Maingear Pulse 15 3K Gaming Laptop Review
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Though PCMark 7 puts quite a bit of emphasis on the storage setup, the use of two 128GB SSDs in RAID 0 wasn't enough to propel the Pulse 15 into the top spot, though it wasn't far behind, either. MSI's system took pole position with a slightly faster processor and GPU combination. This tells us that both systems should perform about the same in daily computing chores, with MSI's significantly heavier, bulkier rig being a little quicker in content creation and graphics tasks and the Pulse 15 having the advantage in anything that requires large file transfers.
Futuremark recently launched PCMark 8, which has several built-in benchmark tests. The Home test measures a system's ability to handle basic tasks such as web browsing, writing, gaming, photo editing, and video chat. The Creative test offers similar types of tasks, but has more demanding requirements than the Home benchmark and is meant for mid-range and higher-end PCs. The Work test measures the performance of typical office PC systems that lack media capabilities. Finally, the Storage benchmark tests the performance of SSDs, HDDs and hybrid drives with traces recorded from Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office and a selection of popular games.
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Futuremark recently launched PCMark 8, which has several built-in benchmark tests. The Home test measures a system's ability to handle basic tasks such as web browsing, writing, gaming, photo editing, and video chat. The Creative test offers similar types of tasks, but has more demanding requirements than the Home benchmark and is meant for mid-range and higher-end PCs. The Work test measures the performance of typical office PC systems that lack media capabilities. Finally, the Storage benchmark tests the performance of SSDs, HDDs and hybrid drives with traces recorded from Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office and a selection of popular games.
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PCMark 8 offers a bit more balanced determination of performance, though it comes at the expense of breaking up the benchmark into several tests. The one we ran is the Work benchmark in Accelerated, which uses OpenCL to improve performance.
At this point, we don't have a large (or even small) collection of PCMark 8 scores from gaming laptops. We'll continue to post results like this until we have enough to plot on a graph for comparison, though in the meantime, we can tell you that based on our experience running this test on a number of systems -- both desktops and laptops -- this is a solid score. If you're comparing at home, we also ran the Conventional option, which doesn't use OpenCL, and scored 3,091 with the Pulse 15.
Converting this benchmark into real world data, we can look at the video chat performance and other metrics to determine that the Pulse 15 shouldn't break a sweat with work chores like video conferencing or multitasking with various productivity worksheets.
At this point, we don't have a large (or even small) collection of PCMark 8 scores from gaming laptops. We'll continue to post results like this until we have enough to plot on a graph for comparison, though in the meantime, we can tell you that based on our experience running this test on a number of systems -- both desktops and laptops -- this is a solid score. If you're comparing at home, we also ran the Conventional option, which doesn't use OpenCL, and scored 3,091 with the Pulse 15.
Converting this benchmark into real world data, we can look at the video chat performance and other metrics to determine that the Pulse 15 shouldn't break a sweat with work chores like video conferencing or multitasking with various productivity worksheets.
