Gadgetory

hey everyone I'm Steve from gamers access net and today we're talking about MSI's new gt72 Dominator Pro G laptop quite a name but the reason this is interesting for those of you who might not be looking at a laptop is because it has the GTX 980 in it so this is not a gtx 980m it is the full desktop gtx 980 including the GM 204 GPU with really nothing disabled same TM use same ROPS same cuda cores all that stuff is pretty much the same there are a couple of differences but we'll talk about those where they exist in a moment but this is the gt72 Dominator Pro it has the GTX 980 in it brand new in notebooks and that is quite a move from the gtx 980m and we'll talk about that more momentarily as well now the driving factor for the disparity between desktop GPUs and mobile GPUs has been thermals you're cramming a lot of stuff into a small space and even though this laptop in particular is a 2 inch thick sort of beast of a thing it's a desktop replacement ultimately that's still a small space to cram high-end hardware into so thermals are your main concern there's a concern with the entropy you have a lot of heat generating in a tight space it just sort of devolves into chaos as it builds upon itself that's why you see some of the notebooks like I'm sure many of you have had experiences or have friends who've had experiences where you'll have to reflow solder or reflow thermal paste to apply new thermal paste to cracked or worn compound on notebook GPUs that stuff happens because it gets so hot inside of the chassis with a traditional notebook cooler you normally have a fairly simple system of an aluminum cold plate maybe two of them one on the GPU one on the CPU and then that runs in a lot that I've seen a single heat pipe made of copper often from the two cold plates and those connect to a single fan which dissipates the heat as it generates from the cold plates which are attached to the actual die of the CPU or the GPU and that heat of course gets transferred into the aluminum fins dissipated by a fan and so forth that is a fairly limited system and with a desktop setup even with it just the GPU the video card itself in a desktop you have a lot more cooling potential so that's been the limiter and to give you an idea of what that difference has been the GTX 980 and desktops is about 30% faster than the 980m so why does that happen well it's because of those thermals and Vidia specifically with a 9 ATM reduced some of the complexity of the GPU it's still a GM 204 GPU but instead of the GTX 980 where you've got more than 2,000 cores the 9 ATM has around 1,500 cores so a lot has been removed there and that sort of corresponds with the 35-ish percent Delta that we've seen in our tests so that's where the limiter is let's talk about the specs on the GTX 980 9 ATM for comparison and then look over the laptop specs and then we'll do the benchmarks looking at the specs for the GPU itself the msi gt72 that we're looking at here has the GTX 980 GPU in it we have another gt72 with a 9 ATM you can see both of the specs compared to this chart that's what we're testing in the FPS benchmarks and thermal benchmarks in a moment the GTX 980 in the new laptop which is priced at $3,100 has 2048 cuda cores versus 1536 cuda cores in the 980m quite a difference and then the base clock of a traditional reference gtx 980 as found in desktops is 1126 megahertz with the boost at 1216 megahertz that is the reference so we're not comparing non-reference aftermarket cards here we're just looking at reference against the laptops and the MSI laptop is a slightly different clock but it's around there the gtx 980m for comparison is a 1038 megahertz base clock and a and 11:27 megahertz of boost so that is a fair difference almost 100 megahertz on the boost which is I actually noticed one gaming the GTX 980 in the notebook transfer is 144 Giga texels per second just like its desktop counterpart it's got 128 TM use 64 ROPS and the memory spec in the laptop is similar to the desktop version but it's got one main item that's different and that is the OEM can decide if it's 4 gigabytes or 8 gigabytes of gddr5 whereas the desktop version is just 4 gigabytes flat in terms of the laptop specifications our model 4 review has a 17.3 inch 1080p display is about 2 inches thick at its fattest and has a 75 Hertz g-sync display in that 17.3 inch space so the item here to note of course is that it's got G sync that's still new to laptops and it's 75 Hertz so what that gives you a bit more FPS than 60 the CPU is an i7 68 20 HK skylake CPU that has some overclocking ability within a very basic BIOS our model has 32 gigabytes of ddr4 21 33 megahertz it's got an RGB keyboard by SteelSeries a subwoofer in the underside of the laptop which is pretty interesting but common in these larger sized laptops has speakers in the top of the keyboard area just above that powered by Dynaudio and then LEDs in the back of the case or the enclosure rather for the eye of the Dragon we'll call it the laptop costs $3,100 and for comparison the gt72 980m cost about $2,100 announced spec so that's a $1,000 difference just to get the 980 desktop version there are a few other changes like the skylake CPU and some of the other the memory specs a little different but in general your 2100 to 2500 for a comparable 980m version of this laptop and you have 30 149 80 version so that's the big news the 980 is technically an MX M card but it is strongly recommended both by us and by people who actually make these systems not to just swap around MXM cards without careful consideration because the laptops are all very carefully designed for what they're shipped with so do keep that in mind the big news with the GTX 980 in the laptop is that it is fully overclocked and supported so well almost folly anyway the main difference here between this and the 980m you can overclock both you can overclock some AMD GPUs in notebooks but the 980 desktop GPU as found in this GT 72 is fairly open in terms of clock rates for both the core clock and the memory clock and we test that later on the one place you're limited is voltage so you cannot currently control the voltage for the GPU this is something that NVIDIA has considered but we're not clear on whether that is coming just yet the fan control you are able to set a custom fan curve which is pretty important if you want a smoother thermal graph as we'll show you in a bit but for purposes of this review we were not given access to a fan control configurator just yet that is something msi is working on but was not done with that time of this review so keep that in mind other than this VRMs for the 980 I found in notebooks are expect to be between four and eight phases for comparison most notebooks are about three phases for the BRM on the GPU and that means that speaking to overclocking with four to eight phases even at four you've got a lot more room to play with the frequency and the voltage even though the voltage is locked for us it still needs to be cleaned at the 1.1 ish bolts that it pushes when testing thermal design in this laptop is pretty open because it is a large enclosure so that's the main advantage you get with something that's big it's a lot less portable it becomes a desktop replacement you don't necessarily want to take it on a plane you can't use it on a plane because it's so big but the thermals are way more open so we have big heat sinks as you can see here blacked-out pipes that are probably copper and a dual fan setup which intakes from the bottom and exhausts out the back so you definitely cannot have this on a surface that conforms to the underside of the laptop because you will suffocate those fans keep that in mind it basically needs to be on a desk or a flat surface the heat mostly exhausts out of the back which is mostly a good thing you don't want it exhausting at the bottom it just gets stuck in there and then the CPU and GPU have independent cold plates which are or at least appear to be aluminum here's a look at the thermal benchmark the first chart shows thermals over time and the unit with the 980 that would be the one we're looking at here runs noticeably hotter the wavy effect that you're seeing in the form here on the chart it kind of looks like a wave form but it's not is because of the automatic fan control so you see it on both of them that's because the fan ramps up and down based on demand because we don't have direct control over the fans at this time but that is apparently coming in the future equilibrium puts us at fifty four point seven for Celsius for the 980m sixty three point four five Celsius for the 980 in the laptop and a reference of 61 point four Celsius for the desktop gtx 980 so just slightly cooler than the laptop version though obviously your cooling configuration matters here there are a lot of testing concerns with the setup like this and we've taken those into account for the desktop two laptop comparison the main one is you want to run not necessarily a clock for clock you don't have to do that but you want the frequency to be as close as possible with the CPUs and the architecture doesn't have to be identical it is okay to deviate from that as long as they're similar so we're running a 4790k versus the i7 skylake cpu in this one they're both i7s they're both hyper threaded four cores eight threads that's very important they have pretty close to the same frequency for the clock rate and then we disable turbo boost on the desktop version for important testing and validation reasons the other item to look for here is GPU bound games so because we're trying to compare the GPUs we don't want to look at CPU bound games often RTS games top-down strategy or world building games things like that Starcraft is a good example grid Autosport is also somewhat CPU bound so we eliminate those games do a strict GPU to GPU comparison jumping into the benchmarks game saw about a twenty to twenty nine percent gain over the nine ATM and about a five to ten percent loss against the desktop and GTX at nine eighty which is really not bad dirt rally the GTX 980 laptop is that 85 FPS versus 980m laptops 66 FPS so that's quite a difference and enough to jump to 1440 with some settings tweaks if you have a GTX 980 laptop that supports it this one does not you could run DSR if you wanted to but that's the the room to play that we're given here you will be happy with a 980 m at this fps of course that sounded very forceful you will be happy but at 66 fps it's pretty hard to complain especially on a laptop so yeah there's a difference but it's not enough to really change the world with dirt rally for Metro last light it's 77 vs. 57 FPS average which is a 29.8 5 percent gain over the nine ATM and the desktop performs 7.5% faster than the notebook 980 at 83 FPS with slightly better lows 1% and 0.1% lows GTA 5 we see seventy-nine FPS versus 57 FPS which are actually huge gains in this case it's it's starting to become very noticeable especially for the 1% lows at 52 verses 38 fps and that means you're gonna have less noticeable dips and drops and framerate when you're playing so that is actually a fairly important metric that is a 32.4% difference Delta over the 9 ATM and that's important if you want to use the more advanced settings which we did not use the Advanced Settings tab for this we just use the normal graphics tab and if you want to use mods then it's helpful there - there's a 6.1 for 4% disparity against the 980 which sits at 84 FPS The Witcher 3 at 56 FPS versus 39 FPS on the 9 ATM again shows a difference and this is the biggest difference in terms of playability between the two laptops at 39 fps you're not gonna have a great time playing you can force it but you'll want to drop the settings at 56 fps you're really close to that magical 60 FPS mark for playability and fluidity of the framerate so that does make a noticeable difference and you can probably drop one setting to get to 60 if you really wanted but 56 is certainly playable on the witcher 3 with the desktop we see a 61 FPS which is an 8 point 5 5 % over the laptop 980 here's our overclocking chart the final OC was plus 200 megahertz offset which put us at 1405 megahertz core clock and we had an 80 megahertz memory offset that put us at 35 80 megahertz here are the charts showing that difference in the real world so you can look at some of the benchmarks here in some instances we see the overclock was actually enough to overtake the reference of 980 and that's obviously because the 980 is reference so if we used an aftermarket 980 by any of the Adam board partners it would outperform and all these tests if we overclock the reference IBM desktop it would outperform but this just gives you an idea of where the laptop 980 Falls and what it is capable of in terms of fps and performance battery tests are on the website and that is linked below in the article but we saw a little over an hour of battery life with the gt72 Dominator pro g1 gaming certainly not bad and very similar to the GT 72 with a 9 ATM so that speaks to the efficiency of the new unit there's a bit of a difference but not much of one generally though you're going to want to be plugged into the wall because when you're on battery it instantly tanks the FPS and that is by design that's to draw less power from the GPU you're not gonna do any overclocking without the battery plugged in because of this difference but that's just that's how it works with really any laptop that's not specific to this model so talking about value then the performance of the laptop in terms of FPS is very impressive the thermals of it less so at 10 see warmer than the gtx 980m but still reasonable and within usability it is pretty warm though and in the smaller units you're not going to have as much overclock and Headroom as we have in this one because of the thermal limitation in terms of gaming performance the GTX 980 performs basically how the desktop version does so that's fairly true to the marketing at least it's a five to ten percent Delta on average sitting around seven to eight percent for the real-world impact on fps between the desktop and the laptop gtx 980 and in terms of actual framerate output against the 980 m in particular that puts you generally enough FPS over to play the same settings so for a lot of the games like for dirt rally and for other not so intensive games you are not going to get a big enough of an FPS hike to change how you're playing that game now if you're playing games like The Witcher 3 or GTA 5 that changes because those games are a lot more intensive especially on the GPU so in these instances especially The Witcher 3 or similar games you're getting enough of an FPS hike from the non-m version of this GPU to increase your settings that quite a bit in some instances going from 40 fps and the 980 m to almost 60 on the 980 what's the witcher 3 and ultra and 1080 and then for the laptops that strip with the 980 and 1440 or 4k display options that also something to factor in the 980 m is not really capable of supporting those at gaming tasks and neither is the 980 for most games but for some again dirt rally you could play at 1440 with this thing not gonna play the witcher at 4040 with it or if you do you're dropping down to like Lua settings or comparable at which point why bother but some games like dirt rally grid Autosport civilization games that kind of stuff you can play at the higher resolutions with a gtx 980m a notebook at the end of the day though it's $3,100 for this and you can buy the 980 m version for 21 to 2500 depending on spec and that's gonna be good enough to give you a pretty good time gaming if you're willing to sacrifice some of your settings if you're not willing to sacrifice settings there's your answer but if you are I'd still suggest looking at the 980 m at laptops for those of you who are production users I did not do adobe premiere test or anything like that I can tell you for a fact from our own internal testing that you see about a 3x again when using cuda enabled processing on a 980 m against just the cpu so if there's any consideration at all as to whether you should get a notebook that is capable of doing some form of CUDA acceleration for a workstation task then the answer is yes you probably should whether or not you get the 980 or the 980 m is going to depend on budget and how serious you are about that production if you're getting paid for it stuff like that now the big differentiating factor that Nvidia is keen to remind everyone is virtual reality and that's a use case we're not really considering too heavily here because we're mostly advocating for consumers but for those who are doing any type of virtual reality demo station if your exodia night conventions or if you just want to take one around for land events or to play with friends then you will need a desktop GPU to really do anything with that that's that's reasonable and that's where the 980 in the notebook does actually have a very large difference against the 980 m and that's where I would steer you toward this Rishta 980 m at the end of the day performance is very good here thermals are reasonable but not great or bad really and the price is not unfair but it's expensive so the things to consider here do you need a notebook if not build a desktop or even buy one and it's gonna be cheaper about the same power or slightly more powerful depending on what you spec it with if it's a 980 it's about the same slightly better in some instances and if you do need a notebook then consider how much do you really care about ultra settings or is as high or very high and if the answer is you care a lot it's it's the 980 something with a 980 in it the GT 72 is certainly fine read the full review for specific comments about this laptop in particular but there's plenty of other ones out there as well and if you have any questions about all this leave a comment below or post on the article check the article out for full details and charts and if you like this kind of content hit that patreon link in the post-cold video as always helps us out a lot I'll see you all next time