Results: Adobe Creative Cloud And Productivity Applications
Adobe Creative Cloud
Adobe After Effects is affected by several system factors, including the X7 Pro’s extra RAM and the GT60’s poor memory bandwidth. Between those extremes, the SBM machine has the X7 Pro’s memory bandwidth (good) with the GT60’s lower memory capacity (bad).
One might expect the X7 Pro’s GeForce GTX 970M to outpace the SBM machine’s Radeon R9 290X based on Adobe’s history of optimizing for Nvidia's technologies. That doesn't happen this time, but I believe that the slower notebook CPU is responsible.
MSI’s higher minimum Turbo Boost ratio appears to propel it through Adobe Premiere. But the X7 Pro’s matching maximum Turbo Boost ratio helps it catch up in our single-threaded Acrobat workload.
Productivity Applications
Mysterious 3ds Max results point towards the X7 Pro’s higher memory bandwidth or greater memory capacity as potential reasons for a performance lead over the similarly-clocked GT60 Dominator.
MSI’s older machine leads Aorus’ newer model in Blender, and that’s likely due to a higher minimum Intel Turbo Boost ratio.
The X7 Pro’s soldered-down CPU appears to take a slightly higher clock frequency hit when unplugged, hurting its overall standing in ABBYY FineReader. It does have a faster storage and memory subsystem though, and both help it along in our Visual Studio compilation times.
