MSI GS70 Stealth vs. Razer Blade Pro - Battle of the Slim 17-inch Gaming Notebooks
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Perfomance Benchmarking
Test Setup
To test the two notebooks, we will be putting it through our slightly revised benchmarks. We have removed older benchmarks such as PCMark 7, 3DMark 11 and Far Cry 2 and have added in a new game in the form of Tomb Raider. You can see the full list below. New also to our evaluation of gaming notebooks is a temperature test, where we take readings from three spots on the notebook and also from GPU-Z. As for comparison, apart from each other, the MSI and Razer notebooks will be compared against recently reviewed ultra-portable gaming notebooks such as the Aftershock XG13 and Razer Blade.
This is the full list of benchmarks used:
- PCMark 8
- 3DMark 2013
- Crysis 2
- Tomb Raider
Here is how the MSI and Razer notebooks stack up against comparable notebooks.
MSI GS70 Stealth | Razer Blade Pro 17-inch (2013) | Aftershock XG13 | Razer Blade 14-inch (2013) | MSI GE40 2OC Dragon Eyes | |
Processor and Chipset |
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Operating System |
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System Memory |
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Video & Display |
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Storage |
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Connectivity |
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I/O Ports |
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Miscellaneous |
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Battery Type |
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Dimensions |
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Weight |
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Audio | — |
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Optical Drive | — | — |
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PCMark 8
PCMark 8 is the latest benchmarking utility from Futuremark and was designed to measure the performance of Windows 8 systems. We will be testing the system using four different scenarios, Home, Creative, Work and Storage, which simulates different workloads that a user might subject the system to.
Bearing in the mind that both the MSI GS70 Stealth and Razer Blade Pro have nearly identical specifications, it was not surprising to see that their scores on PCMark 8 were nearly identical. Clearly, the additional 8GB of RAM did not have any obvious benefits insofar as PCMark 8 is concerned. Overall, the scores of the two notebooks were also pretty comparable with the recent bunch of 14-inch ultra-portable gaming notebooks we have reviewed, although the Aftershock XG13 did manage to garner an amazing lead on both the Microsoft Office and Adobe apps workloads.
3DMark 2013
Scores between the MSI and Razer notebooks were once again very close, which is no surprise because they have identical GPUs. However, we noticed that their scores on "Cloud Gate" were around 15% poorer than that of the Aftershock XG13 and Razer Blade. This was not expected considering they all depend on the same NVIDIA GeForce GTX 765M GPU for graphics processing. We will be investigating this further. Scores on "Fire Storm" were within our expectations.
Crysis 2
With the exception of the MSI GE40, which has a GeForce GTX 760M GPU, the rest of the notebooks are powered by the GeForce GTX 765M (same cores as the GeForce GTX 760M, but higher clock speeds). Unsurprisingly, their recorded frame rates were all closely matches and it was impossible to pick a winner.
Tomb Raider
Tomb Raider is a new game that we are introducing to our notebook testing. The game utilizes Crystal Dynamics’ Crystal Engine and also introduces a new effect called TressFX which is used to render Lara Croft’s ultra-realistic hair.
Scores were once again very comparable, considering both the MSI and Razer notebooks are powered by the same GPU. Also, as far as our benchmarks are concerned, it is clear that the MSI’s extra RAM does not produce a measurable increase in performance.
Temperature
In our temperature test, we let the notebooks run Tomb Raider for 30 minutes so that they get sufficiently warm and then take a couple of readings. We measured the temperature using an infrared thermometer at the palm rests area and also the top two corners of the notebooks - the areas that get the warmest. We also recorded the temperature of the GPU using GPU-Z.
Looking at our results, we can see that the Blade Pro is significantly warmer. GPU-Z indicates that its GPU was around seven degrees Celsius warmer and the palm rests were around 5 degrees Celsius warmer. We concur with these findings as we could feel the difference too just by touching the two notebooks, the Blade Pro felt warmer to touch. The top right corner was particularly hot.
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