Hardware Overview and CPU Performance

The hardware inside the MSI GS40 Phantom 6QE should be very familiar to those who read my review of the Gigabyte P34W v5. Like Gigabyte'southward xiv-inch laptop, the GS40 also comes with an Intel 'Skylake' Core i7-6700HQ processor, which is a quad-cadre, eight-thread part clocked at two.half-dozen GHz with Turbo Boost up to 3.v GHz. Information technology has 6MB of L3 enshroud, it's built on a 14nm process, and information technology comes with a 45W TDP.

On the GPU side, the GS40 Phantom sports an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M, which is a 28nm Maxwell GM204 part with a 75W TDP. Raw performance from this GPU is like to a desktop GTX 960, with the 970M packing 1280 CUDA cores, 80 TMUs, 48 ROPs, and a clock speed of 924 MHz that boosts to at least 933 MHz. On this laptop, the GTX 970M is equipped with 3 GB of GDDR5 retention at 5,012 MHz on a 256-fleck autobus, providing 120 GB/s of bandwidth.

Equally for other hardware, the GS40 Phantom gets 16 GB of DDR4 retention, which is perfect in size for this sort of laptop. Storage is split between a 128 GB Toshiba SSD and a one TB hard bulldoze. For networking, you lot become Killer Gigabit LAN as well equally Killer Wi-Fi 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.ane. There'south also an ESS Sabre HiFi sound DAC, which supports 24-bit/192kHz sampling.

Aside from some of the included extras, like the Killer networking and Sabre DAC, the GS40 Phantom includes a fairly typical gaming laptop setup. Let's run into how it performs.

The Core i7-6700HQ in the GS40 performs every bit expected. In PCMark 8, the laptop exceeds expectations in the Home and Work tests, falling slightly behind in the Creative workload. Compression results in WinRAR are as expected, and memory bandwidth from the xvi GB of DDR4 is neat for a laptop.

In the two encoding benchmarks in our suite, the GS40 falls marginally behind the Gigabyte P34W v5, merely it's not past a hugely significant margin. I suspect this due to a slightly dissimilar thermal profile, which affects when the CPU is allowed to Turbo Boost. In general, the GS40 runs quieter than the P34W v5 during CPU-only workloads, which I'd adopt over slightly ameliorate operation.