PC World - USA (2020-04)

70 PCWorld APRIL 2020

REVIEWS MSI PRESTIGE 14

control. Most of the video is handled

with dedicated circuits in the integrated

graphics, so the CPU and the accompany-

ing GPU should be asleep and using

minimal power.

If you were to do something much more

battery-intensive like browse the web (yes,

that’s a battery drain) or run Photoshop, you

can probably lop off a third to half of the

battery life. If you’re going to encode a video

or push the GPU hard—you probably

shouldn’t expect more than an hour to an

hour and a half at best.

MSI could have solved this, of course, by

using a larger battery. But then the laptop

wouldn’t be as light.

THERMAL THROTTLING

The testing above is isolated to either the CPU

or the GPU. For most functions, that’s fine. But

for the times when you load up both chips,

you could encounter some new problems.

YouTube tech star Dave Lee ran into some

with his Prestige 14 unit (go.pcworld.com/

dvle), and we’ve seen this with Dell’s XPS 15

under long simultaneous workloads (go.

pcworld.com/dx75). No surprise, our

Prestige 14 hits this wall, too.

For the first test, we ran OpenCL Luxmark

3 with the Luxball model. The test uses Open

Compute Language to ray-trace an image.

OpenCL can be run on CPUs and GPUs, so

for the first test, we run OpenCL on just the

Prestige 14’s GeForce GTX 1650 Max-Q. We

also run the test using all four of the available

power presets for the laptop. It’s the first chart

we ran, and here it is again.

As you can see, there are huge CPU

performance hits depending on the profile

selected on the Prestige 14. But what about

the GPU? As you can see in the chart below,

even when the CPU is basically locked at

400MHz, this GPU-based OpenCL test is

essentially a tie.

This second result tells us MSI’s power

profiles don’t gate GPU clocks as part of its

power savings plan. It also confirms that

LuxMark properly doesn’t care how fast the

CPU is running, because this particular test is

supposed to be a GPU OpenCL load.

What happens when you stress both the

MSI’s Prestige 14 features four power profiles

as part of its Creator Center, and each greatly

impacts overall performance.

MSuper Battery settingSI Prestige 14

MSilent settingSI Prestige 14

MBalanced setting (default)SI Prestige 14

MHigh Performance settingSI Prestige 14

Cinebench R15.038 on

different power settings

Multi-core performance

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

726

532

1,076

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