MSI GT77 Titan Gaming Laptop Review: Performance Supremacy
Other than applying updates (like most consumers would), we run all of our tests with out-of-the-box settings. Our goal is to test the system as it ships, but after auto-updating, to accurately reflect what buyers can expect from a retail experience.
ATTO Disk Benchmark
The ATTO disk benchmark is a fairly quick and simple test which measures read/write bandwidth and IOPS across a range of different data sizes. While we don't typically compare these results across multiple machines, it's useful to gauge whether a particular notebook's storage subsystem is up to snuff.
Our MSI GT77 Titan actually included three, 1TB Samsung NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSDs. We're only presenting one set of ATTO results, however, because all of the drives were identical and performed similarly. As you can see, reads and writes peaked at over 6GB/s and 4.6GB/s, respectively. These aren't the highest transfer rates we've seen from a PCIe 4 SSD, but they are plenty fast and will serve most users perfectly well.
Speedometer 2.0 Browser Benchmark
We use BrowserBench.org's Speedometer test to gauge our web experiences, which takes a holistic look at web application performance. This test automatically loads and runs several sample web apps from ToDoMVC.com using the most popular web development frameworks around, including React, Angular, Ember.js, and even vanilla JavaScript. This test is a better example of how systems cope with real web applications, as opposed to a pure JavaScript compute test like JetStream. All tests were performed using the latest version of Chrome.
The MSI GT77 Titan led the pack in Browserbench's Speedometer 2.0 test. That said, this benchmark is affected not only by CPU and memory performance, but the browser as well -- and browsers are updates constantly. Even still, the MSI GT77 Titan's Core i9-12900HX is the most powerful mobile processors currently on the market, so we'd expect it to finish at (and near) the top of the charts, regardless.
Cinebench R23 Rendering Benchmark
This is the latest 3D rendering benchmark from Maxon, based on the Cinema 4D R23 rendering engine. We tested both single-threaded and multi-threaded tests on all of the notebooks represented here...
The MSI GT77 Titan's 16-core / 24-thread Core i9-12900HX processor, which can boost up to 5GHz, offered the best multi-threaded score by far in Cinebench versus all of the other notebooks we tested. However, its single-threaded score, while good enough for second place, couldn't quite catch the Alienware x17 R2.
Geekbench 5 Benchmarks
Geekbench is a cross-platform benchmark that simulates real world processing workloads in image processing and particle physics scenarios. We tested the notebooks featured here in Geekbench's single and multi-core workloads. It measures single-threaded performance allowing a single core to stretch its legs, and multi-threaded throughput to put all cores under a heavy load.
Once again, we see the MSI GT77 Titan's Core i9-12900HX leading the pack. In Geekbench's single and multi-threaded test, the MSI GT77 Titan takes the pole position, out running every other notebook we've tested.
PCMark 10 Whole System Benchmarks
PCMark 10 uses a mix of real-world applications and simulated workloads to establish how well a given system performs productivity tasks, including image and video editing, web browsing, and OpenOffice document editing. While these scores appear to be all over the place, the systems are sorted by their overall PCMark score, which is the third (gray) bar in each cluster.
3DMark Graphics And GPU Tests
3DMark has several different graphics tests which focus on different types of systems. We start with Time Spy, which is 3DMark's headline benchmark. This test presents a pretty significant challenge for the system's CPU and GPU using DirectX 12's API...
With its fast CPU and GeForce RTX 3080 Ti with a 175W max GPU TDP and1,395MHz boost clock, the MSI GT77 Titan jumps to the head of the pack in our first graphics benchmark.
Next up, let's take a look at the Extreme preset for the punishing 3DMark Fire Strike test. This DirectX 11 benchmark has been around for a while, but it's still pretty challenging for notebook systems.
Once again we see the MSI GT77 Titan outgunning every other notebook we've tested. Gobs of memory and the fastest mobile GPU and CPU currently available will do that...
Lastly, the Port Royal test uses DirectX Ray Tracing (DXR) in conjunction with traditional rasterization to illuminate its scenes...
DXR hardware is a requirement for this test, so we don't have quite as many machines represented, but it doesn't matter -- the MSI GT77 Titan finished in the pole position once again.
In-Game Graphics And GPU Tests
Middle Earth: Shadow of War is a fun and and beautiful title set in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings universe. To test the game's performance relative to other systems, we set the resolution to 1920x1080 and turned the visuals up to the High preset. The frame rates here are the average reported by the built-in benchmark.
At this point, we're probably starting to sound a little repetitive, but the numbers are what they are. The Core i9-12900HX and GeForce RTX 3080 Ti powered MSI GT77 Titan outpaced all of the other notebooks we tested yet again.
The finale in the rebooted Tomb Raider trilogy, Shadow of the Tomb Raider is easily the best-looking of the bunch. It's also brimming with Tobii eye-tracking hardware support, and leading edge graphics technologies. To test this game out, we again turned the visuals up to High and tested at the Full-HD resolution of 1920x1080.
The finale in the rebooted Tomb Raider trilogy, Shadow of the Tomb Raider is easily the best-looking of the bunch. It's also brimming with Tobii eye-tracking hardware support, and leading edge graphics technologies. To test this game out, we again turned the visuals up to High and tested at the Full-HD resolution of 1920x1080.
This one was tight, but showed the MSI GT77 Titan is not unbeatable. Although the numbers fall within the margin of error for this benchmark, the Razer Blade technically snagged a victory here, squeaking out a win by a couple of FPS.
Battery Life And Power Tests
We run a custom 1080p HD video loop test developed in-house, to prove out battery life with our test group of machines. In all tests, Windows Quiet Hours / Focus Assist has been enabled and the displays are calibrated with lux meters on pure white screens to as close to 115 lux as possible. For the average laptop this is somewhere between a 40-60 percent brightness setting.
When all of the components inside the MSI GT77 Titan are getting hammered on with a gaming workload, battery life is obviously much shorter, but it ultimately lands about in the middle of the pack, relative to the other powerful gaming laptops we've tested recently. The fact is, larger form factor gaming notebooks simply require more power than less-capable machine, so it's unrealistic to expect stellar battery life when gaming untethered, unless performance is stifled with tools like Battery Boost or frame rate limiters, etc.
