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Battery, Thermal, And Display Testing
Battery Test - Tomb Raider 2013 Battery Rundown
To test battery life, we set each laptop’s battery profile to Balanced while running Tomb Raider’s built-in benchmark at the lowest detail preset. The frame rate is locked at 30 FPS through GeForce Experience’s Battery Boost to limit the strain on the battery. Meanwhile, a script running in the background monitors and time stamps the system’s battery percentage. The laptops are set to hibernate once battery levels reach 5%.
Unfortunately, the MSI GE72VR Apache Pro exhibits the poorest battery life out of the four laptops in our comparison. It just barely exceeds an hour and a half, which might be enough for a short flight. The Gigabyte P57W v6 pushes closer to two hours, while the Asus Strix 17 exceeds two hours.
Thermal Testing
For our thermal testing, we used our Optris PI 640 infrared camera to measure the laptop’s thermals. For more information about how we test, be sure to check out our Measurement Science article.
At idle, the entire cooling solution hovers between 38-41°C, which is safe territory. After running a 15 minute GPU stress test in Furmark, our Optris detected temperatures over 80°C emanating from the GPU’s heatsink, with the GPU heat pipes expelling well over 75°C. The Aida64 GPU sensor logs much lower temperatures, with the average hovering around 70°C and the maximum reaching 74°C. So long as the diode doesn’t reach an alarming temperature, you won’t have to worry too much about thermal throttling, but the cooling system doesn’t do a great job at expelling the heat.
Display Testing
We used the SpectraCal C6 Colorimeter to measure the Apache Pro's display. Be sure to check out our Display Testing Explained article for a full description of our test methodology.
At low brightness settings, the minimum black luminance is adequately dark, but the minimum white luminance is too low, which pulls the contrast down to 780.7:1. The contrast improves at 100% brightness, but the display would have benefited from a lower maximum black luminance. The Apache Pro’s display has the lowest contrast ratios of the gaming laptops we're comparing it to, and of all the gaming laptops we’ve tested thus far.
At minimum brightness, the Apache Pro’s RGB levels are balanced. However, when the brightness is raised beyond 20%, the red and blue values become more pronounced while the green level falls.
The Apache Pro’s average gamma levels come close to 2.2; the CalMAN gamma point chart illustrates the gamma levels peaking at around 20% and 90% brightness, but it stays consistently close to 2.2 at all other points. The average color difference is the lowest out of the four systems in our comparison group, which is impressive considering the Gigabyte P37X v6 previous held the top spot. The grayscale difference isn’t nearly as impressive, however.
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