Temperature

The surface temperature of the X770 (while the laptop is idle or in office use) remains in a comfortable region, as shown by the blue temperature diagram. While the laptop is in intense use, the situation does not change much. The bottom of the laptop heats up to 40 degrees and the surface heats up to 41 degrees. The X770-10J with the 2630QM processor behaved more or less the same way, although in that test, the room temperatures were different.

GPU Throttling

During the stress test (Prime95 + Furmark), the multimeter showed wavering power consumption: from 101 to 162 W. This indicates CPU throttling in most cases, but in this test model the graphic card is at fault. A solo Prime95 CPU stress test showed that the power consumption remained constant at 88 watts. The clock frequency in Cinebench Single and Multi-Core benchmarks stays in the Turbo regions of 2.8 and 3.0 GHz. In contrast, the GPU temperature wavered constantly, even when the Furmark stress test was being run alone. See picture four.

Afraid of how this will affect the gaming performance? The GeForce GTX 560M of our test model performs at the same level as other test models with a GTX 560M (in the synthetic benchmarks). So whether it is the 3DMark 06, Heaven 2.1 or 3D Mark 11, the results are all at the expected level of a GTX 560M. In 3DMark Vantage, the GPU actually performs slightly above average.

This may not be the case with actual games, such as: Battlefield Bad Company 2 (high stress on the CPU). We ran the game on "High" settings and the laptop delivered 70 fps (above average - power consumption constant at 136 W). However, at "Ultra" settings (FHD), the performance drops to 32 FPS. The GTX 560M can deliver 7 to 8% more even with the slower 2630QM (Asus G74SX-3DE). The reason for this drop in performance is that the benchmark simulated explosions near the middle and at that point the power consumption suddenly dropped from 138 to 67 watts (for about 15 seconds), causing the game to stutter significantly.

The reduction in GPU performance with simultaneous CPU load can be tested with benchmarks. We have narrowed the problem down to multi-core stress scenarios. While Prime95 is running, the Cinebench R10 Shading (64 bit) score drops from 5,873 to 2,290 points. A single core SuperPi test does not drop the performance: even with simultaneous stress testing, the score remains at 5,870 points (identical with the solo test).