MSI GT60-2OK 3K Mobile Workstation Review

CPU Performance Continued

Super PI

Super PI is a computer program that calculates pi to a specified number of digits after the decimal point—up to a maximum of 32 million. It uses Gauss–Legendre algorithm and is a Windows port of the program used by Yasumasa Kanada in 1995 to compute pi to 232 digits.

With the GT60-2OK sporting the same 4700MQ processor as the gaming equivalent laptop, we do expect to see a reasonable time for a 32M calculation and with a time of just under 10 minutes, the HM87 based board is not too bad.

Hyper PI

Hyper PI is another Pi calculation benchmark that works in a very similar way to SuperPI the we can see above. It offers the same flexibility to pre-select how many places Pi is calculated to, however the major difference is to doe with the number of threads that this benchmark uses. Whereas SuperPi only creates a single thread workload on the processor, Hyper PI is able to run multiple threads, one for each available thread on the processor. By running multiple threads at the same time, Hyper PI  puts the system under a far greater load and consequently it causes the CPU to generate more heat. This test therefore is a great indicator of how well the system is able to cool the processor by measuring the difference in time between a single threaded run and a multi threaded run of the same 32M depth.

Running a total of 8 instances of a 32M Pi calculation the increase in time is just under 6 minutes, whilst this translates to around a 60% increase, we do have to consider that the heatsink size does play a major part in this test as the processor will tend to throttle itself a little to keep itself with a certain heat boundary.