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NVIDIA GeForce MX150 - Still Worth It In 2019?

2019-02-13
hey everyone Eber here with hardware connects and not too long ago I posted my review of the razor blade stealth which is a thin and light 13-inch ultra book and I really liked it I mean the design and the way our razor just upgraded a few things here and there was absolutely great but the price for the updated version that I had was just a bit too expensive basically the base model had a whiskey Lake i7 85 65 u8 thread CPU eight gigabytes of RAM and a 256 gigabyte SSD but the graphics model which I had came with 16 gigabytes of RAM and nvme SSD rather than a SATA base drive and a discreet MX 150 GPU that version is about $200 more expensive but it got me wondering if the discreet graphics card really made a huge difference you see in videos MX 150 has been rolled out to a few ultrabooks and some entry-level notebooks and I think that trend is supposed to accelerate through 2019 but I want to throw in some more tests to see if it was really worth the extra cost over the lower battery life that we used to get with Intel's integrated solution so let's find out right after this excuse me please explain is easy to systems fully powered by a single power supply just like me and you two bodies powered by a single mind just imagine the good we can do the revolt X by fantex a high performance unit for multi CPU GPU and dual system configurations with 80-plus platinum efficiency with entirely silent fan mode a 12 year warranty and clean cable management explore the opportunities with the revolt XPS you by fan thanks links below all right so let's first get into what the MX 150 really is because the name doesn't really give any hints even though that it has been out for quite a while now as a matter of fact it seems like nvidia went out there way to rebrand and older architectures so it looks something different basically this GPU uses a slightly evolved version of the GP 108 core from Nvidia's GT 1030 GPU that means it uses the Pascal architecture and has 384 cuda cores 24 texture units and 16 ROPS they've also been some modifications to lower core voltage is improve power consumption and level out clocks consistency those are all key aspects for ultrabac designs like the ways of late stealth the big question mark is clock speeds and memory those two specs are determined by laptop manufacturers and are largely based on their internal cooling solutions for example the razor is running the MX 150 at fifteen thirty one megahertz and has four gigabytes of gddr5 memory which gives it a TDP of roughly 25 watts others slim 13-inch notebooks with this GPU runs at just a thousand 37 megahertz and comes with just two gigabytes of memory but they also have a TDP of just 10 watts that means Razer is sacrificing some battery life for increased performance this also brings up a pretty interesting point guys when a notebook says that it comes with an MX 150 GPU you will need to pay very close attention to whether or not if you're getting the 2 gigabyte 10 watt version or the 4 gigabyte 25 one model because the performance difference will be very different another interesting point about the MX 150 is that it doesn't have invidious Envy ENC hardware based video encoding engine that means it can't be used to boost performance tasks like video transcoding you'll need to use a CPU for that it does however have NB Dec decoding so playback or video playback will be accelerated by the GPU with all of that taken into account let's get on to the tests all these were run on the stealth 16 gigabyte model with the MX 150 either completely disabled or enabled for gaming I decided to pick a handful of simple popular games that don't necessarily take a ton of resources and which people might likely be interested in playing while they're away from their main PC you can see that the MX 154 gigabyte delivers a huge amount of additional performance against the integrated graphics card which was pretty much expected with it games that are slight shows with Intel graphics becomes perfectly playable and mind you this is all at 1080p resolutions so if you tweak around with settings here and there I think the MX 150 would be absolutely a perfect companion especially if you're travelling and if you just want to throw in something on an ultrabook now I also want to dig in a little deeper into some other tasks you see a Finan like 13-inch altered book with a price tag like the stealth would typically be expected to pull double duty for content creators and professionals while they're away from their office because they normally used a workstation PC to get their job done but can DMX 150 really make a difference in terms of rendering performance and other tasks that would typically bring an ultrabook with intel's integrated graphics solution down to its needs let's start with handbrake for video transcoding and here the MX 150 couldn't even be used because it lacks the N VNC encoder however until squick sync hardware video encoder does an amazing job and cutting down times versus just using the CPU there's also very little change in Premiere Pro since this program also uses the NBN C to accelerate rendering times but I also have to mention that Intel's QuickSync doesn't come in handy here since it used to reduce rendering times and I think the reason and I think this might be you know it's just my theory I think what's happening here is that when Adobe recognizes that the system has you know Intel CPU and integrated GPU as well as a discrete graphics card and when you enable quick sync Adobe things that okay I'll just offset some of the loads equally or distribute it across the discreet graphics card the integrated GPU and of course a CPU but since the MX 150 doesn't have an Nvidia encoding engine it just freaks out and I think that's what I think and it just offsets all that load to the CPU and the integrated GPU just sort of kind of it doesn't get utilized to its best and I think that's why it takes significantly longer to render you know 4k videos or whatnot so I don't think the MX 150 is you know a greater solution when it comes to just play back or not play back but just rendering performance in Adobe Premiere now v-ray is a rendering program that can be added to a huge number of applications like Sketchup Maya cinema 4d and more in those cases it is usually used to render high detail scenes which means it takes a ton of system resources here the MX 150 makes a huge difference since CUDA can be processed through the rendering quickly while the CPU is left aside for other tasks blender is a bit different with the 1/3 CPU and the MX 150 being pretty close in rendering times so it doesn't look like Nvidia's card gives an advantage here alright guys so while I was running v-ray and blender I did notice that the CPU was only being utilized by like five to ten percent in order to process the final image and the reason for that is basic pretty simple those programs primarily use GPU to accelerate or render the final output now that got me thinking would it be possible to run parallel rendering tasks that could use voltage CPU and the GPU without actually sacrificing on output time now I know this might not sound like a big deal but for professionals this could be a huge time saver because think of it this way for many design and architectural projects you will obviously require multiple renderings at different angles now there's a revision made at some point those renderings will obviously have to be reprocessed and if you're doing one at a time it just takes forever but think of it this way if you can pop out two at a time while traveling or if you leave the CPU to do other tasks that could be an awesome reason to look into something like at the MX 150 now in order to do this I open up two instances of these programs and a set one for CUDA and the other one for CPU and the results are pretty darn interesting you see when processed individually the CPU took about 12 minutes to complete and the GPU took about 15 minutes however when the MX 150 in the CPU are running on two different renderings in parallel both will be done in just over 15 minutes sure the CPU does take a little bit longer but in this case you'll be able to almost double your output now v-ray uses a bit more processor resources when the GPU is rendering so when both are running at the same time the CPU time increases by quite a bit however you are still much better off running two scenes together on different pieces of hardware then waiting around for 2cp renderings to complete one after the other all right guys so what about battery life now I wanted to mention right away that while I made sure that the MX 150 wasn't working during the IGP tests it can't be completely turned off so it isn't drawing any power even when it isn't in use it remains in hibernation which still requires some battery flow so take that into account dedicating the IGP to graphics tasks obviously does extend battery life and not having the MX 150 at all would probably result in even longer times a GPU with a 25 watt TDP in a slim and light notebook will obviously have a pretty big impact on how long it can remain unplugged so take that into account before jumping onto the MX 150 train so I guess it's time to wrap things up you see at the very beginning of this video I had a very simple question is the MX 150 really worth it over Intel's integrated graphics card and the answer to that really depends on what you're looking for in a 13 interested in light ultrabook you see if you're someone who things that you're going to be using applications like v-ray or blender if you're an architect or designer that sees yourself taking advantage of you know those extra cuda cores to accelerate your rendering output or if you're just thinking of doing some light gaming here and there and if you're looking for a pretty compact notebook then the MX 150 is actually worth it although keep in mind keep in mind that you need to make sure that what model you're getting because there are a lot of notebooks out there that come with the two gigabyte 10 watt TDP GPUs and of course there's the 25 one 4 gigabyte model which is found on the razor blade stealth so that's definitely something to consider but in my case I really can't use something like the razor blade style because for video rendering or for content creators or video editors the MX 150 is of no use because it doesn't have the in encoding engine and it just wouldn't really make any sense because it's your rendering time so it almost quadruple so that's where I would look into something with that's a little bit more powerful like GTX 10 series card or even the latest r-tx GPUs although they're they're very expensive so yeah and guys remember parallel rendering is just not for notebooks featuring MX 150 graphics cards because you can apply the same concept to your desktop workstation PC or even your a laptop that has capable hardware because if you can utilize every single piece of the hardware to accelerate your particular rendering task then it's a win-win also don't forget if you're just looking for something that can do casual tasks like browsing the web watching you know content or something like that just normal stuff they're better off going with the laptop that doesn't happy and x1 to GPU because yeah first and foremost you're gonna get longer battery life and it's gonna cost you a lot less so that's it for me thank you very much for watching let me know what you guys think about you know in videos MX 130 GPU and what do you think of it slowly trying to enter into the Ultrabook market because I see that or at least I think it's dot it's going to become the Train for 2019 so I want to know your thoughts about that and of course what do you think of the performance and of course things on parallel rendering the idea of that I mean both hybrid connects thank you so much for watching make sure to check out some relevant content 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