Looking at the specs, this laptop should obliterate the back to school MSI CX640 editions results. We start off with the usual bunch of synthetic tests and end with the more important game results.

Synthetic Tests :

In Superpi there's a small improvement to be noticed, this due to the higher turbo speeds of the 2630QM CPU . But since this test is single threaded we always opt to include the Wprime test. Loading all cores (inclusive the hyperthreaded ones) we see that the 32 test completes almost twice as fast as the i5 2410 CPU of the Acer laptop. The calculating power of this quadcore I7 CPU is amasing.

Time to stress even more.  Even though the Superpi 32M test is only single threaded and both the 2630QM of the MSI 780GT and i5 2410 CPU of the Acer laptop should be running at 2900mhz, we still see a nice advantage for the 780R. The big amount of ram ( 8 vs 4gb) running at command rate 1, could explain the pi 32M result.

Wprime 1024 is completed at 308 secs, thanks to the 4 cores and 8 hyperthreaded ones. The 2410M has to settle with 4 cores and 4 Hyperthreaded ones and is almost twice as slow. The CX640 is powered by a turboless I3 2310CPU running at a mere 2.1Ghz. The dual core doesn't stand a chance.

Cinebench Release 10 64bit is also an application that can be run to test either the single threaded or multi core performance of your CPU. We see similar results as with the above tests. The MSI still edging the I5 2410M CPU with one core tested. Once we opt for the multi core test it just is lightyears ahead of the other two CPUs.

Even though this laptop is designed by and for gamers it is always nice to see how it fares in daily applications like wordprocessing, Video compression, etc. Futuremarks PCMark05 sheds a light on these different aspects. The total score of the MSI is boosted nicely by the presence of a strong dedicated GTX560M GPU, a huge amount of ram and the I7 Quad core CPU. And finally don't forget the Hard drives in RAID which allow faster transfer rates of your beloved data.

Below are the subtests results. Clearly showing this laptop is completely out of touch for the other two ones.

Game Tests :

Time to test some games : Far Cry 2, Mafia II and Crysis II were benchmarked at the native HD resolution of the 17.3 inch monitor 1920 x 1080 and at 1366 x 768 resolution. First up Far Cry 2 and Mafia 2.The stock runs are without enabling the Turbo function. The Turbo ones, well you guessed it, by pressing the P1 function key, are with the Turbo on. Both games are smoothly playable, even at the Full HD resolution of 1920 x 1080. By enabling the Turbo we see a small boost at the 1920 res and a bigger noticeable one at the 1366 res. The Turbo might just keep your fav game playable without becoming choppy. I recommend while gaming to enable the faster fan speed, to cope with the added heat output. Time to see if Crysis II runs on the beast.

If you opt to play the Hardcore detail settting at the 1920 resolution you might be maxing out this laptops performance. Even enabling the Turbo function doesn't jield much gain. The Gamer setting is smoothly playable, keeping FPS nicely above 40FPS. When lowering the resolution to 1366 x 768 things speed up drastically. Close to doubling the FPS and providing a lagfree game environment. If I had to play games this laptop I would install Fraps and see what detail settings runs best to keep the frames per second smooth enough at all times. Or just drop the resolution to 1366 x 768 and still keep the detail level to medium/high.

I already mentioned the enable the faster fan speed function to keep everything better cooled ( at the cost of some extra generated noise). How does it influence the temperatures of the CPU and GPU ?

The stock design with the fan at silent operation still manages to beat the cooling design of the Acer laptop when being stressed. Really impressive as 4 extra cores need to be cooled down.. When opting for the faster fan speed , load temperatures drop a significant 6°C when being stressed, cooling even better than the MSI CX640 laptop. Kuddos to the MSI design team for a very potent cooling solution !

Time to measure how optimal the extra fan speed is with the GTX560M. Via GPU-Z we logged the min ( at idle) and the maximum reached temperature of the GPU (this by stressing via 3DMark Vantage). At idle theres already a nice gain, but it's under load that it all starts to shine. 11°C lower GPU temps are reached by just pressing a simple button !

Battery life was tested via the DVD playback of the movie "Der untergang". Running lenght is 159 minutes which is already a challenge for older laptops to complete. Sadly the GT780R didn't complete the movie before shutting down. It lacked 5 mins to display the end title screen. Testing via battery mark, generated an output file that the laptop should be able to cope with over 3 hours of normal daily usage. Not bad for such specifications.