Notebook 6700HQ+GTX1080 or 7700HQ+GTX1070

Hi guys, which one of these two notebooks do you recommend me for gaming?

• i7-6700HQ + GTX1080
• i7-7700HQ + GTX1070

 

What notebooks are you looking at?

The GTX 1080 is going to have about 20% better performance than the GTX 1070. There isn't that much of a difference between the Core i7-6700HQ and the Core i7-7700HQ, not to the point where it would matter for gaming.

Charles

 

The 6700HQ+GTX1080 is the MSi GT73VR 6RF. This will be used.
The 7700HQ+GTX1070 is the MSi GT72VR 7RE. This will be new

Both 120 Hz 5ms screens. Which one do you recommend me to get?

 

@Falkentyne
hi! do you have a feedback for this user?

 

I think they both have IPS displays instead of TN, so better contrast compared for example with the Asus ROG G701VI. Had in the past the Asus G751JY and did not like the display, so I'm not feel like buying again from them. Here's the thread:

Asus G751JY short review

 

I think CPU 6700hq would bottleneck the GTX1080.
I had a 7700hq + GTX 1070 and that laptop struggled in some games such as GTAV or BF1... So more bottleneck with the 6700HQ because GTX1080 is more powerful than 1070.

 

I think they both have IPS displays instead of TN, so better contrast compared for example with the Asus ROG G701VI. Had in the past the Asus G751JY and did not like the display, so I don't feel like buying again from them. Here's the thread:

Asus G751JY short review

I've seen some reviews on youtube and they overclock the CPU, but can't remember now if it was the HQ or HK version of the processor.

 

HQ CPU is not overclockable. HK its.

 

GTA5 in ultra will make suffer even Titan or Ti cards I think, unless you use SLI. The highest level of detail on grass and vegetation is the responsible I think.

Back in the day I played the GTA5 on the macbook pro with the 750m and played quite well because of the extreme quality of the screen, but at very low resolution.

 

But the main source of my problems GTAV were the CPU. Now I know it since there is a huge difference between playing GTAV w/ GTX1070+i7 7700hq vs GTX1070+i7 7700k.

Also, I had two GT72VR. First one i6700hq+1070. Second one 7700hq+1070. No much difference betweeen both GT72's.
Both broken, display+gpu problem. A lot of crashes due the MSIs GTX1070.

 

There are few MSI notebooks with the HK version, most of them are the HQ.

About the 1070 failing on the GT72VR, there's a unofficial firmware for the GPU, version 86.04.5B.00.8A, which limits the frequency. Do you experience the problems right from the first day or take days or weeks to start failing? It is important because if I but it new I have 2 weeks to return it for the money.

 

I had multiple issues.
For example, massive crashes in GTAV or Dota2.

My first GT72VR last me 11 months. A black vertical line appeared in my display. My reseller refund me.
Second one, 3 weeks. Main display stopped working, I only could use the laptop in external monitor. My reseller, once again, refund me.

Both failures related to GPU+monitor.
Both with GTX1070, different displays (IPS vs TN, 75hz vs 120hz), different CPUS (6700hq vs 7700hq), different chipset too.

So I maybe wouldn't recommend the GT72VR anymore.

 

I saw several reports of that issue on Amazon. Finally bought on ebay the MSI GT73VR with the 6700HQ and the GTX1080. We'll see how good is the screen when it arrives. The MSI notebooks with the 1080 and HK processors are very expensive, either with the 6820HK or the 7820HK.

I really would like to get the Asus G701VI, but some websites give it a low contrast ratio and high response time for the screen. Manufacturers should really declare those parameters for each model and configuration, it makes a difference.

 

I hope you enjoy your new laptop!

 

Do you want my honest opinion? If you do you aren't going to like it ;(

Neither.

Both of those laptops are bad.
HQ processors are worthless and only good for light thin portable laptops for carrying around school or work. GTX 1080 will be castrated hard by any HQ Processor that isn't a 7920HQ. And I don't even think that configuration is available easily.

My recommendation?
Buy a Clevo P870 DM2 or Km1 with a socketed processor and 1080 and be happy forever.
@Mr. Fox

 

Yeah, I came from 7700hq + gtx1070 and now with 7700k + gtx1070 its like another world.

 

Agree. Good advice. Skip the BGA junk and go for 7700K CPU and MXM 1070 or 1080, or 1080 SLI if you want some extreme horsepower.

 

I see the Clevos use mainly displays with 700:1 contrast ratio, both 60 and 120 Hz models, which is pretty bad. The MSi have 1000:1 with the 120 Hz display, and fast response times, even the color gamut is reasonably wide.
The purpose of a notebook is to have good everything. If the screen is bad and have to use external display, I'll just buy a case and external monitor.

 

You're not gonna be able to drive 120Hz adequately in many games with a lowly locked 6700HQ or 7700HQ, both are bottleneck for 1070/1080 in high refresh rate gaming. 60Hz should be fine though.

 

I love my Clevo screens. They are truly excellent and do everything I want them to. If you have a business need for something better, there really are not any truly superior "total package" options in notebooks. Nobody makes such a thing. You will have to make a sacrifice on something. Sadly, nobody sells laptops that are superior at everything. You have to build that yourself, or accept a compromise that is tolerable to your unique situation. In my situation, the elements of primary importance are overclocking capacity and unmatched performance. That might not be important to everyone. And, extreme performance is not necessary for gaming. Unusually expensive screens or desktop displays are also a waste of money for playing games. As long as the resolution, refresh rate, response time are high enough and the colors are decent, it will be better than using a television set and a console.

 

Once I have the laptop, how can I check the FPS and if the CPU is being a bottleneck? I intend to play FPS mainly Overwatch. I play it currently on the Dell XPS 9550 4k screen at 1080p, and the colors are awesome, but there's a lot of screen tearing and a lot of input lag. I notice easily the time it takes from moving the mouse to seeing the movement on the screen.

 

Just check your FPS and GPU usage while playing. If your FPS drops and GPU usage is below 99%, then the CPU is bottlenecking. OW has a built-in FPS counter and you can use MSI Afterburner to monitor the GPU usage.

 

FrameTime its really important too, and the reason why BF1 was not smooth in my MSIs with BGA CPUs.

 

It is also possible that the overall system (CPU and GPU) are not powerful enough to manage the task. XPS are nice consumer products, but not engineered for running demanding games or intense workloads of any kind. If the system is rendering 4K and scaling down to 1080p that may also have an impact. Have you tried using a 1080p external display for the output while gaming? It might not be as much of a problem.

 

Right, frame time spikes are also another symptom of a CPU bottleneck.

 

Good point. A 960M should be perfectly adequate for Overwatch at 1080p. It's a scaleable game in terms of performance and not very demanding if you turn down the settings.

 

Overwatch plays quite well on the 9550 at 1080p with the settings suggested by the game, average quality. The 4k screen is outstanding, specially if you set the Adobe RGB or Vibrant profiles with Dell PremierColor. The biggest isues are the screen tearing and the input lag (or is it the response time?). You can set vsync inside video options but makes things worse. Also, eventually there are slow-downs after several minutes of gameplay, not always, but quite often.

Don't have any external display at this moment. Had the Asus MB169C+ and NEC MultiSyc LCD2170NX but got rid of them.

About the Clevo, I had issues back in the day with the Clevo M540G, ended up failing and was really really hot on palm rests. Seems to me like a generic manufacturer which rebrands to Sager, etc. Also, some youtube videos show failures of Clevo notebooks, not very appealing to start with. I don't want to be a hardware beta tester, and MSi and Asus have much more market penetration and out-of-warranty support probably and are more widespread:

• Mythlogic Phobos 8715S (Clevo P870DM-G) GPU Failure?
• Clevo p650rp6-g laptop issue
  
• I returned my Clevo P775DM3-G GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming Notebook - Here's Why
• EVOC CLEVO P650RS - few issues
• Clevo/Sager/Eluktronics GTX 1060 Laptop 3000 mhz RAM Issue + Kryonaut Paste

If you search google you will find like a ton of problems with Clevo/rebrands.

 

You can find tons of problems with all brands. I've had zero problems with my Clevos other than inconsistent heat sink fit. Their better machines are very robust, performance-oriented products. They do make some cheap turdbooks, but I would never own one of those in any brand. Dell, HP, Acer, MSI, Asus and others sell equally pathetic stuff, but Clevo has no match on the robust end of the spectrum. Their only real competition on the high end for years was Alienware, and now they have a monopoly on high end with no competitors. We're almost at the point now where no company or brand makes any notebook that I want to own. Those in my signature are the only options available today that are able to meet my expectations. Literally nothing else available anywhere (including the *almost* high end Clevo P7 and crappy P6 products) are acceptable to me. We live in a very sad day for notebooks right now, with extremely limited options and an abundance of pathetic garbage to choose from.

 

Maybe at 4k but a 1070 with 7700HQ runs most FPS games over 120fps with high or ultra settings.

Sent from my SM-G955U using Tapatalk

 

I have the 7700hq and a rx580 8gig and can run bf1 maxed out with AA at 1080 not sure what the fps are but its smooth. only time I get any shutter is when I first drop in to a multiplayer match but after 3 seconds or so it smooth out . the 1070 would do better I would think ?

 

In CS:GO, maybe OW, but not BF1 or R6 Siege.

 

I don't know about R6 Siege but BF1 runs between 120 and 130 FPS on 7700HQ/1070 systems at high settings. It will run over 110 FPS on Ultra settings.

Sent from my SM-G955U using Tapatalk

 

BF1 never drops below 120 FPS in 64-player Conquest? I've a really hard time believing that.

 

Yes right, setting on the Dell 9550 the game Overwatch to FullHD with Medium graphics quality, and limiting the FPS to 60 inside the video options, it runs more than 99% of the time at 60 FPS, with spikes very rarely to 44 FPS. Changing the graphics to high or even ultra then fps drop to 37 very often.

Setting the resolution to 3840x2160 and graphics medium the FPS average to 45 or so, with slow-downs to 31. Medium quality average to 55 FPS or so. CPU usage % never reaches 100%, and goes from 25% to 73%.

 

Well the 960M definitely does not have enough horsepower for playing OW at 4K. A better thing you can do is keep resolution at 4K but change Render Scale to 50%, that'll render the game at effectively 1080p but keep the HUD and UI elements like text and boxes sharp at native resolution.

Also make sure VSync is off and Reduce Buffering is on.

 

Yes, disabling VSYNC makes it faster at the expense of tearing, but it's preferable.
Tried also using 4k resolution with Render Scale to 50%, enable Reduce Buffering and set graphic settings to medium. That gives an average of 40 FPS, with values between 29 and 60 FPS. Much worse than using 1080p with 100% Render Scale don't know why.

 

Interesting. It's probably rendering the HUD/UI at native 4K resolution that is increasing GPU load and impacting your performance.

 

@Paloseco , I was simply going to say skip the locked HQ CPU's and get the 7820HK model, but now there is a new Asus 144hz screen with a beefed up thicker frame for better cooling that high FPS gaming load:

Asus’s new ROG Chimera is a massive 17.3-inch gaming laptop with G-Sync
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbre...us-rog-chimera-17-inch-gaming-laptop-ifa-2017

ASUS Unveils ROG Chimera Gaming Notebook: 17.3-inch FHD at 144 Hz with G-Sync GTX 1080
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11784...ing-notebook-173inch-fhd-at-144-hz-with-gsync

Asus Rog Chimera
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/asus-rog-chimera.808489

IFA 2017 Asus's new gaming laptop
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/ifa-2017-asuss-new-gaming-laptop.808461

 

Yeah I was about to say that too, it was announced at Berlin IFA. What remains to be seen, besides the 144Hz, are the other specs of the screen:

• Static and dynamic contrast ratio
• Input lag
• Response time
• Color space and accuracy
• Reflections and viewing angles

 

Yeah but what surprised me was that the FPS weren't as low as I expected. Since the resolution was 4 times bigger I was expecting 4 times less FPS but was not the case.

 

You'd think so, but FPS doesn't usually scale linearly with resolution like that.

 

Finally arrived my MSI GT73VR 6RF Titan Pro with 120Hz 1080p screen, and it's much better than the Dell XPS 9550 with 4k screen, regarding gaming (obviously the quality for movies and that is worse). Has the 6700HQ and the GTX1080, with 16GB of RAM and 156GB SSD.

Also, the screen is much better on the MSI than the Asus G751JY, that had very bad contrast (when watching movies you see the black background lit).
Playing Overwatch at 130 FPS, the GT73VR gets 100% GPU and CPU usage between 41% and 68%. It gets quite loud but it's a beast, and has a lot of USB ports.

The first downside to the MSI is that with 16GB of ram I'm already topping it. It's slow as hell and Memory Compression is like crazy with heavy work. Let's see how good is the newer Asus ROG Chimera and if the upgrade is worth it.

 

Why not just buy better RAM and upgrade it yourself?

 

i7-6700HQ + GTX1080 please!

 

Just installed GTA 5 on my MSI GT73VR with 6700HQ+GTX1080 120Hz 1080p, and I can tell you that the game plays absolutely well. The quality settings are default set by the game, almost everything very high and the rest high. Framerate is 81 when driving and more when on foot, but didn't experience any stuttering.

GTA 4 plays like crap, I think it doesn't even use all the cores or GPU power with none of them even closer to 100%. Need For Speed 2015 has now and then slowdowns. I think this is due to poor game development more than a computer thing.

 

I can only tell you that with 6700 and 7700hq had a lot of stutter and lags in BF1, GTAv, etc. Now with 7700k all this crap is gone.
Maybe your GT73VR, for any reason, makes a better utilization of the CPU than my old GT72VR...

 

It surprises me, because neither the CPU nor the GPU reach never 100%, yet FPS don't get to 120 FPS. Average GPU usage is 50% and 60% What can be happening? Maybe pagefile usage that gets near the 16GB? RAM usage is about 11GB out of 16. I can post a MSI afterburner screenshot if it helps.

 

GPU % usage also depends on the game. Play Witcher III and you'll get always 99%.

 

I was looking for a demo of the game but there isn't, in any case tha's normal for a lot of games. What I will try next time is to get the HK/K processor, let's see if the Asus ROG Chimera has as good screen as my MSI.

 

The problem is that you'll maybe never get a perfect package. You'll get very good screen and good GPU, or very good CPU+GPU and average screen. But all together its very unlikely.