MSI GE60 Review: Mainstream Mobile Maxwell
by Jarred Walton on July 17, 2014 5:00 AM ESTMSI 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.
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thesavvymage - Thursday, July 17, 2014 - link
in writing is not even always necessary, depending on local laws :) in Washington state, a verbal contract is a VALID contract. No need to write it and sign. There does need to be a third party to verify it thoughReedTFM - Friday, July 18, 2014 - link
For Americans, the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act applies. Just modifying/servicing your product doesn't void a warranty guarantee, unless the producer can show the modification caused the defect. This came about because of car manufacturers were pulling crap like, "Oh look you added an aftermarket exhaust, you voided your warranty and we will not cover the windshield wipers failing."With static discharges, however, it will be hard to refute user error, but still, it's always worth making the argument.
ramj70 - Thursday, July 17, 2014 - link
I contacted MSI and they said that opening the laptop will to upgrade will not void the warranty. I also bought an SSD and replaced the HDDruthan - Thursday, July 17, 2014 - link
Without inbuild 3g modem.. so not for real life.Novaguy - Saturday, July 19, 2014 - link
There are phone plans that come with data tethering or wifi hotspot options, and I find those work well.Tanclearas - Thursday, July 17, 2014 - link
No DisplayPort and no G-Sync. This is exactly the class of machine that would benefit the most from it. Even if the claim is that it's too expensive to integrate into the laptop panel (though Nvidia themselves talked about how it's easier on laptops), DisplayPort would have at least allowed for the possibility of using an external G-Sync monitor.JarredWalton - Friday, July 18, 2014 - link
No, G-Sync is actually a pain in the butt on laptops, for one reason: Optimus. To do G-Sync, you need to have the GPU and display communicate with each other, so the only way NVIDIA can do it is if they get rid of Optimus. But doing that means you just killed battery life as well. There are potentially ways around that I'm sure, but it's the reason there haven't been any G-Sync notebooks yet. I actually asked NVIDIA about it at CES and they basically said as much: "We're looking at ways to implement it, but right now we don't have anything we can talk about."Tanclearas - Friday, July 18, 2014 - link
Wow. Interesting. Nvidia's response to AMD's "free sync" demo implied that laptops were easier to implement."However, Petersen quickly pointed out an important detail about AMD's "free sync" demo: it was conducted on laptop systems. Laptops, he explained, have a different display architecture than desktops, with a more direct interface between the GPU and the LCD panel, generally based on standards like LVDS or eDP (embedded DisplayPort). Desktop monitors use other interfaces, like HDMI and DisplayPort, and typically have a scaler chip situated in the path between the GPU and the panel. As a result, a feature like variable refresh is nearly impossible to implement on a desktop monitor as things now stand."
All of this just raises more questions.
In AMD's demo, did they have to disable DSG for free sync to work? If not, how does an AMD GPU communicate with the display? If so, then what AMD showed was even more impressive if Nvidia is still "looking at ways to implement it".
Are there laptops with free sync (officially) coming?
I am not trying to take things off topic. I just want to reiterate that the reviewed laptop is exactly the class of machine that would benefit the most from G-Sync/free sync. If anything, it is more important for a laptop because you do not ever have the option of replacing the GPU once your framerates start dropping.
One final (two-part) question. Could a laptop not have the DP connected directly to the Nvidia GPU? Is it not safe to assume that a person connected to an external DP monitor would have access to external power (and therefore not need Optimus)?
JarredWalton - Friday, July 18, 2014 - link
So basically on a laptop if you plug directly into the dGPU, yes, it's easier -- but I'm not sure how much easier we're really talking about. Obviously it can be done with desktop displays with enough effort, the main benefit of laptops being you have multiple inputs into desktop displays with scalers and such. An interesting corollary is that AMD might have an advantage with laptops using AMD APUs -- both the APU and dGPU would be AMD software, so there's no "Intel iGPU" in the way.As to the question of when laptops with G/Free Sync are coming, I don't believe any have been announced yet, so your guess is as good as mine. I told NVIDIA that laptops would be great for this as getting >60 FPS on a laptop is rather difficult but ~40 FPS with G-SYNC would still be achievable. We might see this in the next year, or perhaps even earlier with non-Optimus solutions (e.g. ASUS has the G750 without Optimus, so it might be a target for G-SYNC in an update). Of course, the number of displays with G-Sync support is still very small (one or two ASUS are officially available, another ASUS display can be modded by the user; Acer and BenQ have displays coming but they're not out yet.)
As for the second question: sure, an external G-Sync display could easily be driven by a laptop. But that sort of defeats the purpose of a laptop in large measure. :-)
Tanclearas - Saturday, July 19, 2014 - link
At first it might appear that it defeats the point of a laptop, but there is (what I assume a growing) group of aging gamers that require a laptop for business/work, but still want to game at home. I have a Lenovo Y580 with 16GB of RAM, a 240GB mSATA SSD, and the Nvidia GTX 660m. It's great for work, and OK for games, but would be better with G-Sync or free sync.