MSI GE40 Review: a Slim Gaming Notebook
by Jarred Walton on July 16, 2013 3:00 AM ESTMSI GE40 General Performance
The GE40 sort of straddles the line between being a gaming notebook and a standard laptop, but we’ll start off with a look at the general performance. Since the model we received has a 128GB SSD, PCMark 7 scores should only be compared with other SSD-equipped laptops to be meaningful. The remaining benchmarks on this page will look more at CPU and GPU performance. We also ran PCMark 8 (1.01—currently available for press use but not quite ready for the public), but we don’t have scores from most of the other notebooks. For the interested, the GE40 scored 4085 in the Home test (and 4108 in Home with the GTX 760M selected for OpenCL 1.1 tasks), 3855 in the Creative suite, 4873 in Work, and 4874 in Storage. As we run PCMark 8 on more notebooks, we’ll eventually include graphs, but for now the full scores are listed in Mobile Bench.
PCMark 7 places the Razer Blade 14 slightly ahead of the GE40, which is interesting as other than the SSD both are running similar hardware—the GPU shouldn’t matter much for PCMark 7. The Cinebench scores are also a bit odd, with the GE40 placing slightly ahead of the Razer Blade 14 in the single-threaded workload but quite a bit slower in the multi-threaded workload. X264 HD 5.0 continues that pattern with the GE40 beating the Razer by over 10% in the first pass, but then it falls behind by over 10% in the second pass. Given the newness of the HM87 chipset and Haswell processors, we are likely seeing minor variance caused by those factors. The GE40 also uses a single SO-DIMM, so potentially memory bandwidth plays a role as well, but outside of iGPU workloads we generally don’t see much scaling of performance with dual-channel memory. Whatever the case, all of the notebooks here (with the possible exception of the GX60) are “fast enough” for all of these tasks, so let’s move on.
Looking at graphics performance, we start to get a hint of what the gaming benchmarks will tell us. In the mostly GPU-limited Fire Strike test, the GTX 760M places at the bottom of the charts, slightly behind the Razer Blade. Interestingly, while the GE40 is also at the bottom of the Ice Storm chart, it’s now basically tied with the GX60 and the Blade is 40% faster, which is more than the theoretical performance difference so we’re again seeing some discrepancies—possibly the single-channel RAM is to blame, or more likely the GE40 firmware isn’t fully optimized. Finally, in the Cloud Gate benchmark the CPU appears to be more of a factor and the GX60 falls well off the pace set by the Intel-equipped laptops. 3DMark11 on the other hand has yet another set of results, where this time the Sandy Bridge i7-2720QM and GTX 580M tie with the GE40. We don’t have results from the GTX 680M for the various 3DMark tests, though, so let’s see how things look there.
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hfm - Wednesday, July 17, 2013 - link
USB 3.0 is going to supplant thunderbolt.silenceisgolden - Tuesday, July 16, 2013 - link
Can the next laptop review that has a terrible display just have one sentence in it? "This LCD is junk"JarredWalton - Tuesday, July 16, 2013 - link
Nope.noeldillabough - Tuesday, July 16, 2013 - link
Careful when upgrading radios, it seems they're all putting whitelists pointing to new parts they sell...I have a 3G radio in my X220 which works great, popped it into the X230 I *had* to upgrade to (call me weak) and sure enough it wouldn't boot up. The "old" card wouldn't work. So I had to pony up 125 bucks for the "new" card...which is the exact same speed lol.JarredWalton - Tuesday, July 16, 2013 - link
The bigger OEMs (Acer/Gateway, Dell, Sony, HP, Lenovo) all definitely have whitelisting in the BIOS and it's difficult to upgrade the WiFi. I know you can often cover one of the pins on the adapter so that the card will always be on (I've done this on an Acer in the past), but that's not a perfect solution either. The whitebook laptops (like MSI, ASUS, Clevo) in my experience are less likely to lock out other WiFi adapters, but short of trying it out (or Googling), I don't know if they'll actually work as well. Hence why I say, "You could try to upgrade WiFi as well—I don’t know if there’s any device whitelisting in the BIOS by MSI; hopefully not, as slapping in a better 802.11ac WiFi adapter would be a handy upgrade."max1001 - Tuesday, July 16, 2013 - link
Someone need to start making IPS panel for this and Razer and sell it for $150.toyotabedzrock - Tuesday, July 16, 2013 - link
I have never heard of device whitelisting for a pciexpress port, who does that?Has anyone ever fitted a high resolution display from another model. They used to use the same connectors but I haven't opened up a recent model.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, July 16, 2013 - link
The biggest issue with LCDs is that many of the lower end laptops ship with single-link LVDS conncetors that basically max out at 1366x768 -- they don't have the wires in half of the cable to transmit data. If you have a dual-link LVDS cable, you can pretty much use anything up to WUXGA resolution in theory, but again there are other aspects to consider.One potential problem is with the whitelisting you mention. It's there on WiFi in theory to keep people from using unauthorized hardware -- FCC requires certification for any wireless devices. Well, there's also stuff in the firmware sometimes for LCDs. I had a Dell XPS 15z a while back where the LCD cracked. I got a replacement and while it would connect and power up fine, it never displayed content properly -- it was all garbled. The company that sold the LCD panel had me ship the original cracked panel back to them and they were able to copy over the firmware or something for the display so that the laptop would recognize it and work. Welcome to the proprietary world of laptop displays and wireless networking. Ugh.
Zap - Tuesday, July 16, 2013 - link
Can't even upgrade RAM without voiding warranty?Lame!
DanNeely - Wednesday, July 17, 2013 - link
As of a few years ago (early netbook era); even in the US those stickers weren't legally enforceable.