MSI X460DX 14" Core i5 Notebook Review

Name: MSI X460DX 14" Core i5 Notebook Review - Page 4
Brand: MSI

by Ray Willington — Thursday, September 08, 2011, 10:00 AM EDT

SiSoftware Sandra and 3DMark Benchmarks

Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA 2011

Synthetic Benchmarks

We continued our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2011, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests (CPU Arithmetic, Memory Bandwidth, Physical Disks).

Processor Arithmetic

Multi-Media

Memory Bandwidth

Physical Disks

Memory bandwidth and CPU performance were solid with the MSI X460DX. In the Physical Disks test, the X460DX also returned a score comparable to other machines that use a mechanical hard drive spinning at 7200RPM.

3DMark06

Details: http://www.futuremark.com/products/3dmark06/

The Futuremark 3DMark06 CPU benchmark consists of tests that use the CPU to render 3D scenes, rather than the GPU. It runs several threads simultaneously and is designed to utilize multiple processor cores.

The 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M is no slouch. While it obviously falls short of some seriously hardcore gaming machines, the X460DX manages to put up respectable scores here, particularly nice when you consider the reasonable $850 price. Too bad you pay for it in the excess heat department. Here's the full score:

Futuremark 3DMark Vantage

Simluated Gaming Performance

The latest version of Futuremark's synthetic 3D gaming benchmark, 3DMark11, is specifically bound to Windows Vista and 7-based systems because it uses the advanced visual technologies that are only available with DirectX 11, which isn't available on previous versions of Windows. 3DMark11 isn't simply a port of 3DMark Vantage to DirectX 11, though. With this latest version of the benchmark, Futuremark has incorporated four new graphics tests, a physics tests, and a new combined test. We tested the graphics cards here with 3DMark11's "Performance" preset option.

The Core i7 machines with higher-end GPUs beat up this guy on the test bench, but that's to be expected. It still hung tough with its peers, though. Here's the full score: