PC World - USA (2019-11)

56 PCWorld NOVEMBER 2019

REVIEWS MSI GE65 RAIDER

For the most part, it’s fairly close. The

Core i9-9880H CPUs have small clock speed

advantage, so they outperform 9th-gen

6-core Intel chips by about 5 percent. Against

8th gen 6-core Intel chips, you’re looking at

about an 11 percent advantage. If you keep

hearing that there’s been “no change”

between generations of Intel CPUs from the

peanut gallery, note that the difference

between a 7th-gen quad-core and a 9th-gen

8-core is about 29 percent in single-core

performance. Of course, it’s about 115

percent in multi-core performance.

One issue with using Cinebench R15 as

the only way to measure a laptop’s

performance is its short

duration. A multi-core

run might take just a

minute or two at most.

That’s not really

enough to heat up a

laptop, so we also use

an older version of the

free HandBrake utility

to encode a 30GB file

using the Android

Tablet preset. The task

can take as long as 45

minutes on a 7th-gen

quad-core laptop, and

about 24 minutes on

an 8-core laptop. As

HandBrake is multi-

threaded, that means

the CPU heats up long enough that we see

the impact as it reaches its thermal limit.

While the Dell XPS 15 outperformed the

GE65 Raider in the short Cinebench test, once

we subjected both to a marathon, and not a

sprint, the GE65 Raider’s thicker chassis and

better cooling power allowed it to finish far

ahead of the XPS 15. The GE65 is outperformed

only by the thicker and larger laptops.

GRAPHICS PERFORMANCE

The other half of the GE65 Raider’s appeal is

its GPU. Our configuration included Nvidia’s

GeForce RTX 2070. It’s nicknamed “Max P”

by industry insiders because it’s the version

The GE65 pretty much outruns all other laptops except for those much

larger, and much heavier.

Alienware Area 51m R1

(Core i9-9900K)

Acer Predator Helios 700(Core i9-9880H) KB Open

Alienw(Core i7-9750H)are M15 R2

M(Core i9-9880H)SI GE65 Raider

MSI GS75 Stealth

(Core i7-8750H)

HP Omen 2XS

(Core i7-9750H) Default

Alienware M 15

(Core i7-8750H)

Acer Predator Triton 500 Dell G7

(Core i7-9750H)

3DMark Fire Strike 1.1 Graphics

(GPU score)

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

26,787

19,579

21,786

18,213

25,589

18,379

20,123

15,263

15,034