MSI showing off their new goodies at Computex

[jasong]

Broadwell Updates

We’re sure you haven’t missed the new Broadwell CPUs – also known as the 5th Generation Core CPUs from Intel. As ever, the new CPU family brings out performance increases and improved battery life due to a new 14nm manufacturing process. We’ve already established that the new CPU family beats the old Haswell (4th Gen Core), but in case you’ve missed this, Bit-Tech has conducted an independent test of the PE60 and its Core i7-5700HQ CPU.



The i7-5700HQ is a direct successor to the i7-4720HQ, widely used across our range of notebooks, and the performance increases are clear to see, despite a 100MHz turbo boost deficit compared to the older CPU. In fact, Bit-Tech points out that “the Intel Core i7-5700HQ was an even match, even for the Intel Core i7-4800MQ” which is a notch higher up than the i7-4700HQ series. Or, to put it another way: “Thanks to the addition of hyper-threading, the Intel Core i7-5700HQ was able to topple desktop quad-cores such as the Core i5-4670K convincingly in Cinebench R15”.

Broadwell therefore shrinks the gap between mobile and desktop CPU performance even further, and we’re extremely happy to announce that our Gaming and Prestige series are both being shipped out with Broadwell CPUs as you read this. Also, the transition couldn’t be simpler - see the very handy guide below.

[jasong]

Broadwell vs. Haswell – part 1: Cinebench

As we’ve previously mentioned, we are rapidly phasing in 5th Gen Intel Core i7 Broadwell CPUs across our range instead of the previously used 4th Gen Haswell CPU – as seen below.



On paper, the differences between the CPUs mainly used aren’t very large – they’re of similar specifications, same power levels (47W TDP), and support the same kind of things. In fact, the biggest differences comes down to the i7-5700HQ Broadwell chip having a 100MHz higher base frequency, as well as a 100MHz lower boost frequency than its predecessor, the i7-4720HQ, as well as support for 1866MHz RAM, as opposed to 1600MHz. For casual users, Intel are steadily improving its graphics solutions, so Broadwell comes with Intel HD Graphics 5600, whereas the Haswell offering comes with HD 4600.

With everything looking very similar specification-wise, we decided to take the CPUs for a head to head spin in a few benchmark applications, the first of which was the CPU test Cinebench R15. The benchmark utilizes all CPU threads, and both our CPUs have 4 cores and 8 threads.



We ran the benchmark three times on each CPU, both with dual channel memory, and recorded the results as seen above. Clearly, the newcomer is a big step up, with a consistent performance over 10% higher than that of the older i7-4720HQ. This is fairly impressive, considering the fact that the i7-4720HQ is actually able to perform at a 100MHz higher boost frequency than the i7-5700HQ.

The Broadwell CPU absolutely walks away with the victory in Cinebench, the first of our benchmarks we’re looking at over the upcoming few weeks.

[jasong]

Broadwell vs. Haswell – part 2: WinRAR

Part 2 of our Broadwell vs. Haswell series brings us to more real-life performance increases. This time, we’re looking at compression, and the WinRAR benchmark. Now, as a reminder, the table below is to give you an overview of the transition to the 5th Generation Broadwell chips, the i7-5000 series, and which CPU replaces which.



Just like with last week’s Cinebench test, the WinRAR benchmark supports multi-threading, and will therefore be using all 8 threads of both our i7-4720HQ as well as the i7-5700HQ.



Just like last time, we put both systems, both with dual-channel RAM at the same frequencies and timings through their paces in three runs. The result is clear to see, with the Broadwell CPU edging ahead with a reasonable margin, adding another comfortable win over Haswell in real-life performance.

[jasong]

Broadwell vs. Haswell – part 3: wPrime

Part 3 in our article series of highlighting the advances on the CPU market brings us to yet another benchmark – wPrime. Basically, wPrime calculates prime numbers for the fun of it, much like SuperPI calculates decimals of Pi. It is a synthetic benchmark, meaning it necessarily has no bearing on real-life performance.



The benchmark is multi-threaded and will use all available CPU threads – once you let the benchmark know. In our case, we set the thread count to 8, which both our Haswell and Broadwell CPU has, and run a 1024M calculation.



Two things become apparent – one is that the newer Broadwell is a lot faster. We’ve seen this before in Cinebench and WinRAR, but not by these margins. Another thing is that the older Haswell-based i7-4720HQ is a bit more inconsistent over three runs, although not by much at all.

In any case – the victory is a walkover. The i7-5700HQ cuts almost 40 seconds from the calculation time of its predecessor. Once more though, it should be stressed that the wPrime benchmark is completely synthetic, unlike our previous benchmarks. It’s still three out of three for i7-5700HQ over the i7-4720HQ.

[jasong]

MSI Rewards Program



Sign up to the MSI forum and participate to earn points that you can use towards your purchase of MSI related goods. Post articles, offer feedback, review hardware and generally contribute in a positive way to qualify for some amazing discounts.
https://forum-en.msi.com/

For details see here: gaming.msi.com/rewards



Initial rewards on offer include one GE62 Gaming Notebook, one GTX 960 Gaming 100 Million Edition graphics card as well as 50 downloadable copies each of two games (Far Cry 4 and Elder Scrolls: Online). These are some pretty serious gifts.

[FarligOpptreden]

Well, seeing as I just got a GS70 I can register and review it to earn a quick 100 points. Dunno how I'm gonna make up the rest though...

[jasong]

GeForce Experience: Gamestream co-op
Our gaming notebooks are exclusively sold with NVIDIA GeForce graphics, which means added benefits of NVIDIA software. One such benefit is GeForce Experience, which up until now has been perhaps most useful for optimizing your in-game graphics settings to match your system’s hardware.

Now though, with the latest version of GeForce Experience, NVIDIA are opening up some more options worthy of your attention. First of all, the new version of GFE is equipped with a new overlay, for easier access to controls in game. One part of this is ShadowPlay, which basically enables you to record gameplay (much like our bundled six-month trials of XSplit Gamecaster), but the second, way cooler (if you ask us) feature, is Gamestream co-op.

Gamestream co-op lets you stream your gameplay to a friend using an Internet connection, instead of broadcasting on for example Twitch, but actually invite said friend to help you out in-game(!) – or play co-op. See how NVIDIA demonstrates this in the video below:

https://youtu.be/ZqsT4Og28lI

You can also choose to completely relinquish control to your friend, who will play on your system, over the Internet, should you be playing a title without local two-player co-op capabilities. Apparently, all this requires is a “modern GeForce GTX graphics card” (read: any newer MSI Gaming notebook) and we’re guessing some decent bandwidth. Apart from that, we obviously also recommend a friend to play with.

A beta version of GeForce Experience with these features is set to hit your GeForce GTX-equipped system by the end of September, with a final version to be released before the end of 2015.