The 7970M is far too powerful for the A10, but a Radeon HD 7870M/8870M would be a more appropriate companion. Ideally AMD would release a mobile Bonaire GPU, which would be perfect for the A10-5750M. At that point the value proposition kicks in hard. GPU performance won't hit those outside highs, but under most circumstances neither part should hold the other back too much, and the end user doesn't wind up wasting money on more GPU than they could ever hope to use.
As for the A10, it's not a bad chip, but Intel has been driving prices down hard in the mobile space and AMD doesn't have much latitude to work in. I can see an all-AMD gaming notebook potentially working if Kaveri lives up to expectations. In the meantime, the GX60 is a cute idea in theory, but the inescapable fact is that as I said before, you're not really getting an AMD Radeon HD 7970M for $1,199. The GPU is there, but it's leashed. There are better alternatives.
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JarredWalton - Sunday, June 30, 2013 - link
My testing suggests otherwise. Despite having 20 EUs vs. 16 EUs, HD 4400 and HD 4600 are generally about the same performance as HD 4000. I've even got a quad-core standard voltage i7-4700MQ system (MSI GE40), and surprisingly there are several games where the HD 4600 iGPU fails to be a significant upgrade to an ULV HD 4000 in and i5-3317U. I'm not sure if Intel somehow changed each EU so that the Haswell EUs are less powerful relative to IVB, but outside of driver optimizations (it's still early in the game for Haswell) I have no good reason for the lack of performance I'm getting from HD 4600.sheh - Monday, July 1, 2013 - link
The i7-4500U review showed not much of a difference at times, and even slightly lower performance, but +20% in other cases. i7-4770 vs i7-3770 shows more improvement. I'm guessing the improvement in a 37W CPU would be more like the desktop parts rather than the 15W CPU. But, well, all theoretical anyway.TheinsanegamerN - Saturday, June 29, 2013 - link
its a little problematic, i think. they are ultrabook cpus, and bga to boot. it's cheaper to make laptops with rpga connectors than soldering the cpu to the motherboard. until rpga models appear (not likely) we might not see that many. they are also $100 more expensive than ultrabook models from last year, so a lot of maufacturers are still using ivy. toshiba just brought out 3 new laptops, two are ultrabooks, all which use ivy instead of haswell.TheinsanegamerN - Saturday, June 29, 2013 - link
never mind, just found list that included socketed models. guess the oems are just slowIntelUser2000 - Saturday, June 29, 2013 - link
The SV dual cores are actually Q4, so its quite a few bit left. They are planning on phasing it out in favor of U chips, where it Broadwell it disappears entirely.sheh - Sunday, June 30, 2013 - link
On the forum you said Q4 is rumors, any more concrete info since then?arthur449 - Saturday, June 29, 2013 - link
I wouldn't sell or buy a laptop if it didn't have all its available memory channels populated. This entire review is pointless to me.JarredWalton - Saturday, June 29, 2013 - link
Because buying an extra 8GB DIMM for $75 or whatever is too hard? And it will only help with iGPU performance?arthur449 - Saturday, June 29, 2013 - link
Mainstream CPUs have used a dual channel memory controllers for so long that simply disabling access to one channel can have (as we've seen in this case) a not insignificant effect on benchmarks that do not directly stress the GPU portion of the chip. CPUs have had uses for more memory bandwidth before there were on-chip GPUs, afterall.Furthermore, in scientific terms, due to the author changing two variables in this experiment (var1a: iGPU. var 1b: dual channel. var2a: dGPU. var2b: single channel.) to compare the iGPU to the dGPU, we cannot be certain that the subtraction of the second channel of memory has a non-zero effect on dGPU performance.
If the author's intention was merely reviewing the out-of-the-box performance of this hardware configuration of the MSI GX60 Gaming Notebook, this would be fine. Instead, the article is titled: "AMD's A10-5750M Review: ..."
I'm not trying to be unnecessarily harsh. And the subject of this review could very easily apply to my interest. (I *just* purchased a laptop for a family member with an AMD A8-5550M.) But if the author is going to test the processor's gaming performance: don't change more than one variable.
TheinsanegamerN - Saturday, June 29, 2013 - link
the single channel ram should be fine in this case, since its not used for video at all. at least its 1600mhz