Performance and Battery Life
There are no surprises here, the Core i7-4700MQ is one of Intel's quickest mobile processors. Cinebench examines the chip's multi-core processing capabilities, and a score close to seven can be considered very fast indeed.
The CPU's speed does come with one small caveat, however. During our benchmarks it would reach temperatures of up to 80ºC. We didn't come across any throttling, but during prolonged stress tests the fans would ramp up in speed and transform the laptop from quiet to clearly audible.
PCMark 7 takes overall system performance into account and, as expected, the CPU, 16GB of DDR3 memory and mSATA SSDs combine to deliver a score of over 6,000. This is among the fastest laptops we've tested, and it feels ultra responsive in use.
But how about those discrete graphics? For reference's sake, the XMG P503 Pro was armed with a GeForce GTX 770M, but the MSI GT70 2OD's GeForce GTX 780M is clearly a big step up. And frankly, it needs to be if it's to have any chance of running today's games at the laptop's native resolution.
Our basic gaming benchmark is to run Just Cause 2 at 1,366x768 with medium quality settings. This is a light 3D test that can often trip-up some of the premium Ultrabooks, however it poses absolutely no challenge to the GT60 2OD.
In fact, even at its native 2,880x1,620 resolution, MSI's machine was still able to run Just Cause 2 at 37.7 frames per second with maximum image quality settings (8xAA and 16xAF).
15.6in Gaming Performance (Average FPS) |
|||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Game | Quality Settings | ||||
GeForce GTX 780M |
GeForce GTX 770M |
GeForce GTX 770M |
|||
2,880x1,620 |
1,920x1,080 |
1,920x1,080 |
1,920x1,080 |
||
| BioShock Infinite | Medium Quality | 61.2 |
112.0 |
72.1 |
74.3 |
| High Quality | 45.0 |
99.8 |
63.3 |
64.8 |
|
| Max Quality | 31.3 |
58.3 |
34.9 |
35.3 |
|
| DiRT Showdown | 4xMSAA, Medium Quality | 85.3 |
113.3 |
104.4 |
111.7 |
| 4xMSAA, High Quality | 76.8 |
111.1 |
87.2 |
93.9 |
|
| 4xMSAA, Ultra Quality | 33.6 |
55.2 |
35.7 |
35.5 |
|
To get a better idea of what the GeForce GTX 780M can do, we've tested two modern games - BioShock Infinite and DiRT Showdown - with varying degrees of image quality at the laptop's native 2,880x1,620 resolution, as well as at 1,920x1,080 resolution for direct comparison with two other 15.6in systems.
Performance at 1080p is excellent and the GTX 780M is found to be, on average, more than 50 per cent faster than the GeForce GTX 770M when gaming with ultra-quality image settings.
What's interesting is that there is enough underlying performance to drive today's games at 2,880x1,620. You might need to knock image quality down a notch, particularly with some of the more demanding titles, but DiRT Showdown with high quality settings looked and played fantastic.
A quad-core processor, GeForce GTX 780M graphics, four storage devices, and a 4.7-million pixel display. That sort of hardware takes its toll on battery life, and in our video rundown test - which entails looping a 720p movie clip with 50 per cent screen brightness and all wireless radios disabled - MSI's GT60 2OD was able to keep rolling for just past four hours. Not a bad return for a gaming laptop, but of course, nowhere near enough to get you through a full working day.