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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corejamz - Friday, February 4, 2022 - link
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https://corejamz.com/sandeep_r_89 - Monday, January 31, 2022 - link
Depends on the performance plan, and other things like DPTF, plus the laptop manufacturer UEFI doing screwy things with respect to power management and heat.Too much nonsense gets in the way.
And of course Windows is always doing something in the background, and not actually allowing the CPU to sleep as well as it should. Can't get good battery life with E-cores if the P-cores can't actually turn off.
deil - Thursday, February 10, 2022 - link
That's kinda expected when your laptops is 330W on wall but 45 on battery ? Who would think a battery can provide consistently 115W for cpu alone, when it's not brick sized ? That's why AMD wins this IMHO, their laptops loose on a plug, but on battery they win soundly. There is another thing to be said about 250W of heat under your palm that 330W brick suggest.I think that if you would disconnect power while under load, this would just explode.
at_clucks - Wednesday, January 26, 2022 - link
Apple's M1 seems to be in ballpark performance (from the few benchmarks I've seen on ArsTechnica) so if you want battery powered performance you don't go for the 7lbs DTR gaming Christmas tree but more likely to the 4.5lbs Mac.On the other hand you gotta love a CPU focused review of a laptop subsequently comparing the storage performance to another machine's who's storage details get no mention as far as I can tell. I mean what's the point of showing me how much faster the 2 PCIe 4.0 SSDs in the MSI are compared to the 5400RPM SATA HDD in the Asus laptop? I'm glad it's class leading though...
jrocket - Wednesday, January 26, 2022 - link
Or better yet, a much more power efficient Ryzen laptop, so you don't have to run macOS.corinthos - Wednesday, January 26, 2022 - link
M1/Pro/Max provided optimized for your desired workloads. AMD Ryzen & 3070+ also do pretty well in terms of battery life. One really needs to test out their typical workloads to determine exactly how much battery life is gained by going Apple vs AMD, rather than just go by reviews based on reviewers' test scenarios. Also, being able to properly gauge how often you need to be unplugged is another thing to factor into a purchasing decision. If it's not as much as you think it would be, then you'll get more power for your dollar getting a desktop.Netmsm - Wednesday, January 26, 2022 - link
The title is about testing Alder Lake but actually it is about testing MSI laptop! Who in their right mind would consider this gaming tests as a justifiable review for Alder Lake?What are you doing Doc?
Spunjji - Thursday, January 27, 2022 - link
"the one where its performance is too poor for it to actually be used as a desktop replacement"Weird how often the benchmark level for "enough performance" magically moves to be as much performance as Intel provide...
evolucion8 - Wednesday, February 2, 2022 - link
So, a laptop with Ryzen 5800X/Radeon RX 6700XT class performance is not a desktop replacement? In which parallel world it isn't? With the fact that according to tests, it barely loses any CPU performance when unplugged and retains over 75% of its GPU performance as well?