MSI GX 60 mit 7970

[m3n00b]

This reminds me of when I bought my old current 6860FX. Top tier graphics with a weak CPU for $1100. It's lasted almost 5 years though so I can't complain too much.

[rmacgowa]

Man there are way too many split up forum posts on the GX60. Did some digging in the AMD fusion thread and found a link :

AMD Trinity A10-4600M Laptop APU Review - Piledriver Arrives - Piledriver Cores, Turbo Core 3.0 & GPU-Z Shots - Legit Reviews

Looks like my theory is completely out the window.

The voltages are insanely low for the CPU speeds shown. 2.7GHz @ 0.8V and 3.2GHz @ 1.025V . This leaves a LOT of potential headroom for overclocking. If you look at the picture with HWINFO running, it states that the maximum effective voltage that can be applied on the CPU is 1.2875V.

Also another BIG note, if you read the small print it says that during most benchmarks the system was running at 2.7GHz, and was using 3.2ghz for "some" single threaded applications. So it looks like the effective multicore turbo is locked to 2.7GHz.

[R3d]

Yeah it's pretty much the same as Bulldozer. There's a max turbo and an intermediate one halfway between the base and max speeds. As with llano, the limiting factor probably wont be voltage or stability, but heat. Ths MSI has pretty good cooling though (judging from the GT60), so I think there is a lot of potential there.

I did some calculations and at 4.0ghz, Trinity should have the same single threaded perf as an i5-2410m and multithreaded perf somewhere between the i5 and an i7-2630qm. Still not enough to guarantee that the 7970m wont be bottlenecked imo, but if Trinity can reach those speeds then perf should be significantly more competetive with Intel based notebooks. Still, I think that a 7870m would have been a better choice for this notebook.

[rmacgowa]

Personally I would rather if they had an option that got rid of super raid, and had backlit keyboard + dynaudio.

SSD performance scales with capacity , and with RAID you lose TRIM , and according to some articles the scalability of RAID-0 SSDs in real world performance is low to marginal at best.

Read this article for more info : RAID 0 of SSDs: Two Kingston HyperX 120 GB SSDs vs. Kingston HyperX 240 GB SSD - X-bit labs

[Forge]

Your results do show that a 4600m has the potential to bottleneck the 7970m badly (roughly -25% it looks like, using your 2310 as a yardstick).

[layjohn]

So I learned that the A10 APU can't hybrid cross fire with the 7970M, due to the architecture? But can we see hope of this happening tho? Like from newer driver and such, can someone explain how this would work thanks

[Meaker]

No, as much change as crossfiring an Nvidia card and an AMD card.

They use totally different drivers, compilers, etc, etc, etc.

[rmacgowa]

Well correct me if I am wrong, but wouldn't a 25% pure cpu bottleneck be corrected by a 25% cpu overclock? So in this case 3.4ghz across 4 cores and 4GHz for a single threaded app.

There has been talk in the Llano forums that some kind of 7660 performance crossfire , see this post by seeratlas: *HP dv6z AMD Llano (6XXX series) Owners Lounge*

[Meaker]

Assuming perfect scaling you would need a 33.3% overclock.

0.75 x 1.33 is roughly 1.

[rmacgowa]

Wow, I really didn't think that one through, thanks lol.

Looking at bulldozer overclock scaling (probably the best indicator I can think of), going from a base clock of 3.6ghz, with turbo of 4.2 to an overclock of 4.9ghz resulted in a 33% performance increase in cinebench.

For llano, a 24% overclock resulted in a 29-34% fps/benchmark increase.

That seems like pretty good scaling, I really wish someone would buy one of those HP Trinity laptops already so we can dig into those piledriver cores.