MSI GT627: Bringing Balance to the Force?

Application Workloads: Overclocking FTW

Wrapping things up with our performance testing, we have results from the Futuremark PCMark suites as well as some of our own application benchmarking. When it comes to running your office, multimedia, and Internet tasks, most modern laptops are more than fast enough. What follows are a few of the more strenuous application benchmarks - 3D rendering and video encoding - that put more of an emphasis on high CPU speeds. If you don't do that sort of thing on your computer, you will probably find that just about any current dual-core processor is sufficient.

PCMark Vantage and CINEBENCH have 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the test suite available, with performance typically being 10% higher in CINEBENCH and 5% higher in PCMark Vantage. We have pulled the 64-bit results out of the graphs to clean things up, and since this is a 32-bit system we won't bother reporting the 64-bit results. You can find them in our last review, if you're interested. The Alienware m15x using the integrated X3100 is once again shown in gold on the PCMark tests, where the GPU still has an impact.

Stock performance places the GT627 near the bottom of the PCMark Vantage results (though admittedly only 16% behind the Gateway P-7808u), while it does better in the PCMark05 tests. PCMark05 represents a more "typical" usage scenario for most people, while Vantage stresses the system quite a bit more. Also note that the Toshiba X305-Q725 includes an SSD, which improves performance substantially in PCMark Vantage.

In the video encoding and 3D rendering tests, the GT627 places near the middle of the pack in performance, which you would expect from the P8400 processor. Not surprisingly, for all but the most demanding users the MSI GT627 is plenty fast - in fact, if you don't play games it's probably overkill. For CPU intensive tasks, the stock clocked GT627 is 22% to 23% slower in QuickTime and DivX encoding, but a far more substantial 75% slower in x264 encoding (the second pass, which is far more time consuming) and 64% slower in multi-core CINEBENCH.

Where things get interesting is in the overclocked results, where performance scales almost linearly in some applications with the 15% overclock. It's not enough to get the GT627 past quad-core options in highly threaded workloads, but it does surpass all but the fastest dual-core laptops. The P8400 is quite possibly the perfect CPU for such a laptop, coming in at a low price of around $210 for just the CPU but matching the performance of the T9400 when overclocked, a CPU that costs about $340. The final clock speeds and heat output at the overclocked speed of ~2.6GHz also appear to be well within the cooling capabilities of the chassis, as we never experienced any instability when utilizing the Turbo mode.