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Benchmark

The GT729 ran the following benchmarks at standard settings, both on battery and AC. As such there were no tests in “Turbo Mode”, which only works on AC in any case. I have decided to put it up against the Abook 1590W, a laptop with a slightly more humble design than the GT729. Though slightly cheaper, it does fall in the same price range and is also primarily aimed at gamers.

Abook 1590W specifications:
-    Intel Core 2 Duo processor at 2.80 GHz
-    4 GB DDR3 RAM
-    320 GB HDD
-    ATi Radeon 4650 HD GPU at 512 MB GDDR3 RAM

CPU-z and GPU-z are used to determine how fast the GT729 runs.

It scored surprisingly well in the Windows Experience Index.

Boot times and out of standby:



Boot and out of standby times are measured from when the power button is pressed and the Windows desktop appears.

The GT729 starts up in 51 on AC, which is alright. In general you can be satisfied with anything less than a minute, and you should not expect better regardless of which computer you are looking at.

Battery life



Battery-eater Pro 2,70 is used to measure the longevity of the batteries.

Idle test settings: Windows Vista ”Power saver”, 1600 MHz, 1/8 brightness, hard drive standby after 10 minutes, and WLAN & Bluetooth deactivated.
Classic test settings: Windows Vista ”High performance”, 2000 MHz, 8/8 brightness, hard drive standby after 10 minutes, and WLAN & Bluetooth activated.

The graph clearly shows the GT729 uses up a lot of juice in Classic mode, but is also capable of saving power if needed. It is obvious MSI has actually done some work on power management, optimizing the different components to deliver as much performance as possible while at the same time saving power.

Processor

WPrime



wPrime calculates the number Pi with 32 million decimals. wPrime is capable of utilizing multi-core processors, which means it gives a more accurate picture of CPU performance than for example SuperPI. The result is a time in seconds – the lower, the better.

The GT729 is clearly faster on battery but falls behind the Abook 1590W on AC, presumably because the GT729 has a lower clock frequency.

Sisoft Sandra CPU Arithmetic:




SiSoft Sandra’s Whetstone and Drystone benchmark tests the processor’s ability to do pure number crunching, which occurs during gaming or different forms of picture editing. The measure is in Mflops (Millions Floating Point Operations Per Second) – the higher, the better.

It is obvious the GT729’s Intel® core™2 Quad CPU Q9000 @ 2.00GHz outperforms the Abook 1590W’s Intel Core 2 Duo T9600 – 2.8 GHz.
The reason is probably that the GT729 has a Core™2 Quad, i.e. 4 cores, while the Abook 1590W only has two cores, being a Core 2 Duo. It might be those two cores run at 2.8 GHz, but the GT729 has four cores running at 2.0GHz.



The multimedia test in SiSoft Sandra is calculated on a 2D figure. The output (it/s) is Mandelbrot iterations per second, i.e. the bigger the better.

The GT729 is close but just not fast enough, probably because of the difference in clock frequency of the two CPUs.

RAM - SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth:




Sisoft Sandra’s Memory Bandwidth benchmark is used to measure the speed of the RAM – the higher the value, the better.

The shows how many GB can be moved per second. Looking it at the Abook 1590W, we can clearly see it is capable of moving around a lot of gigabyte per second (GB/s) on AC, but not nearly as many when running on battery. This indicates that the speed of the RAM is significantly lowered when it runs on battery.
That does not appear to be the case with the GT729; GB/s for battery and AC are almost identical.

GPU performance - 3Dmark

3DMarks tests the GPU at various graphics sequences, as well as the CPU’s ability to process graphics. That gives a total score which then represents the total power of the PC.

The GT729 wins comfortably as expected, since it possesses an ATi Mobility Radeon HD 4850 1GB DDR3 GPU, a younger generation than the ATi Radeon 4650 HD GPU at 512 MB GDDR3 RAM  in the Abook 1590W.

But let us now focus on the GT729 and the various ”modes” it can run in, and how those modes impact performance in 3DMark06. The most interesting mode for the test is standard, which works both on battery and AC. These results can then be used as basis of comparison for the ECO gaming mode and Turbo mode, an overclock feature.



The test clearly shows the computer performs very evenly when it comes to graphics, regardless of mode.
For those interested, it scores a Passmark rating of 1021 in PerformanceTest 7.0 from Passmark.