A/V Encoding and Battery Life

Below you get a look at the main screen CPU-Z screenshot to give you a look at the actual specifications of the unit that we will be testing further on below.

The MSI GX470 will be run through the standard notebook/netbook test regime here at TweakTown. This includes iTunes Encoding and Media Transcoding plus Battery Eater Pro for battery life estimation. This machine will also be tested with 3DMark Vantage.

All systems are tested "as is", which means operating systems and drivers can and do vary and some come pre-installed with applications that may or may not affect performance. Any anti-virus or security applications are disabled and uninstalled before any testing is started as they can affect test numbers.

For the iTunes encoding test I take Stone Temple Pilots - Core CD album in MP3 format and encode it to AAC format using iTunes and time the results with a stopwatch.

All tests are performed with the system in High Performance mode with minimum CPU set to 100%.

The MSI GX740 takes second place in this benchmark and it is very close to the X8100 in performance that costs many times more than the MSI machine.

For the movie encoding test I take the Microsoft Magic of Flight VC-1 WMV video with six channel audio (1080p HD) and transcode it to XviD (1080p HD) with LAME MP3 two channel audio and a MP4 container using MediaCoder 0.7.3.4616 32-bit edition.

All tests are performed with the system in High Performance mode with minimum CPU set to 100%.

The MSI GX740 took fourth place on my notebook chart in movie encoding performance with a solid performance overall.

It has been a while since I had a gaming notebook on my desk for testing and had a chance to run 3DMark Vantage. This test was run on default performance presets.

Battery Eater Pro is very hard on batteries so you are likely to get more run time in the real world, depending on how you use the machine. Since we compare all laptops and netbooks the exact same way though, it creates a fair and balanced playing field for our comparisons.

For the power saving mode test I run the machine in 'Power Saver' mode with turn off display disabled and brightness set to 50%, sleep mode disabled, HDD turn off disabled and minimum CPU set to 5%.

For the performance mode test I run the machine in 'High Performance' mode with turn off display disabled and brightness set to 100%, sleep mode disabled, HDD turn off disabled and minimum CPU set to 100%. Do note that some systems even when set to 100% CPU may force drop down the clock speed when AC power is lost.

Wireless is kept enabled during all tests and nothing else unusual is disabled. Time is rounded up to the nearest minute.

The MSI GX740 is a gaming machine, not an ultraportable centered on run time. That said, I was surprised to see the GX740 hovering near the middle of the pack in runtime for machines I have tested considering its performance.