General Performance and 3DMarks
Here are the remaining application benchmarks, most of which remove the storage subsystem from the equation.
PCMark Vantage echoes what we’ve shown with PCMark 7 above, so we’ll just refer to the commentary we’ve already made. The remaining tests mostly focus on pure CPU performance, so all of the i7-2630QM notebooks fall in a tight cluster. The only systems that consistently come out ahead are those with faster Sandy Bridge CPUs, or the hex-core Clevo X7200.
Turning to 3DMark, we’ve dropped the 03 and 05 versions from our benchmark list, added 3DMark 11, and for higher end notebooks like these we are including 3DMark Vantage’s Performance preset. In all four tests, the performance falls out just as you would expect, with the GTX 460M notebooks all close together. MSI’s GT680R shows us two other interesting pieces of information. First, the latest 270 series NVIDIA drivers appear to have helped 3DMark performance slightly, bumping performance up a few percent. (I can’t say for sure whether I used Turbo on the original MSI GT680R when testing 3DMark performance, so it’s possible much of the increase in performance comes from that.) That already gets into the second point: the slight 5% GPU core overclock does show up in 3DMark; it’s not a major improvement, but it’s free so there’s no harm in including it. The same slight boost in performance generally carries over to gaming as well, which we’ll look at next.
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