MSI GT627: Bringing Balance to the Force?
by Jarred Walton on April 29, 2009 4:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Battery Testing - we need Hybrid Power, please!
For battery life testing, we run all laptops at around 100 nits brightness. If you choose to run your LCD at maximum brightness, you may lose 10 to 60 minutes depending on the laptop and the display. In the case of the GT627, maximum brightness is ~190 nits and uses just 1W more power, so the impact on battery life is generally small (see the idle chart below for reference).
We run several different battery life scenarios: Internet surfing (load several webpages using the wireless adapter every minute until the battery dies), DVD playback, x264 playback, and idle (maximum) battery life. For x264 playback, we copy a 720p file to the hard drive and loop playback using Windows Media Player Classic Home Cinema; we will include scores from other laptops, but it's worth noting that we did not have GPU accelerated x264 decoding enabled in earlier laptop tests. We've also included web surfing results (and DVD for the MacBook Pro) for the latest Apple MacBooks as a point of reference.
Several systems that we've tested include extended capacity batteries or a second battery, so we've colored those results light blue. The Alienware m15x has two batteries in addition to letting you disable the discrete 8800M GPU and run on the integrated X3100 graphics, so we colored the IGP results gold/yellow. Using the IGP cuts power requirements by about 20W at idle (and over 60W at load), which dramatically changes the m15x X3100 placement in these charts. We really wish more manufacturers would offer such a feature, especially with high-end GPUs.
Battery life is generally unimpressive, hovering around the two-hour mark. In a best-case scenario - i.e. doing absolutely nothing - the MSI GT627 manages 2.5 hours of battery life. We didn't really expect much more than this, considering this is a moderate gaming laptop with a 6-cell battery. We can only wonder what might have been if MSI included an integrated graphics solution and supported NVIDIA's Hybrid Power feature. That should reduce power requirements by 5W to 10W at idle, which could result in a 50% (or more) improvement in battery life. Consider, the difference between maximum brightness and 100 nits is only 1W, and yet battery life improves by 16 minutes in the idle chart. If we could shut off the discrete graphics chip and save 5W, we would get about 3.25 hours of battery life, and 7.5W saved would give us nearly 4 hours. There is simply no good reason why users can't buy a reasonably priced gaming notebook and still be able to use it for three or four hours without plugging in. If it added $100 to the price of the notebook, I would be more than happy to pay that extra money rather than spending $100 on a second battery.
In our apples-to-apples - or Apples-to-PCs - comparison, where we look at battery life relative to battery capacity, we continue to see the tremendous advantage Apple enjoys by controlling both the hardware and operating system. Hopefully things will improve once Windows 7 starts shipping, though we're definitely not holding our breath. We think it's far more likely that notebook manufacturers just need to spend more time optimizing for battery life, as windows XP wasn't noticeably better than Windows Vista in this area.
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JarredWalton - Wednesday, April 29, 2009 - link
Anand tested the MacBooks - he's the Mac person around here - and outside of battery life there really aren't any tests we can run on the Macs without installing Vista. As mentioned in the past, MacBooks running Vista also have battery life problems (they get about half the battery life they achieve under OS X). So why are they in where they excel? I thought it would be obvious: we want the Windows vendors to catch up to Apple, whatever it takes. If Apple can do it with a certain set of components, others can do the same thing.There's little point in installing Vista on a MacBook just to run all these tests. Frankly, you can look at the specs of a notebook and generally guess within a few percent how it will perform. A MacBook with a P8400 CPU is going to be about the same as a Vista laptop with the same CPU.
IlllI - Wednesday, April 29, 2009 - link
i like the laptop display quality tests, would it be possible to also test the quality of the macbook display and post the results?JarredWalton - Wednesday, April 29, 2009 - link
If I can get Anand to part with one of his MacBooks for a week or two.... :-D (He's in North Carolina; I'm in Washington. We typically see each other maybe a couple days a year.)Hulk - Wednesday, April 29, 2009 - link
I agree with you 100%. We need quality displays on laptops!Thank you for pushing this issue.
andrezunido - Wednesday, April 29, 2009 - link
Nice review, seems like a well rounded notebook for the price but I wouldn't mind paying a little extra 100$-200$ for a decent screen I mean its not even LED backlit.I mostly use my laptop for programming work and the screen (apart from battery life - I like the freedom of working anywhere) is a major concern for me, the manufacturers tend to neglect its importance making it a premium/luxury of top of the range laptops (i.e. Apple's macbook pro 15 and 17 - this later being the only with matte option, Asus U2, Dell), all being over the ~2000$ mark.
Anyway, nice, balanced feature set (the overclock button is a nice touch), might consider buying one given its competitive price to do some gaming.
Hrel - Wednesday, April 29, 2009 - link
The Macs start at $2K!!! At least with PC you get choices, and more customization and better compatibility. Also anandtech did a review of a laptop not too long ago with the best laptop screen they'd ever seen; pretty sure it was from dell.niva - Wednesday, April 29, 2009 - link
Well I personally think the 32 bit vista is a big no-no at this stage. I don't care if some apps still have problems working under 64 bit vista, I want to use the extra gig of ram and I want to be able to upgrade the RAM and use it w/o having to swipe the OS.Does MS offer a free upgrade of 32 bit vista to 64 bit vista on machines like this one? Or does one have to fork out the cost for the 64 bit OS?
Lord 666 - Wednesday, April 29, 2009 - link
I received a free copy of Vista Ultimate last year at a Microsoft "Heros Happen Here" event. Tried to get the 64bit disc for it but was told by MS the SKU I have is not entitled for 64bit media.Judging by that alone, I highly doubt MS will offer 64bit upgrades in the future as they did with XP in 2005. Their 64bit coming out party really is Windows 7.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, April 29, 2009 - link
I had a desktop that came with Vista 32-bit installed, and at some point the installation became corrupted. Just for kicks, I decided to try installing Vista 64-bit instead, using the RTM DVD. That worked fine with the code on the box. I don't know if that would work in other instances, though.IlllI - Wednesday, April 29, 2009 - link
maybe one day you can review one of these http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=9050...">http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp...&typ... or http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=9173...">http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp...&typ...looks like they are the same except one uses a P7450 and the other a P8400.
either seem to be very similar to the msi, except the asus comes with 512mb on the gs as opposed to 1gb with the msi. also as you can see the asus is a tad cheaper.