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Temperatures, Clocks, and Power
Just as we saw with the cheap Katana GF66 that we reviewed recently, MSI runs the Balanced power profile with the Core i7-12700H CPU getting around 38W sustained power under long-duration Cinebench loading.
The average P-cores clock speed was once again in the vicinity of 2.2GHz steady-state. This means that there is CPU performance left on the table that can be extracted by using the more aggressive power profiles such as Extreme Performance.
With both the CPU and GPU being loaded in a gaming scenario under the Balanced profile, we saw the power allocation trending at around 150W combined.
This was typically segregated as around 30-35W for the CPU and 110-125W for the GPU. That translated into around mid-2GHz for the CPU P-cores with a temperature around the mid-90C mark and often butting up against the 99C throttling point.
We recorded around 1450MHz average for the RTX 3070 Laptop GPU clocks with a temperature around the high-80s mark.
As was the case with the Katana GF66, MSI’s recommended – Balanced – power profile clearly left performance on the table, so we tested out the Extreme Power profile with the fans set to Cooler Boost.
Of course, the noise output was unpleasant and was certainly not something for general usage or even headphones gaming, but this does highlight the laptop’s capabilities with the maximum cooling might thrown at our tasks.
The CPU-only load saw power budget ramp up to around 75-80W sustained. Package temperature for the Core i7-12700H was mid-90s but did just enough to stay away from the 99C throttling point in general. Clock speeds on the P-cores increased from the Balanced power profile by around 1GHz to around 3.2GHz.
This is almost identical CPU-biased behaviour that we saw on the Katana GF66 with its Core i7-12700H running in Extreme Performance Cooler Boost mode.
For gaming, we actually saw some bump up in the performance by applying the Extreme power mode with Cooler Boost fans. The combined CPU and GPU power jumped by around 10-15W up to around 160W typical.
The GPU seemed to get a similar allocation as the Balanced power profile – that is, around 120W typical for 1470MHz. But now, the Power threshold was highlighted as the GPU Boost limiting factor instead of thermals, as with Balanced and standard cooling mode. This has a net result of dropping the GPU temperature by around 17C down to 70C.
The CPU was fed with more power now that the cooling allocation had increased. Now, we saw the chip getting around 35-55W but mainly 45-55W allocated which resulted in improved clock speeds that were around the 3GHz mark. Temperatures were still lofty at low-to-mid-90s, but there wasn’t major thermal throttling.
Noise
You can see an example of our noise testing result in the video review.
Noise output for gaming usage with the Balanced power profile was fine. I didn’t have too many complaints running this laptop without headphones. And with headphones, I think the fans could even be pushed a bit faster to allow for improved temperatures whilst maintaining tolerable noise output.
SSD
The Micron 2450 SSD performance is mediocre and I’d actually want a little more from a laptop of this ilk. The SSD is PCIe Gen 4 in name only, as the performance doesn’t really push past Gen 3 speeds.
Drive cooling was fine, even with heavy, sustained write operations.
Battery
Battery life is actually pretty reasonable for this configuration of laptop. We managed around five-and-a-half hours even with the screen maintained at its 83-165Hz dynamic refresh rate. That’s really pretty good and is thanks largely to the 90Whr battery.
I’d have liked to see USB-C charging, but with decent battery life anyway, it’s perhaps less important. Oh, and the charge rate from dead was a slow 52W using the 240W power brick.
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