The Core i7-8750H in the MSI GS65 is slightly slower than in the Asus Zephyrus M GM501

The MSI GS series is the manufacturer's thin-and-light gaming category designed to compete directly with the Razer Blade series, Aorus X series, and the Asus Zephyrus series. The latest GS65 model is a complete redesign of the previous GS63/GS63VR generation with an even smaller footprint albeit at a slightly thicker chassis (18 mm vs. 17.7 mm). Naturally, our concerns about throttling come into play especially since the system utilizes Intel's latest hexa-core Core i7-8750H.

Perhaps to our surprise, the i7-8750H in the GS65 is able to maintain Turbo Boost clock rates quite well. Running CineBench R15 Multi-Thread in a loop results in an initial score of 1023 points before stabilizing at around 985 points to represent a performance drop of only 3.7 percent. This is compared to the original GS63 with i7-7700HQ which can experience a performance drop of 10 percent in the same stress test scenario.

If we dive deeper into the scores, however, we begin to notice that the i7-8750H in the GS65 is performing slower than the same processor in the Zephyrus M GM501 and Gigabyte Aero 15X v8. The Asus and Gigabyte notebooks are able to score 11 percent and 8 percent higher, respectively, than the GS65 in the initial CineBench R15 Multi-Thread run. As a result, the GS65 may not throttle as much as the GS63, but that is at least partly due to its slower initial clock rates from the onset. Clock rates average around 3.3 GHz on the Zephyrus M GM501 compared to the fluctuating 3.0 to 3.4 GHz behavior of the GS65.

The differences in CPU performance are thankfully very minor especially for gamers. Most titles are GPU bound and so the i7-8750H is rarely a bottleneck even after accounting for its slightly slower performance in the GS65.

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