The MSI Titan GT77 Review: Desktop-Class Core i9-12900HX Tested
by Brett Howse on September 1, 2022 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
- Intel
- MSI
- Alder Lake
- Alder Lake-HX
Battery Life
Performance-focused notebooks rarely achieve excellent battery life, although the benchmark has been raised in the last couple of years. A device like the MSI Titan GT77 is designed to be plugged into power for most of the time though, and the component choices reflect that. With a massive RTX 3080L Ti processor, four sticks of DDR5-4000, three M.2 SSDs, and a 360 Hz display, the idle power draw of this system is significant. The display does at least switch to 60 Hz automatically when you unplug the laptop from AC power. This notebook also supports both hybrid graphics (NVIDIA Optimus) as well as discrete only, and for the battery testing the notebook was configured in hybrid mode.
To combat the high power draw, MSI has fit in a 99 Wh battery, which is bumping into the largest viable battery in a laptop computer since you can not take a battery larger than 100 Wh on to a commercial flight.
For all of our battery life measurements, the display is set to 200 nits which on this device was 59%.
Web Battery Life
At 380 minutes of runtime, the Titan GT77 was able to surpass the Raider GE76 we tested a few months ago. It is still a long way from the all-AMD ASUS G513QY. AMD has really done an excellent job power-gating their graphics.
Looking at the normalized results, which removes the battery size from the equation, the power efficiency of this over the Raider GE76 is pretty good. It is surprising since this notebook has quad-channel memory, compared to just dual-channel in the Alder Lake HX powered Raider GE76.
Movie Playback
Movie playback is offloaded to fixed function decode in the iGPU, so it is generally one of the tasks that uses the least amount of energy. That is the case here as well, although the base power draw of the rest of the system does mask it somewhat.
Our Tesseract score divides the movie playback runtime by the length of The Avengers, and the Titan GT77 can almost get through three viewings of that movie before shutting down.
Battery Charge Time
The Titan GT77 ships with a 250-Watt AC Adapter, but it has a very large 99 Wh battery to fill. Laptops meant for on the go often offer fast-charging options, but this desktop-replacement system does not, so the charge time is a very average three hours.
Storage Performance
The review unit that was provided shipped with three Samsung PM9A1 drives with each being 1 TB in size. The PM9A1 is a very quick PCIe 4.0 SSD from previous testing.
The results are not quite as strong as the Raider GE76 unit, which shipped with three 2 TB PM9A1 drives. In the world of storage, larger drives offer increased parallelization and, at least when looking at the same model, are generally faster, so the 2 TB outperforming the 1 TB is not unexpected. The PCIe 4.0 drive still performed very well though with the smaller capacity.
Wireless
MSI equips the Titan GT77 with Killer’s AX1675i wireless networking solution, which is a Wi-Fi 6E solution based off the Intel Typhoon Peak lineup which includes both this Killer and the Intel AX210. For those that prefer hardwired networking, the Killer E3100G adapter is a 2.5 Gbps solution with an Ethernet jack found on the right side of the device.
Our test bed for Wi-Fi is the ASUS ROG Rapture GT-AX11000 which is Wi-Fi 6, but not 6E, so it does not support the 6 GHz range. Performance on 5 GHz for the Killer AX1675i was excellent though. Intel’s Wi-Fi offerings are the best in the PC space, with very stable drivers and excellent performance.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
25 Comments
View All Comments
Otritus - Sunday, September 4, 2022 - link
It’s a pretty decent benchmark to measure relative perform between processors, but almost no software uses the engine making it not “real world”. Cinebench is not a very good predictor for gaming performance because it scales poorly with additional cache. It is a decent predictor of productivity differences since it is a rendering workload, but you can always use “real world” tests like blender or adobe. I wouldn’t say it’s terrible — as it can provide decent insight into a processor with a single benchmark — but it provides no insight into workloads that a micro architecture can be very good at.bogda - Friday, September 2, 2022 - link
I expected at least several pictures of laptop internals. Considering the type of laptop tested, this would probably be interesting for many anandtech readers.Ryan Smith - Friday, September 2, 2022 - link
Unfortunately, we are typically prohibited from disassembling laptops these days. The manufacturers like to get them back intact.bogda - Friday, September 2, 2022 - link
I am sure anandtech with its reputation and history can get a permission to open and close desktop replacement laptop from manufacturer without problems. Peek inside it the least you readers expect.PeachNCream - Saturday, September 3, 2022 - link
No they really can't do that if they expect to get more review samples in the future. Reviewer sites of yore used to buy their hardware off the shelf, but in a age where landing benchmarks first is going to generate competitive page views, reviewers can't realistically wait until a laptop/phone/desktop lands on the shelves (especially now with supply problems, scalpers, and gray market reseller markups) so this is the world we live in. If you want internals, you just have to wait until someone rips one apart and that probably won't be very early in the hardware life cycle.IBM760XL - Friday, September 2, 2022 - link
Does AnandTech typically return laptops not-intact? :)It's a fair request, one of the things I look for in laptops is upgradeability. Being able to add more RAM or storage or perhaps upgrading the WiFi card down the road is an important consideration.
Although as an owner of an MSI, I'm well aware of their "opening this area voids the warranty" sticker. Not that it's ever stopped me, but they seem to be more of a stickler for that than most.
sheh - Friday, September 2, 2022 - link
Why are bad keyboard layouts the norm?Plenty of unused space horizontally (and also vertically).
meacupla - Friday, September 2, 2022 - link
What are you talking about? The keyboard layout is fineThe sides are filled with speakers, the rear is filled with cooling, and the front has a giant track pad.
IBM760XL - Friday, September 2, 2022 - link
My guess is sheh prefers full-width NumPads?Personally I have fewer complaints than for most laptop keyboards. It doesn't have half-height arrow keys, which is my top requirement (although it's not quite full-size, let's give it a B grade). The Cherry MX probably hash decent key feel/travel, which is also lacking on some laptops.
I'd personally slightly prefer dedicated page up/down/home/end buttons, versus the NumPad-off variant, but that's a small quibble and from someone who's learned to touch-type numbers quickly without a NumPad, and who usually only uses NumPads for directional movement in grid-based games.
So, yeah, overall I think they did a lot better job on the keyboard than most manufacturers do these days...
logoffon - Saturday, September 3, 2022 - link
Given that MSI is kind of a king of that, I'm honestly not really surprised. But they did get to new low with this layout.