KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
Cooling and noise
Note: if the above images are not displaying properly, you may need to disable Ad Block as it is known to interfere with our display code.
Cooling and noise overview
In regular use the GS65 is an impressive laptop, however when you dig into the cooling performance you get a different picture as both the CPU and GPU run hot. We expect most laptops will push the CPU close to 90 degrees however the GS65 is clearly on the edge of throttling whenever it is under heavy load and can be pushed over the edge by a stress test.
The same is true of the GPU which runs at 85 degrees under load, however the fact that both GTX 1070 Max-Q and GTX 1060 GPUs in 8RF and 8RE versions operate at the same temperature was unexpected as we thought the GTX 1060 might run a bit cooler.
It is clear that MSI has chosen to run the fans in this laptop at speeds that keep the noise levels down, as opposed to Gigabyte Aero 15X which is relatively noisy. We are unclear whether the flipped motherboard design hurts internal temperatures, however our testing demonstrated that air flow on one side of the cooling system is doing something peculiar. On the left side of the laptop not much seems to happen while on the right side the fan is going like the clappers. You can clearly see in our video how exhaust airflow is operating and that it is highly asymmetric.
Battery life
Battery life overview
The 80.25Wh battery lasts just over four hours in a continuous loop of PC Mark 8 which equates to eight hours of real world usage. That is pretty impressive and while we have seen better battery life from especially good laptops we really cannot complain about those figures.
