50 PCWorld JULY 2019REVIEWS MSI GS65 STEALTH THIN
pcworld.com/9g8g), you
that going from an 8th-gen
Core i7-8750H to a
9th-gen Core i7-9750H is
nothing major. There’s no
core jump from one
generation to the other,
for example. You still get a
decent 15-percent base
clock difference (where
the CPU runs at during
worst-case scenarios), and
a 9-percent increase in
Turbo Boost.
We see that play out in
our Cinebench R15 3D
modeling test, which
pushes all the cores of the
CPU. The GS65 Stealth
Thin outpaces all Core
i7-8750H laptops by a decent margin and
can actually stand with 8th-gen Core i9 chips.
For the most part though, we’re looking at
about 9 percent more performance.
Running Cinebench R15 on a single core,
we also see the 9th-gen pull out ahead. The
difference narrows to about 5 percent
between the old GS65 and the new one.
Cinebench runs in just a few seconds to
couple of minutes. That’s not enough to heat
up the laptop. To see how it performs under
more adverse CPU conditions, we use
HandBrake to encode a 1080p video. The run
can take 30 minutes on a 6-core CPU.In our lengthy HandBrake encode, we can see the impact of running the
CPU harder for a longer period of time.Alienware Area-51m R1
(Core i9-9900K)
Acer Predator Helios 500 (Ryzen 7 2700)
Origin PC EVO(Core i9-8950HK)-17S
Acer Predator Titan 500(Core i7-8750H)
MSI GS65 Stealth Thin
(Core i7-9750H)
MSI GS75 Stealth
(Core i7-8750H)
MSI GS65
(Core i7-8750H)
Dell XPS 15 9570(Core i7-8750H)
Dell G7(Core i7-8750H)HandBrake 0.9.9
Encode 1080p MKV (Seconds)SHORTER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE1,1281,8381,7181,9851,4301,9291,8272,016
2,035As you can see, the GS65 Stealth Thin
does relatively well (about 7 percent faster)
compared to other 8th-gen Core i7 laptops, but
surprisingly it ties with the Acer Predator Triton- Acer is likely driving its CPU at higher
clocks than usual compared to other 8th-gen
laptops. It also confirms that overall, the 9th-gen
CPU is a minor upgrade from 8th-gen.
GAMING PERFORMANCE
Our first gaming test is UL’s popular 3DMark
Fire Strike test. We focus on the graphics
result, which filters out the CPU’s impact. First
up, we can see that when compared to the