Although the average power consumption of the GS65 is lower compared to the Aero 15X, the Gigabyte laptop manages longer battery runtimes. One of the reasons is the smaller battery capacity of MSI's 15-inch system at "just" 82 instead of 94 Wh (52 Wh @GS63). While the Aero 15X lasts more than 12 hours in the Battery Eater Reader's Test at minimum brightness, the GS65 only lasts 8.5 hours. The MSI laptop does not last as long in the practical tests. We only determine 6 instead of 8.5 hours (medium luminance), which is still good for a gaming system. However, the battery capacity does not seem to be the only advantage of the Aero 15X. It looks like the power-saving mechanisms of the GS65 are not working properly yet. We noticed strange peaks in the power measurements every couple of seconds, which do not make much sense at first. An analysis of the CPU reveals the problem. Despite the right power settings, the Core i7-8750H did not always maintain its idle clock of 800 MHz, but we often saw more than 2 or 3 GHz.

Update 05/10/18: The battery runtime is a bit better compared to the Shift-Setting power options. We now determined 6.5 instead of 6 hours in the video test.