Here at CES 2023 in Las Vegas, in a quick pit stop at MSI’s CES 2023 suite to see a few laptops, we were met with a pleasant surprise: the first formal benchmarking for a 13th Gen Core “Raptor Lake” H-series processor outside an Intel demo.
MSI was showing off the latest model of its Titan GT77, its mega-size flagship gaming laptop. This model was equipped with a top-of-the-line Core i9-13980HX CPU. It was also rocking GeForce RTX 4000 series graphics, for which independent performance tests have not yet emerged. (Nvidia’s still got them under wraps.)
But the Core i9-13980HX was shown running Cinebench R23, the processor-intensive benchmarking utility that many vendors and media reviewers (PCMag included) use to gauge raw multicore CPU performance.
The Core i9-equipped Raider was rocking a super-high score on Cinebench’s multicore test: exactly 31,000 Cinebench units. That tops our current PC Labs test leader, another MSI machine, the MSI Creator Pro X17, equipped with the Core i9-12900HX, by a country mile. (It scored “only” 21,800.)
What’s at the “core” of it? To be sure, part of the giant Cinebench boost is down to more Efficient cores (E-cores). The top 12th Generation “Alder Lake” CPU topped out at eight Performance cores and eight E-cores (as in the Core i9-12900HX), while the Core i9-13980HX ships with an additional eight E-cores for a total of sixteen. If that’s the kind of performance boost we can expect to see from adding E-cores...we’re all in.
PCI Express 5.0 Peeks Out
We also got a look at the GE78 HX Raider, which is one-step-down model from the Titan. We did an advance preview of this new model for CES, but MSI had a version of the machine equipped with a PCI Express 5.0 M.2 SSD on site.
Just a quick tease of the kind of speed potential we can expect to see from PCIe 5.0 and a compliant drive, courtesy of Crystal DiskMark…
Yes, that is well into five figures on the reads! (A bit over 12,000MB per second to be precise.) One of the M.2 slots in the Raider is compliant with PCIe 5.0 and allows for direct connectivity to the CPU.
With PCI Express 4.0, the peak speeds you could expect to see from a 4.0-compliant SSD were in the neighborhood of 7,000MB per second, and to date we've only seen that with a desktop-style M.2 drive under ideal conditions. This is a pretty striking upgrade, and while PCIe 5.0 drives are still a ways from being mainstream items (we are expecting to see a few later in the week at CES 2023), this is an interesting first look at the kind of performance these drives can offer. Now that AMD and Intel both have rolled out platforms with built-in support for PCIe 5.0, we can expect to see these drives to become more common throughout 2023 and beyond.