MSI GT76 Titan DT 9SG Laptop Review – the 5GHz laptop

1. Introduction2. CPU/GPU Performance3. Thermals, Noise, Battery, Power4. Closing Thoughts5. View All Pages

Temperature testing

Starting with CPU temperature testing, as we mentioned on the previous page the 9900K can maintain 5GHz across all cores when gaming, and the CPU peaked at 87C during a 30-minute Battlefield V gaming session. Once artificially stressed to 100% with AIDA64, the CPU could not maintain that frequency for long – it hit 99C and thermal throttled within fifteen seconds – two cores fell back to 4.4GHz, with the other six sitting at 4.6-4.7GHz.

The GPU hit 87C during both gaming and 3DMark workloads, though the clock speed did settle a little higher in Battlefield V versus repeated runs of 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra. Both frequencies were still well above the base clock of 1575MHz, though, so no signs of thermal throttling there.

Noise

Despite the immense cooling hardware MSI has used, the fans still have to get incredibly loud to cool these components when the system is under load. I would go as far to say that this is the loudest laptop I have ever heard. Clearly that is not a good thing, but I can't help but feel you know what you are getting into if you want to buy a laptop with a desktop i9-9900K. It's just not going to be a quiet machine.

Battery

In a similar vein, battery life is as weak as we would expect. We did squeeze an extra twenty minutes from the 90Wh cell by using the ‘ECO' profile versus ‘Comfort', but realistically speaking you are almost always going to have this connected to mains power.

Power

Speaking of power, the GT76 requires two 330W power bricks and that is certainly for good reason – with 100% load on both CPU and GPU, we saw power draw peak at 418W, and while gaming this was closer to 390W. This is serious stuff for a laptop, but again we come back to the fact that this is running a desktop i9-9900K and RTX 2080. It was never going to get by on a 150W power adapter.

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