Hardware Overview and System Performance

There are two components in the MSI GE62 7RD Apache that we haven't reviewed on TechSpot earlier. The first is the Intel Cadre i7-7700HQ, from the company's new Kaby Lake line. Like the Skylake Core i7-6700HQ information technology replaces, the 7700HQ is built on a 14nm process with largely the same microarchitecture as before, save for some minor additions and optimizations. While there are other H-series Kaby Lake SKUs available, the mid-table i7-7700HQ volition end up being the most popular with OEMs.

Nigh of the Cadre i7-7700HQ's specifications are identical to the Core i7-6700HQ. Both chips have iv cores and eight threads with 6 MB of L3 cache and a 45W TDP, and largely the same feature sets. However, the Core i7-7700HQ is clocked higher: information technology has a base clock of two.80 GHz with a maximum heave clock of iii.80 GHz, compared to previous clock speeds of 2.threescore and 3.50 GHz respectively. The 7700HQ also supports faster DDR4 and LPDDR3 retentiveness, and its integrated Hd 630 graphics is clocked fifty MHz college than before.

We already know that Kaby Lake'south IPC is essentially identical to Skylake, so the only performance gains experienced this generation are from higher clock speeds. Every bit such, we should run into a performance improvement of around eight percentage.

The 2d piece is the GeForce GTX 1050 in notebook form. Although like the entirety of the GeForce 10 series, it should exist almost identical to the desktop carte. The GTX 1050 essentially replaces the GTX 960M in Nvidia's line-upwardly, and should provide performance ~30 to 40 percent meliorate. Going purely on specifications, it should lucifer the GTX 965M and fall around 15 per centum slower than the GTX 970M.

The GTX 1050 for notebooks packs a cut downwardly GP107 GPU with 640 CUDA cores, 40 TMUs, and, strangely, sixteen ROPs (rather than 32 in the desktop card). The base clock is identical to its desktop counterpart at 1354 MHz, while the rated boost clock is slightly college at 1493 MHz (upwards from 1455 MHz).

On the retentivity front, the GTX 1050 supports either ii or 4 GB of GDDR5 at seven GHz on a 128-scrap omnibus, providing 112 GB/s of bandwidth. MSI offers both the two and iv GB versions in the GE62, and I take the 4 GB version in my review unit of measurement.

Other hardware in the GE62 includes up to 32 GB of RAM from two DDR4-2400 slots (my review unit of measurement came with sixteen GB), and an M.2 SSD combined with a 1 TB hard bulldoze. In my review unit, the SSD was a Toshiba THNSN5128GPU7 with 128 GB of space and an NVMe PCIe jitney.

For connectivity, there is an Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 3168 chip for Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n/ac, plus there's Bluetooth iv.2 and Killer Gigabit Ethernet. Internally there's a 51 Wh bombardment which provides not peculiarly great battery life. The unabridged system is powered by a 150W power brick, which is moderately sized merely all the same a significant item to conduct effectually should you decide to motility the GE62.

Let'south await at how the GE62 7RD Apache performs in general arrangement benchmarks.

To start with, the Cadre i7-7700HQ is clearly faster in encoding benchmarks relative to the Core i7-6700HQ. Relative to the fastest 6700HQ laptop I've reviewed, the 7700HQ was around 8 percentage faster, which matches the clock speed proceeds. However, in some cases gains were every bit much every bit 20 percent.

Interestingly, the i7-7700HQ was slower in both WinRAR pinch and MATLAB simulation workloads, which are both heavily CPU dependent. I did notice that the GE62 uses a single stick of 16 GB DDR4, then memory bandwidth is roughly half of other laptops due to the single-channel retention configuration, which may exist impacting these benchmarks.

In more general organisation benchmarks like PCMark, the i7-7700HQ provides a boost in CPU performance, leading to higher scores in the Work test; however the slower GTX 1050 led to a lower score in the Dwelling and Artistic tests, both of which hit the GPU harder than the Work exam.