Benchmarks: Vitals and Battery Life
We alluded to fan noise earlier in the review and, frankly, there's a lot of it. MSI's dual-fan configuration is always audible and when the going gets tough, it is frustratingly loud to the extent that you can hear it clearly in adjacent rooms.
We use a pair of PCMark 10 benchmarks to gauge battery life; Modern Office, which intermittently uses the writing, web browsing and video conferencing workloads from the main PCMark 10 benchmark; and Gaming, which uses the common Fire Strike test to stress the GPU until the battery is drained.
In order to make the results comparable between laptops, each system is configured with a purpose-built power plan, wireless radios disabled, and screen brightness set as close to 200 nits as possible using a calibration device.
Sub-five-hour battery life is a poor return in this day and age, and the results on this page make you wonder about the industry's insistence on making everything as thin as possible. Heck, I'd probably prefer an GF65 Thick if it meant a cooler chassis, lower noise and improved longevity.
