Gadgetory

generational gains in notebook technology are often the most interesting for their reduction in power consumption which grants more battery life so you go from Pascal to Maxwell because of the reduction in power consumption on the GPU there is a benefit to the battery life and the same is true for Intel and moving from as well the skylake to kb lake or whatever now kb lake I would say don't really hold your breath for that but we're still waiting on the arrival of those chips before getting to the coverage of the Apache laptop this content is brought to you by an tech and a new cube MITx case designed by Razer which supports a full open-loop liquid cooling solution surprisingly for being a small box and you can hit the link in the description below for more information as for what we're looking at today this is the ge62 apache pro laptop from msi this one has the GTX 1060 in it I've got another ge62 Apache pro next to me and we already did a video talking about their naming scheme if the names confuse you this one is with a 970m this is the previous generation this is the new generation and that's what we're reviewing today MSI is a patchy pro that we're looking at today the ge62 VR is priced at $1600 the ge62 VR is part of the again Apache family of MSI notebooks with the six in the sixty two indicating a 15.6 inch display and the two indicating a second-generation chassis the unit's crowning feature is its GTX 1060 desktop GPU which runs a full 10 SMS per 1280 CUDA cores and this is identical to the GTX 1060 add-in boards for desktops with the only difference being clock rate and some power management stuff 10 series notebooks have about a 10 percent range permitted for pre overclock or under clock settings on the GPU as defined by the manufacturer and that's likely to be the largest contributor to FPS differences between laptops this generation that is aside from the bloatware that we already talked about on the MSI notebooks if you want to see that video we already posted one but bloatware aside the GTX 1060 runs at 16 70 megahertz stock and runs the same eight gigabit per second six gigabytes of gddr5 as a desktop counterpart as for the CPU msi ge62 VR is using a six gen i7 6700 HQ clocked at 2.6 gigahertz pre boost and this is the non overclocking skew of current skylake notebook CPUs kb lake will undoubtedly see inclusion in notebooks soon and they will be Pascal and Polaris hopefully in some regard though its performance difference will almost certainly be negligible for gaming this time our unit uses 16 gigabytes of ddr4 so-dimm memory with a maximum support capacity of 32 gigabytes for higher density modules ddr4 is lower power consumption than ddr3 so that is more benefit to the battery life in theory and there's also an nvme MDOT - SSD included at 240 gigabytes also a low power consumption part with a one terabyte SATA hard drive for mass storage not quite as low power consumption but we're moving away from them eventually the ge62 VR uses either a 15.6 inch 1080p display or 15.6 inch 4k display both IPS panels with accurate color from most viewing angles and our test model is one with a 1080p display but we connected a monitor for additional 1440p testing it's a shame that the laptop doesn't have a 1440p option natively from the manufacturer since the 1060 can definitely handle 1440p gaming and it does struggle with 4k making the pairing a bit less sensical you'd have to buy a 4k display just to run games at 1440p because there is a note native option for just a 1440p display before getting to the benchmark so let's look at the internals of this notebook the bottom of the laptop uses four quadrants of ventilation ports over the memory and some of the heat pipes with two side ventilation ports still on the bottom for fans there are also side ventilation ports and ports elsewhere on the laptop like the back as for internal cooling a set of heat pipes converge on the CPU and GPU aluminum cold plates fairly standard for laptop cooling and they don't really create the most comprehensive coverage we've seen in a laptop like msi gt80 3 Titan but this is way smaller and it's got to keep weight in mind as well so copper obviously adds a ton of weight so the thermal coverage looks good from the design but we can actually test it and see what it looks like in actuality that's what we're going to do next but the first thing to talk about testing methodology all that stuff is defined in the article below if you're curious about how we run these tests or you want to recreate some of the testing yourself to make sure your unit is within the spec that we've sort of laid out and we also have some noise tests in the article which are important this time around because the fan RPMs are a bit more variable than we've seen in the past so that will be in the article here we're talking about thermals bloatware fps and battery life for thermals we're looking at delta T values by subtracting the ambient temperature as collected by two thermocouples which are then averaged for the room temperature the msi ge62 VR keeps its CPU at a temperature of approximately twenty six point eight C delta T over ambiens a slight improvement from the previous ge62 model that we tested with his twenty seven point nine four C temperature idle is about the same between the two and the fanbook four is large form factor benefits the unit's ability to dissipate heat a bit better allowing it to skate by just below the i7 6700 HQ equipped ge62 VR for GPU thermals we're at 31 C delta T over ambient load on the msi ge62 VR or about four C improved over the gtx 960m at GE 62 unit that we previously reviewed thermal values are vastly improved over the nine atm note though that MSI is mostly able to achieve its lower temperature by blasting the fan rpm which gets pretty loud when under full load and again you can check our article for fan noise and DB testing and our usual endurance test with two hours of gaming on the AC is also in the article going into the FPS test we already posted a video and an article on the bloatware that comes pre-installed in these units if you don't want to use the word bloatware I guess to define it was more than I think 13 programs included all that start at startup when you first get the unit that includes Norton the MSI control panel the dragon center stuff all the lighting for the keyboard steelseries keyboard tons of stuff lots of software killer networking all this stuff so we tested it and the impact unfortunately for a messiah was pretty significant it was somewhere in the range of 12 to 20% at worst and to give an example well we'll go through the numbers again here but this is where an SI actually has some value like high-power CyberPower origin those three companies for sure generally don't include the kind of bloat that you will find straight from manufacturer and they're taking these units and rebranding them and selling them so it's the same laptop but the reason it's unfortunate is because from a hardware perspective this is mostly identical as one would expect because the CPU and the GPU are made by Intel and NVIDIA they don't change mostly identical to the competitors but it will look a lot worse in benchmarks if you don't remove all the bloatware first or if you're maybe working with the user who doesn't know to do that and so the difference looks larger than it actually is from a hardware level so just to quickly recap those performance metrics GTA 5 so our performance reduction of about 19 FPS average at 1080p ultra when using bloatware on this ge62 VR after we uninstalled the software we were over 100 FPS average and running 0.1% low values of 70 FPS compared to the 50 2.7 FPS of the bloated system Metro last light posted similar results with nearly 76 FPS average on a clean install versus 59 FPS on the creep software bloated install the hit 20.1% loads is also substantial and Metro last light gapped at about a 2x difference and that's just a few of the more CPU bound tests you can read or view that content for more depth but let's look at the comparative tests with no bloatware installed on any systems for the best Hardware comparison this generation and that starts with shadow of mordor which is our more complete comparative chart because we were able to run these tests on the 1070 1018 notebooks while at Nvidia's press event haven't received those yet for review but we ran these tests they're at 1080p ultra with shadow of mordor the ge62 vr and it's GTX 1060 s sit between the 980 m and 1070 notebooks we're at 70 6.3 FPS average and 51.7 fps 1% low but resting near 37 FPS for the 0.1% low values 980m meanwhile is pushing an FPS average of 60 4.3 with 47 1% lows and 43 0.1% lows as for the 10 17 notebooks that's posting a significantly higher FPS than really both of these at 114 average with lows constantly above 60 the cleveo 1080 equipped notebook for reference is nearly a hundred and forty FPS average at 1080p clearly far and away better equipped than the other two and more suited for higher resolution gaming at 1440p more places the 10 60 exactly where it did hierarchically as at 1080p performance rest around 60fps marking the 10 60 with i7 6700 HQ combo powerful enough to support shadow of Mordor at 1440p with ultra settings the 1080 laptop unit for reference is closer to 100 FPS while the 1070 unit is at 70 FPS average looking at 1440p performance for the GTX 1060 across-the-board just looking at this one laptop here we're seeing greater than 60 fps and almost all of the games tested Metro last light is the only title where performance falls below 60 fps and it's still plenty playable at 52 FPS average overwatch as one might expect runs easily and at nearly 100 FPS average with lows greater than 70 FPS GTA 5 is nearly maxed out other than advanced graphics and runs at 75 FPS average for 1440p but our unit has a 1080p display so this was all done with the laptop effectively docked and plugged into a monitor the point is that a 1440p display on a gtx 1060 laptop would actually not be misplaced if you could find one but there's not one on the msi ge62 VR that we've yet seen 1080p gaming is relatively painless for the laptop across the board we're getting 109 FPS average in black ops 3 at 1080p high with the 970 m unit at 62 FPS average that's a massive 50 FPS gain over the last gen step higher GPU skew but also the CPU has changed and that's important to Metro last light operates at 76 FPS average on the ge62 VR with a 970 m ge62 version from last gen at 4 seven FPS overwatch would be supported on 120 Hertz displays readily which this doesn't have but MSI does have a few in the works and maybe some even shipping at this point and 148 FPS average is what is pushed for overwatch on the 1060 notebook also supporting a 98 fps 0.1% low value the ge62 970m is at 89 FPS average granting a sizable lead to the new generation of non-m branded GPUs because again this is a desktop 1060 using grid Autosport four hour battery life test we start the test at 1080p ultra with loop enabled then check Event Viewer defined kernel power events at the end of the test the ge62 survives for 68 minutes of gaming compared to the 960m Apache pro at 51 minutes and these units were pretty similar in spec given the generational gap the power consumption overall has been reduced across basically all components in the system including the GPU the CPU and the memory the nine ATM units have the best battery life presently on our bench but that's for two reasons one the test when on battery is limited to 30 fps with battery boost 1.0 that is a power saving feature but 2.0 which is supported with the 1060 allows you to get up to 60 fps if you enable it and as a part of that point the 980m can handle 30 FPS relatively easily comparatively and it's just not sucking all the power it's rated for because it's a more powerful system it's limited to 30 FPS so you get better battery now the main thing here though is that the fan book is physically imposing and has a massive battery as a result of its 18 inch form factor and this helps considerably because the battery is just physically larger msi ge62 VR is priced at $1,600 that lands it basically actually exactly the same price as most of its competitors including the Asus equivalent size gtx 1060 notebook the ROG Strix gigabytes p at 55 w notebook also $1600 acer not a soos acer is $100 more at 1700 but we don't have full specs on there 15.6 inch predator just yet so in terms of price they're all pretty much the same Asus is the most competitive in thickness and they've got a slight difference in weight and height extra features but the biggest difference is in the bloatware if you're savvy enough to remove unneeded applications when you get the system or reinstall windows msi ge62 VR hardware is good and the chassis z' of reasonable build quality now the best we've seen but pretty darn good and the form factor is small enough to use on a plane so the main thing here the takeaway is you're obviously sacrificing a bit rather than going with something like a blade which generally will run more expensive but is a bit smaller you get a slightly larger form factor laptop you can see we're not at the sort of Ultrabook form factor which is not really terminology used anymore but the less than one inch form factor is not what you'll get here you would need something like a stealth for I'm from an aside for that or a blade from Razer both of which are more expensive part four part so that's the this is the middle ground unit other than some of the gt72 Dominator stuff we might look at later and as far as travel goes it is something you could actually use on a plane a decent for gaming but lower price overall than these smaller competitors as for software that the out of box software is really killing performance and makes this thing look way worse than it actually is and not only look worse when using it you can actually feel these differences and see them clicking on something as simple as advanced power options after hitting the system tray battery icon that takes sometimes more than one full second to open and that might sound petty but when you're looking at equivalent Hardware for the same price doing it instantly it's a big difference so this is a big issue for MSI I really hope that they will sort of tone down the bloat that they've got on their systems Norton's a big part of that their own control panel which I know they will defend as being sort of a ease-of-use feature for people who don't know how to use the normal windows control panel to do the same things that does add some bloat a lot of its Norton if you don't tune it you can obviously tune it a bit but that's the arguments the same if it's people who don't know what they're doing it's just going to perform slower than it needs to and those aren't the only two culprits either all this other stuff there's like 13 in software solutions on I that don't need to be on there and as for the VR tag ge62 VR that's the thing now so we've got even things like the s340 elite which is a good-looking case it's still kind of taking some of that VR branding so it's a big thing right now I'm not sure that this is the SKU I would get for VR gaming you could certainly do some VR on it but for higher graphics settings more complex games in the future things like that a 1060 is a bit low on the the list I would probably look towards a 1070 maybe a case Q CPU but this HQ CPU with 1060 is definitely cutting it close depending on what kind of VR games are planning to play and then of course there's Andy's new rx 470 laptop this was announced somewhat silently while we were at PAX we went to their booth we're like where is this thing and they couldn't get us one while at the show we haven't seen one I haven't been able to acquire one from anybody so hopefully we can look at the RX 470 lat op soon because that would be a good competitive look but right now it's all just Nvidia stuff that we have because AMD has been kind of out of the laptop game for a while and the RX Polaris stuff is the most recent to go hopefully into laptops but it's just begun with rx 470 and it's impossible to find at least on the review side so I don't have one for you yet unfortunately but hopefully we will get one at some point for now this is what we've got as always patreon like the post all video link in the description below for the full article with more information noise testing things like that and subscribe for more I'll see you all next time