MSI GT680 Sandy Bridge Gaming Laptop Review

As we do with all systems, we'll run the GT680R through a number of benchmarks to get a better feel for how it stacks up to other systems on the market. We began our benchmark testing with Futuremark's PCMark Vantage benchmark as well as 3DMark 11.

Futuremark’s PCMark Vantage runs through a host of different usage scenarios to simulate different types of workloads including HD TV and movie playback and video manipulation, gaming, image editing and manipulation, music compression, communications, and productivity.  Most of the tests are multi-threaded, making this test a good indicator of all-around performance.

The MSI GT680R performed very well in this test, outperforming all of our comparison systems. MSI also offers a variant of the GT680R that has a 120GB SSD and a 500GB HDD (our test system was configured with a pair of 500GB, 7200RPM drives in RAID 0). We would expect the SSD version of this system to perform even better in the Vantage tests.  

Futuremark's latest version of 3DMark is dubbed 3DMark 11 (in reference to its level of DirectX support). The latest version of this benchmark includes a fresh set of tests and a game demo sequence. It also measures CPU performance differently than its predecessor, 3DMark Vantage.

The GT680R came in behind the Eurocom Panther 2.0 with various GPUs installed, but it still produced respectable scores overall. As you'll notice, the MSI GT680R wasn't too far behind the Eurocom with a GeForce 470M.