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GT72 refreshed with GTX 900M graphics

Saw the launch of one of the biggest leaps in mobile graphics we’ve seen in a long time. We’re talking of course about the NVIDIA GTX 900M series, which consists of the GTX 970M and the 980M. These come in distinctly different flavors, but they’re both extremely high-performing, while using less power than the previous generation.

If you want the best, the GTX 980M is your choice. A GT72 with the GTX 980M scores over 11000 points at stock frequencies in 3DMark 11 (with NVIDIA 344.00 drivers), whereas the GTX 970M outperforms the previous generation’s high-end offering GTX 880M in the same benchmark by scoring about 9200 points.

MSI Notebook Product Guide October 2014 is out now!

[NEW!] MSI Notebook Product Guide Booklet

GTX 980M overclocking

The GTX 980M is extremely high performing out of the box already, but there is always more to gain if you’re brave enough. That’s right, today we will be overclocking a little bit.

Before doing this yourself, you should know that the drivers limit how high you can actually set your GPU frequency. Being a mobile GPU, you won’t have to worry about fan profiles or voltages though, as these are simply not adjustable – all you need to worry about is clock frequencies. No power limits, no fan profiles.



Test system:
MSI GT72
Intel Core i7-4700HQ
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M 8GB
16GB DDR3-1600

First off, the stock base runs in 3DMark Fire Strike, 3DMark 11:




The 980M-equipped GT72 scores a cool 8207p in Fire Strike and over 11000 in 3DMark 11 on the performance preset – figures that even the high-end offerings on the desktop side just recently can’t match. For example, the same system with a GTX 580 wouldn’t reach these scores.

Never mind though – we were supposed to try out overclocking, so with Afterburner 4.0, we set core frequency as high as it would go (+135MHz or 1173MHz/1262MHz Boost on GPU and 6212MHz on the memory). The GPU had no problem with this frequency, while higher memory frequencies would crash. The results are even further improved performance, with little increase in graphics card temperature – the Fire Strike score increases from 8207 to 9107 points, a 10.97% increase in performance with no effort to speak of.




The 3DMark 11 scores also yield a nice boost of a bit over 600 points, or 5.55% at the same frequencies.

There is almost always free performance to gain from overclocking – just make sure your cooling is up for the job. In the GT72, these bumps in frequency doesn’t load the cooling too much, so they work for pretty much every day use.

GT72 Thermal Performance

Hey all,

I’ve read a bit about people being curious about the 980M and how hot it runs, so I decided to try it out on my GT72. While I was at it, I thought I should give the Cooler Boost feature a go at the same time…



What I did was to run a looping benchmark (Resident Evil 6) for about 15 minutes, and let Afterburner run in the background, logging temperatures, recording the maximum. I did also crank up the core frequency by a full 135MHz, resulting in a peak boost frequency of 1261MHz on the GPU. The memory was clocked at 5800MHz.



First up was the standard fan profile, the GT72 out of the box, if you will. I wish I had a decent way of giving you noise levels as well, but to me, there is obviously noise from the cooling, but it isn’t bad at all. You can easily game without headphones on and not be disturbed by the noise levels. Also, the temperatures stay at a relatively (for notebooks) low 80°C.



After that, I did the same run, but with Cooler Boost activated instead. The exact same overclock, benchmark and once more over 15 minutes in RE6. The result is a louder machine as the notebook’s fans spins up to max, but honestly, I found the noise levels non-intrusive for gaming with a headset on. A lot quieter than the GT70, for example.

This feature drops the temperatures from the already quite low 80°C peak with a full 6°C to only 74°C, with a full 135MHz GPU overclock. Sure, you won’t want to run with the Cooler Boost activated all day, but for those toasty LAN parties, where you sit around with a headset anyway, I can see the point.

Tests were conducted with a 22°C ambient temperature in the Resident Evil 6 benchmark at 1080P, high settings for 15 minutes.

Power saving in MSI Notebooks?

MSI has developed a feature called SHIFT for the GT72. Even though the GT72 barely doesn’t run particularly hot, you might come across some scenarios where you might approach the thermal limits of the hardware, such as gaming outside or in offices without air conditioning in hot countries. Maybe you just don’t need all that performance, and want to limit the heat output, for comfort reasons? You can make sure you’ll stay inside thermal limits, both your own as well as the system’s with a simple key combo, completely independent of your operating system’s power profiles.



In short, you have three modes to choose from, when running on AC power:
Sport Mode: Overclocking of both CPU and GPU. Also activates Cooler Boost
Comfort Mode: CPU turbo is enabled, but GPU frequency is prohibited from ramping up into boost frequencies.
Green Mode: CPU turbo disabled, lower frequencies/voltage on both CPU and GPU. Lower revving fans.

The switch between SHIFT profiles is simple, done by pressing the Fn + F7 key combo, or via Dragon Gaming Center. As you’d expect, Sport Mode delivers the maximum potential of the hardware and the highest scores, while Comfort and Green Mode are a bit slower, but lowers the temperatures by a lot. Below, you can see the performance difference between the different profiles in 3DMark Fire Strike on the GT72.



There largest gains are in GPU temperatures though – by changing from Sport to Green Mode, you’ll see an 11°C drop in temperature and a full 14°C drop in CPU temperature.





SHIFT, therefore, is a handy tool which helps you control power consumption and thereby heat output. If you don’t need all the power, for example during lighter game loads, why not make sure the system runs quieter and cooler?

SHIFT is available on NVIDIA GTX 900M-series equipped GS60/70 as well as the GT72.

GS60 vs. GT72 – Performance to weight ratio

We’ve done a couple of articles on the monstruous NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M graphics card, since we’ve been fiddling around with a GT72 quite a lot lately. However, as strange as it may sound, we (us writing these articles) haven’t actually had any access to samples with the equally impressive, but better-value-for-money GTX 970M. Until now.

We got hold of a GS60, which as you probably know is a slim machine at only 19.9mm thick. Due to some clever engineering, we can run a GTX 970M in it without any problems, and since it also uses the same CPU as the GT72 we previously used for performance tests, we can compare them side by side. You can probably see where this is going… Yes, it’s obviously going to be about 3D benchmark performance, GS60 vs. GT72. GTX 970M vs. 980M. Finesse vs. Bulk.

In any case, below are the specs of the two machines. The benchmarks used are 3DMark 11 and 3DMark Firestrike, as these put graphics performance to the test.



Starting off with Firestrike, we notice that the GTX 970M in the GS60 will go as far as the drivers will allow us: 135MHz above stock levels: a GPU frequency of 1059MHz and boost at 1173MHz. Obviously, the 970M is down on shaders compared to the 980M as well, but it also won’t overclock as high. The 980M in the GT72 reaches 1173MHz GPU with a boost frequency of 1262MHz, while its memory also overclocks better, to over 6GHz. The GS60 and 970M falls some 80MHz short of the 6GHz mark.



At stock frequencies, we hit over 9200 points in 3DMark 11, with the GS60 and 970M, wheras the GT72 with its 980M clears 11000. With overclocking, the 970M comes close to the 10k mark, which no doubt would have fallen with higher frequencies if it hadn’t been for the driver limitations.



Moving on to Fire Strike, we see a similar picture. The 980M is comfortably clear of the 970M, but the 970M still offers impressive performance for a mobile chip. Over 6500 points in Fire Strike, and an additional comfortably achieved 800 points with overclocking.



Not enough to touch the 980M in the GT72, but there’s more… Remember us bringing up weight in the spec tables? You bet, we’ve come up with another graph with more stats for you folks:



The GS models were designed for people on the go who still want to do some serious gaming every now and then, while the GT series is more performance focused. This is what we want to highlight with the graph above: the performance/weight ratio in the GS60 is probably among the highest in notebooks everywhere right now.

GS60 – Thermal Performance

During our previous overclocking tests of the GS60 we discovered that it comes with a nice performance to weight ratio, but we were also slightly surprised by the fact that the computer had no trouble supporting quite serious overclocking of the graphics card either.

Logic dictates that the slimmer a notebook is, the harder it is to fit large cooling solutions – that’s why we can cool the 980M and any mobile CPU in the GT72 with ease, while keeping it quiet. The GS60 though, is under 20mm thick including screen, meaning that space for cooling is critical.

The obvious way is to throw in a couple of fans with massive RPMs, but that would be extremely noisy. Another way would be to make the system thicker to allow more space for the cooling fins, allowing for a larger convection area helping you exhaust the heat, which of course makes the system bigger, heavier and less mobile. Instead, we’ve worked with the space available and managed to create a system that stays surprisingly cool even under full load.

Yes, we’ll have to admit – it’s not whisper quiet, but nowhere near as bad as you might imagine by looking at how slim the GS60 is. All things considered, we believe it is at a sweet spot where it stays quiet for everyday use, while making itself known during gaming, which is when you have a headset on anyway, right?

We’re always partial to a benchmark, so we set about finding how hard we can push the GS60’s thermal solution… In doing so, we got nowhere near the limits of the GTX 970M, despite a 20 minute loop of game test 4 in 3DMark 11, meaning constant 100% load on the GPU. In 22°C room temperature, we maxed out at 85°C on the GPU, despite overclocking it to the max, thus creating extra ”excess” heat.



Of course the system was audible, but even when set in an office landscape with people working all around during the benchmarks, nobody as much as lifted an eyebrow.

In case you’re worried about the cooling of the GS60, you shouldn’t be, it leaves plenty of headroom for the processors.

Dragon Gaming Center – an introduction

Dragon Gaming Center is a nifty tool to set a bunch of settings that are available on the G series MSI Notebooks. The idea with this article is to break down the settings and explain them.

The first thing that meets you when you launch the Dragon Gaming Center is the System Monitor screen:



It does pretty much what the name says – it gives you system parameters in real-time, such CPU load, RAM use, battery status, etc. You can also switch SHIFT profiles and monitor your temperatures and network usage.



Screen 2 is the Utility screen – from here, you can launch applications, with the ones you see in the screenshot are preset. In addition to these, you can add your own applications.



Instant Play comes with four tabs – the first one is ”Instant Play”. Here you can assign the P1 key shortcut to launch a specific application or game.




Tab 2 is Display & Audio, where you can adjust speaker volume and microphone levels, as well as display brightness and gamma.



Tab 3 is Mouse – you can set pointer speed, double-click speed and scrolling properties.



The last Instant Play tab is Resource Release where you can choose which applications will be automatically closed when you launch your preset game with the P1 key combo.



Lastly, Device Setting comes with the possibility to turn on/off the Windows key on the keyboard, and enabling/disabling the high performance profile. Finally, you can once more choose SHIFT modes.

GT72 Cooling layout

The GT72 comes with a much improved dual-fan cooling solution compared to its predecessors. Thanks to advanced thermal engineering and features such as the thermal bridge (the heatpipe connecting the CPU cooling block to the VGA exhaust fins), the GT72 has a world-class cooling system. Anyone can keep a system cool by blasting the fans on max RPM, but the dual-fan Cooler Boost 3 solution also manages to keep the revs and thereby the noise levels down.



As we already touched on a couple of weeks ago, we know that the temperatures never reach above 80°C, even with a grossly overclocked GTX 980M – the Cooler Boost 3 design you see above is the reason for this.

Graphics card memory – how much is enough?

How much memory do you really need? With the introduction of the GTX 900 series graphics from NVIDIA, we’ve seen a leap in two things: performance, and especially on the mobile graphics side, memory size. Simply put, the higher your resolution is, the more memory you’re going to need in addition to high raw processing power. But how much?


For example, Futuremark recently updated its latest 3DMark to support 4K benchmarking. Trying to run this benchmark on any graphics card with what is now the de facto standard amount of graphics card memory, 2GB, will give you a really hard time with the FPS figures generally below 2 (yes, two) FPS in Game Test 2, whereas 3GB will be barely enough to get you by.



This is with 4K (3840x2160) of course, and just one benchmark, but it gives you an indication of where things are heading. That’s why we’ve chosen to equip our GTX 970M and 980M graphics cards with double the amount you’d expect – future proofing, and for high-res external monitors.

A real-world example on the subject was written up by Swedish media NordicHardware on Nov 7th. During its testing of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, they discovered that the game, even with a perfectly normal 1080P (1920x1080) resolution, would use all graphics memory at its disposal, all 6GB of the NVIDIA GeForce Titan Black.



Other games are going in the same direction as well. Games such as Shadow of Mordor also require a whole lot of VRAM, also eclipsing the 4GB barrier with 1080P resolution (tests once more courtesy of NordicHardware):



With even regular games, 2GB of VRAM is barely enough right now, and is simply not going to be enough in a future that is closer than you might think. The high-resolution revolution is closing in fast, do you have enough graphics memory?