MSI GE60 Review: Mainstream Mobile Maxwell

MSI GE60: Stress Testing

One area of performance that warrants a closer look with any gaming notebook is the question of throttling. Simply slapping in a certain level of hardware inside a laptop isn't the same thing as truly ensuring that the hardware works as expected, and we've seen more than a few instances of notebooks that have severe throttling under sustained heavy loads. This is particularly true of the thinner class of laptops, where cooling capacity often can't keep up with a sustained load. While manufacturers might argue such loads are "unreasonable", it's still important that a system handle such loads gracefully. As an extreme example, dropping the CPU (or GPU) clocks to a minimum level while letting the GPU (or CPU) run at maximum clocks is generally not going to produce the best overall experience.

The testing environment for this workload is unfortunately not temperature controlled, but that can be good in that the summer months allow for a better "worst case" scenario. For these tests the ambient temperature (in my office that has no AC, ugh...) was between 85-90F. The following gallery contains graphs for the temperatures and clocks using a 100% CPU + GPU stress test, a gaming workload, and a 100% CPU test:

The good news is that the GE60 performed well during my testing, and while it can get a bit warm under a heavy load… well, that's pretty much the case with every laptop if you push the CPU and GPU to 100% for a few hours. For the worst-cast stress testing, the CPU ended up clocking down to the minimum guaranteed speed of 2.4GHz while the GPU continues to run at close to max clocks (1020-1090MHz). Temperatures meanwhile look to stabilize around 90-92C for the GPU and 86-89C for the CPU. You can see at one point that we paused the GPU workload and the CPU almost immediately jumps up to 3.2GHz, which is what we want to see for a 4+ thread test.

For a more typical gaming workload or a sustained 100% CPU load (e.g. video encoding or 3D rendering), the temperatures aren't quite as high as with the worst-case stress testing, and clock speeds are better as well. The pure CPU test pegs the CPU cores at 3.2GHz and 82-84C. The gaming workload meanwhile has the GPU running at 1006MHz once the system is warmed up, with the temperature sitting at 87-91C. The CPU hovers between 3.2 and 3.4 GHz most of the time and thus ends up running a bit hotter than in our full stress test, but of course it's not actually working as hard as several of the cores are mostly idle. Interestingly, the CPU still heats up enough that periodically it drops down to 2.4GHz again, which lowers the temperatures as well; our graphs only show one such instance, but I let the testing continue and the pattern repeats every 10-15 minutes.

Surface Temperatures

If you're wondering about surface temperatures, the left and back sides of the GE60 are quite a bit warmer than the right side – not surprising considering that's where the CPU, GPU, and exhaust are located. Basically, everything left of the numeric keypad runs about 35-40C under load, while the 10-key is around 30-33C. The palm rest is also generally cooler than the keyboard area, again with more heat on the right than on the left; ranging from 30-35C. The exhaust on the left meanwhile is pretty consistently at 40-42C under load.

Flipping the notebook over, the plastic shell doesn't conduct heat as well as the aluminum covers on the top, which means most of the temperatures are actually slightly lower. The right half of the GE60 is at 30-32C, the middle section is 32-35C, and the left portion is again hottest and ranges from 35-40C with the area right around the heatsink (exhaust) hitting a rather uncomfortable 43-46C. The power brick actually ends up being the hottest part under load, with surface temperatures of nearly 50C, but that's not too surprising as it lacks any active cooling.

Again, keep in mind that it's quite warm right now in my testing environment, around 90F (30C), so these are pretty extreme conditions. Given the heat wave washing over the northwest, I'm actually quite impressed with how well the GE60 manages to cool the CPU and GPU. I can't say how well the laptop will continue to perform in a year or two, but at least any high temperatures so far have resulted in at worst minor throttling. The CPU and GPU in general appear to be able to run at their rated speeds without difficulty, and in a cooler (e.g. <80F) environment they should do even better.