Review MSI GF65 10UE Notebook

Review MSI GF65 10UE Notebook.A new gaming laptop that can handle any games.

In 2021, video cards are almost entirely bought up by miners, so the choice among gamers has been reduced to consoles, pre-assembled computers and laptops. And even then, new models of consoles are still in short supply, the price tag for many computers in the assembly is clearly overstated, so the market for gaming laptops remains, perhaps, the fairest. We got the MSI GF65 10UE, a laptop with a powerful Intel® Core ™ i7-10750H processor and the latest NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card. Should you upgrade?

Review MSI GF65 10UE Notebook

Externally, the GF65 is made quite traditionally for gaming laptops of 2020-21. Classic black color, a corporate logo on the lid and a minimum of “gamer” elements – you can play with this and work in the office. Pleased with the size: Of all the 15-inch gaming laptops we tested, the GF65 turned out to be the most compact.

The cooling system is typical for gaming laptops of this class – cold air is drawn in from the bottom, warm air comes out from the back and on the left side. During the game, the panel on top of the keyboard heats up to a noticeable temperature, but it does not interfere with playing – the temperature on the WASD keys is already comfortable. Sure, it would have been great to have an additional exhaust between the keyboard and screen, as in the recent HP OMEN 15, but then the designers probably had to sacrifice something else – for example, compactness.

The sound from Nahimic is not bad, you can watch, play and watch movies and TV shows with these speakers, but separate speakers or headphones are still preferable, although for the sake of positioning in games.

The screen left an ambivalent feeling. On the one hand, it is almost perfect for gaming – we have an IPS panel with an ideal contrast ratio of 1000: 1, low lag and a matte finish that does not reflect ambient light into the eyes. On the other hand, it covers only 65% ​​of the standard sRGB color space and is bluish enough without calibration. Calibration can help deal with the blue cast, but colors are still washed out and desaturated. This is very strange because the rest of the panel is excellent and the matte finish shows that MSI is thinking about how its laptops are used. Hopefully this is a display controller bug that will be patched in software with an update.

The ports on the GF65 are intriguing – HDMI on one side, two USB 3 Type A, two USB Type-C, a headphone / microphone combo, and an RJ-45 network cable on the other. The GF65 is clearly made for games and for gaming peripherals, which are increasingly using the USB Type-C interface.

Gaming performance

MSI GF65 10UE is one of the most powerful laptops that you can buy for 125-130 thousand. It is built on the basis of the Intel Core i7-10750H processor (there are also variants on the Intel Core i5 – the price for them starts at 100 thousand) – this is a 10th generation Intel Core mobile processor, in which the company has done everything to squeeze out high performance. 6 cores, 12 threads, frequency up to 5 GHz in Turbo mode, smart overclocking technologies – all this allowed to raise performance up to 15% in comparison with the predecessor Intel Core i7-9750H.

16 gigabytes of memory and a fast SSD (it’s a pity that only 512 GB) are quite standard for a laptop of this class, but this is the first time we come across an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card for laptops. It is based on the new NVIDIA Ampere architecture and supports the entire gentleman’s suite of laptop graphics technologies – DLSS, Dynamic Boost 2.0, Whisper Mode 2.0 and, for the first time in laptops, Resizable BAR. Dynamic Boost is simply an automatic overclocking of a video card if there is a headroom for cooling and power supply. Resizable BAR allows the processor to work with both RAM and fast graphics card memory. This is a new technology and officially NVIDIA claims a performance increase of 5% on average. We plan to study the Resizable BAR in detail in the near future.

We talk about DLSS a lot and often in our technical articles. This technology allows games to be rendered at a lower resolution, which is then upscaled using machine learning. The resulting picture hardly suffers in quality, but the load on the hardware drops significantly. And for laptops this is somewhat even more important than for desktop PCs – after all, not only the frame rate and / or resolution grows here, but, for example, the cooling system works in a more gentle mode, without burning your knees.

Whisper Mode 2.0 is relevant in cases when you want to play, but there is someone else in the room who loves silence. When activated in GeForce Experience, the feature takes control of the cooling system and also automatically changes the graphics settings of the games so that the laptop does not sound like a vacuum cleaner.

As usual, we start our performance test with the synthetic 3DMark benchmark. It does not give real indicators of performance in games, because all games and situations are different, but it allows you to assess the overall potential of the hardware.

According to 3DMark, the GF65 turned out to be the fastest laptop, beating even the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q by a small margin. Let’s see how he will now show himself in real games.

Game settings:

• Counter-Strike Global Offensive: 1080p, Very High
• Rainbow Six Siege: 1080p, Very High, 50% resolution
• For Honor: 1080p, High
• Far Cry 5: 1080p, High
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider: 1080p, High, RTX OFF, 75% resolution or DLSS
• Assassin’s Creed Odyssey: 1080p, High, 70% resolution
• Gears 5: 1080p, High
• Red Dead Redemption 2: 1080p, Quality present 8
• Wolfenstein Youngblood: 1080p, Uber, 75% resolution or DLSS Quality
• Doom Eternal: 1080p, Ultra Nightmare
• Watch Dogs Legion: 1080p, High, 75% Resolution or DLSS Quality

The main rival was last year’s Dell G5 5500 – it has the same processor, but the previous generation video card, albeit of a higher class (NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070). Let’s see how the novelty handles.

The lag of the MSI GF65 over the Dell G5 5500 in a number of games may seem like a surprise. The analysis of frame times showed that in the GF65 the processor simply does not have time to supply the video card with new data. But in both cases we are dealing with Intel Core i7-10750H. This is probably a matter of cooling, which in the GF65 is designed in such a way that it often limits the maximum processor performance per core. But in games optimized for multithreading, the MSI GF65 straightens its shoulders – the processor is loaded much more optimally here and the combination of Intel Core i7-10750H and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 shows itself in all its glory. Wolfenstein Youngblood, for example, had an impressive 61% lead!

Designing gaming laptops, especially in a 15-inch case, is always a difficult balance to find that will suit the maximum customer base. Yes, the cooling of the Dell G5 5500 reveals the processor better in some situations, but the laptop also weighs almost a pound more and is larger in size. Plus, now the developers are more and more carefully optimizing their games for multithreading, so the safety margin of the GF65 is noticeably greater in any case.

If you approach from the position of a person who just wants to play here and now, then the GF65 does an excellent job with all gaming tasks. In the games we tested, except for Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Watch Dogs Legion (we’ll talk about the latter later), the frame rate turned out to be above 60 FPS. The GE65 was the first laptop we tested in Red Dead Redemption 2, and the result exceeded expectations with an incredibly demanding game at 62 frames per second. Well, in e-sports projects we got from 170 FPS and above at all – which means that the 144 Hz display will be used to its fullest.

You can also play on battery power, albeit for a short time – at best, about an hour. In the case of Watch Dogs Legion, to our giant surprise, the game ran even faster than the network. Most likely it’s about undervolting – when running on battery power, the processor automatically lowers its voltage, which in the case of the Legion gives more performance. This opens up space for those who love fine tuning – it is possible that a well-done undervolting will allow you to squeeze out the best results from the GF65 when working on the network.

Performance in production applications

In 2021, almost every second gamer tries himself in streaming, video creation, computer graphics and other content creation. Therefore, we also check all gaming laptops in professional software – especially since the capabilities of the latest Intel processors and NVIDIA video cards allow you to work in it without any problems.

DaVinci Resolve 16

One of the most popular video editing, color grading and grading software from the Australian company Blackmagic is actively using hardware acceleration using video cards. However, Resolve is very demanding on video memory, and in the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 for laptops it is half as much as the desktop version. Of course, this applies to all laptop video cards – you can mount it on laptops, but it is better to seriously engage in painting video and effects on a stationary computer.

V-ray

The professional V-ray rendering engine works in almost all popular 3D scene modeling programs, including Nuke composition software, Houdini visual programming environment and Unreal Engine. It supports rendering with CUDA and RTX. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 in conjunction with an Intel Core i7-10750H processor copes with V-ray better than previous generations of video cards, but inferior to the older 30-series models. A new chip in the Ampere architecture allows RTX 30-series graphics cards to use integer (int) blocks as floating point (FP) blocks, which NVIDIA calls CUDA cores. Unlike games, V-ray requires only FP from the video card, which allows you to use the card almost entirely.

OctaneBench 2020.1.5

One of the most popular rendering engines for creating 3D scenes, Octane uses CUDA exclusively. The latest versions support additional RTX acceleration, so newer graphics cards run much faster than older ones. This is especially noticeable in the RTX 30-series, with its double the number of CUDA cores, which allows the RTX 3060 Laptop to compare with the most powerful graphics card of the previous generation, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q.

Blender 2.91.2

Blender is one of the most popular 3D rendering and special effects software. It supports CPU rendering, OpenCL, CUDA, and even OptiX, an NVIDIA hardware / software interface that allows the program to use RT cores for high quality renders.

Cinebench R23

Originally conceived as a performance testing tool in the Maxon Cinema 4D 3D renderer, Cinebench is now being used as a tool to get raw single-core and multi-core CPU performance and raw computing power.

Coming back to the question at the beginning of this article, is it worth upgrading to the MSI GF65 10UE? If you have last year’s laptop with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 or 2070, then perhaps not. If you managed to jump into the last carriage and assemble a PC with a GeForce RTX 20 or 30 series – of course, not worth it either.

In all other cases, the GF65 looks like an interesting choice. This is a powerful laptop that will be enough not only for all modern games, but also for those coming out in the next few years. A price under 130 thousand would have recently looked biting, but now there is a natural mess on the market – and for a desktop RTX 3060 you can easily be asked for 80 thousand rubles. As a result, a PC with such a video card will turn out to be even more expensive, and in the case of the GF65, we still get an excellent display, as well as mobility – the ability to play from anywhere is important for many.