Results: SiSoftware Sandra
Sandra tells us much more about individual component performance without necessarily indicating how those differences impact our real-world benchmarks. We do generate the theoretical information to help with our performance analysis, though.
The desktop’s cheap dual-core processor lags far behind in Sandra's Arithmetic module, so it's possible that the notebooks will demonstrate better than expected value in threaded metrics.
Despite fewer cores, the AES-accelerated Encoding/Decoding test looks a lot faster on the $750 System Builder Marathon configuration. That's because Paul Henningsen is meticulous about fully utilizing a platform's features, one of which is a dual-channel memory controller. MSI isn't as careful about this, so it's single DDR3 DIMM cannot feed data to the processor quickly enough. As a consequence of that bandwidth shortage, a faster Core i7-4800MQ barely outpaces the previous -4700MQ.
And here we see the direct correlation. Memory bandwidth is the Achilles heel of MSI’s value-seeking shortcuts. Choosing a single module doesn’t make performance sense in a system that holds four SO-DIMMs and supports dual-channel mode.
