Benchmarks: Vitals and Battery Life
A modest CPU temperature under load suggests that MSI's default configuration may be overly eager to throttle, and when gaming it is GPU temperature that poses a greater challenge. The chassis exhausts a lot of hot air and the area at the top of the keyboard gets quite toasty to the touch.
To our surprise, the sound meter reckons the laptop is relatively quiet when working flat out. It is idle noise that becomes more bothersome, and both MSI models in the chart suffer the same fate; they are always clearly audible.
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.
We worried about the 54Wh battery and our concerns have been realised with Katana GF66 falling well short of an eight-hour working day. Heck, forget the charger at home and you'll do well to make it to lunch.
