Gadgetory

engineered to handle the most demanding networks ultimate power uncompromised speed meet the Linksys wrt54g much and today we're talking about Maxwell as it is rolling out for mobile particularly for the gaming notebook section and that is exactly why we have this msi ge70 from their patchy series on the table and we have the little fool of you for this so make sure to check it out is gonna be a link in the description and also if you can click anywhere on the screen here you will be redirected to that reviews now we first saw Maxwell with the gtx 750ti it was an incredible card because it had low power draw so power efficient yet very powerful and that is exactly why maxwell is so fitting within the notebook scene and what's better than a powerful GPU that doesn't require a lot of power for a notebook scene and NVIDIA definitely has realized the potential for Maxwell to be incorporated into the gaming notebook seem as many gaming notebooks today are becoming thinner they are becoming lighter and therefore you know introducing that appropriate size for mobile use now the latest Maxwell offerings are the GTX 850 m and the gtx 860m they both utilize the GM 107 core with 640 cuda cores 40 texture units up to 2 gigabytes of memory on a 128-bit memory bus the main difference between the two cards are the frequency clocks so the gtx 860m being a more higher-end model clocked at higher clocks over one gigahertz to be exact while the gtx 850 m is more targeted towards more power conservative yet productivities use delivering about 20% less performance at the significantly lower power draw now aside from what seems to be like a very complementing relationship between power efficient GPU and the notebook seen particularly for gaming maxwell also is rolling out with a few awesome features that were previously only available on stop Kepler GPUs so we will have game stream which allows you to stream games from your notebook directly to your shield then we also have shadow play that allows you to record all your gameplay again from the notebook a feature that was only available for Kepler based desktop GPUs is now on Maxwell for notebooks but to complement this whole battery improvement there's a new feature that NVIDIA has up its sleeve called battery boost and that is exactly why we have this here DG 70 from MSI because this was the our test unit to test out to see how battery boost worked and how efficient it was really so battery boost as Nvidia says is a low level governor so on a driver level that works with your CPU your GPU and your memory to adjust both the frequency and the voltages of all those components to hit a certain frame target you access the frame target through GeForce experience you have the slider between 20 and 50 frames a second that will be a ceiling frame ceiling battery boost will work to acquire just enough power from all your resources in order to hit that frame target I think this is very important as one of the main disadvantages for a majority of gaming notebooks including this one is battery life so you can hear gaming while it's not plugged in it significantly suffers and it's reducing everything because the notebook is pushing out pretty much at maximum capacity that it's capable of however a battery boost does with a limits the frame cap and therefore it will only acquire those resources that are needed to hit that frame cap and therefore potentially saving you battery life and giving you extra game time so in theory battery boosts that combined with Maxwell architecture that already features an extremely powerful core and yet actually without sacrificing on performance and so to be your match made in heaven however in practice while you still get extra game time there's still some limitations that we found particularly with more this notebook in particular as on battery it does underclock both the CPU and the GPU so performance difference between on battery and plug then is quite significant and with our unit it was about 40% difference in performance while it was plugged in and unplugged without battery boost now one of the things that I found interesting while testing battery boost is that it actually improved my frame rate so playing crysis 3 well this is plugged in we get 57 frames a second on average unplug your notebook and running the exactly the same sequence we get 25 frames a second on average with battery boost off turning on battery boost at 30fps cap and you get that fluid performance of 30 fps pretty much consistently throughout the benchmark which is which is very impressive the fact that you can still squeeze out a little bit extra power with battery boost enabled vs. battery boost off and just running off the notebook as it's trying to push out as many frames as possible I saw exactly the same behavior in Metro last slide plug then we get 40 FPS on average unplug in notebook with battery boost off we get 15 FPS and actually battery booster turning it on to 30fps cap because it's a demanding game it does require quite a bit of power and because of the the under clock while it's on battery it hits 22 FPS on average but still tighter than it was without battery boost and this is pretty much across the board all the games that I tried we had higher framerate with battery boost enabled so in that sense battery boost actually does give you better performance wild on battery however in terms of actually expanding battery life throughout your gaming session while Nvidia claims to have in certain games improved by 200% or something like that the results that we've experienced and certain benchmarks are not as impressive as what they claimed running the Metro a slight benchmark on the loop we gained only 5 minutes of extra extra battery life with 30fps cap and actually increasing the FPS gap to 50 frames/second reduced the battery life by a minute with games that do not require as much power when you can set the FPS limit to 30 and game on battery you do gain additional game time however it's not as significant as you know doubling up the lifetime of the battery or your game time so battery life does have its advantages in terms of actually improving the frame rate from what we've experienced however not a significant improvement in battery life as over just gaming on battery just standard now overall we've seen that maxwell is very promising since its early stages with the gtx 750ti and finally when it's moved on to the mobile sector or mobile scene it is also as impressive for its low power requirement yet very impressive performance now all the features that have been transferred over from the desktop counterparts like game stream shadow play GPU boost 2.0 and very optimized technology and battery boost all complement this into a very attractive package particularly for the mobile sector particularly for the gaming sector for that ability to game on-the-go still gaining a little bit of extra time while on battery improving frame rates and while tying this whole thing together into a very nice package overall especially when you have to consider of the competition from Intel and AMD this seems to be like the optimal solution at the moment but what do you guys think of Maxwell GPUs entering the mobile sector particularly because the form factor for these types of notebooks it's quite impressive for where we've come and we can actually see a lot of more thin notebooks coming out rolling out extremely thin profiles that also feature Maxwell you know is this perhaps something that you will consider buying because of Cole factor and because the performance and perhaps because of the battery life as well so let us know how you feel about that in the comments below again don't forget to check out our review of the g70 from msi the link in the description thanks for watching leave you comments down below and we'll see you in the next one