iBuyPower Battalion M1771 (MSI GS70) Gaming Notebook Review
by Dustin Sklavos on December 30, 2013 2:45 PM ESTWhile synthetics are good for a reality check, the iBuyPower Battalion M1771's reason for being is gaming. The GeForce GTX 765M is capable of producing performance that's at least, in synthetics, not too far removed from last generation's second best, the GTX 675MX.
Since this is a higher end gaming system I'm omitting the Value benchmarks, but you can still find them in Bench for comparison's sake.
Performance is basically where it should be, but it's interesting to see where bottlenecks shift depending on the game. The GTX 765M's primary weakness is its 128-bit memory bus; even with 4GHz GDDR5, the GPU is still somewhat starved for memory bandwidth. So while the 765M can produce a stellar performance in synthetics against the GTX 675MX and GTX 580M, once that memory bandwidth limitation kicks in it starts to tumble.
Probably owing to differences in drivers, performance jumps around the map a bit. For some reason, performance in StarCraft II takes a bath, but everything else is about where it should be. 1080p with AA (or in the case of Tomb Raider, TressFX) is a bit too much for the limited memory bandwidth of the 765M, but if you're willing to kill the AA it should edge performance up into playable territory. That excludes Metro: Last Light, which beats up on the GTX 765M in general.
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BillyONeal - Monday, December 30, 2013 - link
Why does that matter? The CPU is designed for 105 C -- and will (via Turbo) attempt to get itself there. If you're overclocking I can see some point but in a notebook you're not doing that.Egg - Monday, December 30, 2013 - link
That's pretty misleading - the chip will only stop turboing if it goes above 105 C. It won't raise clock speeds until it reaches 105 C. It should never, in normal usage, reach 105 C...nunomoreira10 - Monday, December 30, 2013 - link
The thing is the fan and heatsunk could be much smaller or make much less noise to keep the cpu at the same temperature and thus we could have much powerfull laptop half the size.Flunk - Monday, December 30, 2013 - link
You might not overclock your laptop, but some of use do. I've got my GPU overclocked 295Mhz/1600Mhz .. and the CPU underclocked to bring the temperatures to a reasonable level. Sometimes unified cooling is helpful, but not often.erple2 - Tuesday, December 31, 2013 - link
Dustin touched on that in the article. I think that it has a lot to do with heat density. The 765 is physically a larger chip (more transistors and larger process node) and it !makes sense.Egg - Monday, December 30, 2013 - link
Did you run into the issue where Chrome says that it's conflicting with one of the Killer Networks dlls?hfm - Monday, December 30, 2013 - link
You guys just glossed over the noise levels of the cooling system under gaming load. Could you elaborate more on what "a good citizen" means as far as noise levels? Noise of the cooling system while gaming is my #1 concern as there is no shortage of 765M or 770M (gigabyte p25w) systems to choose from.nevertell - Monday, December 30, 2013 - link
This is not the review I was looking for.blzd - Monday, December 30, 2013 - link
Is it just me or is the keyboard tiny? There's a lot of extra room around around the chassis I don't see why they had to squish the keys into such a small area.Connoisseur - Tuesday, December 31, 2013 - link
Wish they'd make a viable alternative to the blade 14 that fixes the screen. I'd be all over it. 17 is just too big for me to carry around with a work laptop.