The GTX 980 when in a laptop is an entirely different beast depending on
how it happens to be implemented. And this comes down to power and thermal
constraints placed upon it. In this video, we're going to give a little bit
of a deeper look into MSI's implementation on their
GT72S6QF Dominator Pro G. Not only in
normal operating mode, plugged into the wall, but also overclocked plugged into
the wall and stock, but on battery.
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First off, let's take a look at its overall physical features. This probably
out of your budget level expensive machine features an SD card reader, four
3.5 mm audio jacks, and four USB 3.0
ports on the lefth hand side. On the back, there's a Killer E2400 Ethernet
jack, one power in, one USB 3.1 type-C
super port, and one mini DisplayPort. On the right hand side, you have your
last two USB 3.0 ports, and a Blu-ray writer. On the top of this unit that it
has a chiclet based keyboard with zoned lighting controls. There's also some
buttons uh for power on and off, a graphics switch between the iGPU and
discrete GPU for power saving reasons or performance reasons, a cooler boost
button which massively ramps up your fan speed, a dedicated XSplit game cer or
userdefined application button, and a dedicated button to launch the Steel
Series engine for keyboard, lighting, and macro control. It also features a
pretty nice touchpad with dedicated buttons, which I actually do prefer on
something like a gaming laptop. But one thing that I don't like, well, it's good
aesthetically, is that they outlined the touchpad with an LED, but for physical
reasons, I'm not going to be looking down at my touchpad. So, it's not actually really going to help me. And
I'd like to be able to know where the edge of the touchpad is. For a screen,
it features a 17.3 in anti-glare wide
view 1080p screen, which doesn't feature
G-Sync. I thought all MSI Dominator Pro G laptops feature G-Sync, hence the
whole ProG thing, but I can't find it anywhere in the NVIDIA control panel or
on the box or on the laptop itself physically on a sticker. So, I don't
know. We're awaiting comment from MSI. Moving on to the internals, there's an
i76920HQ processor running at 3.8 8 GHz
with turbo boost engaged, 32 gigs of DDR4 memory, two PCI Expressbased NVMe
SSDs in RAID zero totaling 512 gigs, and
a single 7200 RPM 1 TB hard drive,
Bluetooth version 4.1, Killer N 1535
combo 2x2 AC wireless, and finally the
pista resistance, the full desktop grade GTX 980. So that's a lot of hardware and
a lot of money. Let's see how it performs. We tested our laptop in three
different scenarios. Running on AC power, running on AC power but
overclocked, and running on battery power at stock. We used a 500 MHz
overclock on our CPUs and a 100 MHz overclock on our GPUs, which were both
stable even without giving the chips any extra voltage. Our goal was not only to
get an idea of the MSI GT72's
performance, but also to contrast the different approaches that MSI and Seager
took with their respective desktop GTX 980s. We recently reviewed the Seager
NP9870UGG, which features not only a desktop GTX 980, but a desktop Intel
Skylake i76700 K as opposed to the laptop
specific Skylake we have in our MSI notebook. meaning these two units will
have to approach power management quite differently. With that in mind, let's
start off by looking at power draw and thermals in our Crisis 3 Skybox load
test. Not surprisingly, the MSI drew 47
watts lower than the Sega with the ladder essentially trying to cram an
entire desktop rig into a laptop chassis. The MSI though ran hotter under
load with the GPU getting up to 83 degrees C and the CPU getting up to 78
degrees at stock speed and 87 when
overclocked. But to be fair to MSI, the Seager has a much louder and more
aggressive default cooling profile. The affformentioned cooler boost button on
the MSI really cranks up the fans and would undoubtedly result in lower
temperatures. In any event though, the MSI ran quite a bit cooler on battery
thanks to throttling to save power. We also saw a difference in GPU boost with
the MSI GTX 980 ending up 26 MHz lower
than the Seager at stock. The MSI CPU also didn't overclock as well as
applying a 100 MHz offset only resulted in an actual clock speed increase of 65
MHz. But where the MSI really struggled was when we unplugged it and ran the
load test on battery power. Here, the GTX 980 maxed out at only
256 MHz, way lower than the Sega's
734. Here, we can see the differences in design philosophy between the two
models. While Seager designed theirs to be a true replacement for your high-end
desktop rig, MSI seems to be more focused on building the 980 into a more
traditional, conservative mobile platform, which resulted in it being
lighter, smaller, and quieter, but not as great in the performance department.
With that said, you'd probably think that the MSI would give us more
longevity due to a lower power processor and more aggressive throttling on the
GPU. But sadly, this was not the case.
Our benchmarks added up to roughly 16 minutes of gameplay time, which drained
both the MSI and the Seager by a whopping 39% each, meaning you'll be
hardressed to get an hour of gameplay time out of either model. However, the
MSI was only able to manage 25 FPS in Crisis 3, 32 in Tomb Raider, and 35 in
Battlefront with the settings cranked up at 1080p. When you consider that the
Seagga achieved frame rates of 45, 65,
and 67, respectively for the same percentage of battery drain. However,
the experience was much more positive when we plugged it in where it managed
frame rates that took full advantage of the screen's 75 Hz refresh rate and were
only slightly lower than the Sagers, possibly due to MSI's notebook class
CPU. Overclocking our CPU and GPU gave
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it beautiful. Thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do.
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Amazon affiliate code to buy stuff or by contributing on the forum. Also, check
out this video up here, which uh looks at the Sega laptop that we compared in this video. Thanks. Bye.