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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%.
Out of the four systems in this roundup, the Stealth Pro takes first place, producing just under two hours of play time on battery power. The Gigabyte and Asus take a close second and third. If you game while unplugged, an hour and 55 minutes certainly won't have you scrambling to find an outlet.
Thermal Testing
For our thermal testing, we use the 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. We capture a thermal image during idle, and after 15 minutes of a Furmark GPU stress test. During the Furmark test, we record a temperature log of the GPU diode using Aida64.
The MSI Stealth Pro remains surprisingly cool, only bordering on 40°C after 15 minutes at idle. After 15 minutes of Furmark stress testing, the heat ramps up. The three sets of aluminum heat fins closest to the GPU expel the most heat, while the fourth set remains relatively cool. Keep in mind that the MSI laptop's construction obstructs the heat sinks and heat pipes, so the heat measurements are taken from the motherboard beneath the GPU and CPU rather than from the heat sinks, thus the rather high measurements. In reality, the Stealth Pro averages 74.1°C and reaches up to 75°C according to Aida64's GPU diode log.
Display Testing
We use the SpectraCal C6 Colorimeter to measure the P37X v6’s display. Be sure to check out our Display Testing Explained article for a full description of our test methodology.
Starting at 0% brightness, the MSI Stealth Pro has incredibly low black luminance, which is great, but its minimum white luminance is too low, lowering its overall minimum contrast ratio to 883.7:1. The story changes at 100% brightness. The maximum contrast ratio is higher than the other GTX 1060 models, and scores behind only the Gigabyte P37X v6, which has one of the better laptop displays we've tested.
The Stealth Pro's RGB levels start off rather balanced, but as brightness increases, the green levels drop immensely, and at 100% brightness, the blue levels skyrocket. Red levels rise ever so slightly, but normalize at 100% brightness.
The gamma averages around 2.2 overall, but the gamma point at low brightness levels is incredibly high and drops below 2.2 at medium-to-high brightness levels. The DeltaE 2000, or color difference, also starts off at tolerable levels, but becomes easily noticeable past 40% brightness. The MSI Stealth Pro's display's primary drawbacks are in grayscale and color accuracy, but its competition doesn't fare much better.
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