Overclocking & On-battery Performance of GTX 980 Laptops
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
1,315 words · ~6 min read
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The GTX 980 when in a laptop is an entirely different beast depending on
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how it happens to be implemented. And this comes down to power and thermal
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constraints placed upon it. In this video, we're going to give a little bit
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of a deeper look into MSI's implementation on their
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GT72S6QF Dominator Pro G. Not only in
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normal operating mode, plugged into the wall, but also overclocked plugged into
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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
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out of your budget level expensive machine features an SD card reader, four
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3.5 mm audio jacks, and four USB 3.0
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ports on the lefth hand side. On the back, there's a Killer E2400 Ethernet
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jack, one power in, one USB 3.1 type-C
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super port, and one mini DisplayPort. On the right hand side, you have your
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last two USB 3.0 ports, and a Blu-ray writer. On the top of this unit that it
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has a chiclet based keyboard with zoned lighting controls. There's also some
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buttons uh for power on and off, a graphics switch between the iGPU and
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discrete GPU for power saving reasons or performance reasons, a cooler boost
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button which massively ramps up your fan speed, a dedicated XSplit game cer or
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userdefined application button, and a dedicated button to launch the Steel
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Series engine for keyboard, lighting, and macro control. It also features a
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pretty nice touchpad with dedicated buttons, which I actually do prefer on
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something like a gaming laptop. But one thing that I don't like, well, it's good
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aesthetically, is that they outlined the touchpad with an LED, but for physical
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reasons, I'm not going to be looking down at my touchpad. So, it's not actually really going to help me. And
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I'd like to be able to know where the edge of the touchpad is. For a screen,
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it features a 17.3 in anti-glare wide
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view 1080p screen, which doesn't feature
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G-Sync. I thought all MSI Dominator Pro G laptops feature G-Sync, hence the
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whole ProG thing, but I can't find it anywhere in the NVIDIA control panel or
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on the box or on the laptop itself physically on a sticker. So, I don't
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know. We're awaiting comment from MSI. Moving on to the internals, there's an
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i76920HQ processor running at 3.8 8 GHz
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with turbo boost engaged, 32 gigs of DDR4 memory, two PCI Expressbased NVMe
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SSDs in RAID zero totaling 512 gigs, and
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a single 7200 RPM 1 TB hard drive,
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Bluetooth version 4.1, Killer N 1535
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combo 2x2 AC wireless, and finally the
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pista resistance, the full desktop grade GTX 980. So that's a lot of hardware and
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a lot of money. Let's see how it performs. We tested our laptop in three
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different scenarios. Running on AC power, running on AC power but
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overclocked, and running on battery power at stock. We used a 500 MHz
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overclock on our CPUs and a 100 MHz overclock on our GPUs, which were both
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stable even without giving the chips any extra voltage. Our goal was not only to
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get an idea of the MSI GT72's
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performance, but also to contrast the different approaches that MSI and Seager
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took with their respective desktop GTX 980s. We recently reviewed the Seager
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NP9870UGG, which features not only a desktop GTX 980, but a desktop Intel
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Skylake i76700 K as opposed to the laptop
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specific Skylake we have in our MSI notebook. meaning these two units will
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have to approach power management quite differently. With that in mind, let's
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start off by looking at power draw and thermals in our Crisis 3 Skybox load
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test. Not surprisingly, the MSI drew 47
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watts lower than the Sega with the ladder essentially trying to cram an
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entire desktop rig into a laptop chassis. The MSI though ran hotter under
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load with the GPU getting up to 83 degrees C and the CPU getting up to 78
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degrees at stock speed and 87 when
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overclocked. But to be fair to MSI, the Seager has a much louder and more
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aggressive default cooling profile. The affformentioned cooler boost button on
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the MSI really cranks up the fans and would undoubtedly result in lower
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temperatures. In any event though, the MSI ran quite a bit cooler on battery
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thanks to throttling to save power. We also saw a difference in GPU boost with
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the MSI GTX 980 ending up 26 MHz lower
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than the Seager at stock. The MSI CPU also didn't overclock as well as
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applying a 100 MHz offset only resulted in an actual clock speed increase of 65
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MHz. But where the MSI really struggled was when we unplugged it and ran the
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load test on battery power. Here, the GTX 980 maxed out at only
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256 MHz, way lower than the Sega's
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734. Here, we can see the differences in design philosophy between the two
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models. While Seager designed theirs to be a true replacement for your high-end
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desktop rig, MSI seems to be more focused on building the 980 into a more
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traditional, conservative mobile platform, which resulted in it being
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lighter, smaller, and quieter, but not as great in the performance department.
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With that said, you'd probably think that the MSI would give us more
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longevity due to a lower power processor and more aggressive throttling on the
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GPU. But sadly, this was not the case.
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Our benchmarks added up to roughly 16 minutes of gameplay time, which drained
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both the MSI and the Seager by a whopping 39% each, meaning you'll be
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hardressed to get an hour of gameplay time out of either model. However, the
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MSI was only able to manage 25 FPS in Crisis 3, 32 in Tomb Raider, and 35 in
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Battlefront with the settings cranked up at 1080p. When you consider that the
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Seagga achieved frame rates of 45, 65,
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and 67, respectively for the same percentage of battery drain. However,
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the experience was much more positive when we plugged it in where it managed
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frame rates that took full advantage of the screen's 75 Hz refresh rate and were
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only slightly lower than the Sagers, possibly due to MSI's notebook class
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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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But if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit the like button, or even consider supporting us directly by using our
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Amazon affiliate code to buy stuff or by contributing on the forum. Also, check
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out this video up here, which uh looks at the Sega laptop that we compared in this video. Thanks. Bye.