hey everyone Eber here with Hardware Canucks and not too long ago I posted
my review of the razer blade stealth which is a thin and light 13-inch ultra
book and I really liked it I mean the design and the way our razer just
upgraded a few things here and there was absolutely great but the price for the
updated version that I had was just a bit too expensive basically the base
model had a whiskey Lake i7 85 65 u8 thread CPU eight gigabytes of RAM and a
256 gigabyte SSD but the graphics model which I had came with 16 gigabytes of
RAM and nvme SSD rather than a SATA base drive and a discreet MX150 GPU that
version is about $200 more expensive but it got me wondering if the discreet
graphics card really made a huge difference you see in videos MX150 has
been rolled out to a few ultrabooks and some entry-level notebooks and I think
that trend is supposed to accelerate through 2019 but I want to throw in some
more tests to see if it was really worth the extra cost over the lower battery
life that we used to get with Intel's integrated solution so let's find out
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all right so let's first get into what the MX150 really is because the name
doesn't really give any hints even though that it has been out for quite a
while now as a matter of fact it seems like nvidia went out there way to
rebrand and older architectures so it looks something different
basically this GPU uses a slightly evolved version of the GP 108 core from
Nvidia's GT 1030 GPU that means it uses the Pascal architecture and has 384 cuda
cores 24 texture units and 16 ROPS they've also been some modifications to
lower core voltage is improve power consumption and level out clocks
consistency those are all key aspects for ultrabac designs like the ways of
late stealth the big question mark is clock speeds and memory those two specs
are determined by laptop manufacturers and are largely based on their internal
cooling solutions for example the Razer is running the MX150 at fifteen thirty
one megahertz and has four gigabytes of gddr5 memory
which gives it a TDP of roughly 25 watts others slim 13-inch notebooks with this
GPU runs at just a thousand 37 megahertz and comes with just two gigabytes of
memory but they also have a TDP of just 10 watts
that means Razer is sacrificing some battery life for increased performance
this also brings up a pretty interesting point guys when a notebook says that it
comes with an MX150 GPU you will need to pay very close attention to whether
or not if you're getting the 2 gigabyte 10 watt version or the 4 gigabyte 25 one
model because the performance difference will be very different another
interesting point about the MX150 is that it doesn't have invidious Envy ENC
hardware based video encoding engine that means it can't be used to boost
performance tasks like video transcoding you'll need to use a CPU for that it
does however have NB Dec decoding so playback or video playback will be
accelerated by the GPU with all of that taken into account let's get on to the
tests all these were run on the stealth 16 gigabyte model with the MX150 either
completely disabled or enabled for gaming I decided to pick a handful of
simple popular games that don't necessarily take a ton of resources and
which people might likely be interested in playing while they're away from their
main PC you can see that the MX150 4 gigabyte delivers a huge amount of
additional performance against the integrated graphics card which was
pretty much expected with it games that are slight shows with Intel graphics
becomes perfectly playable and mind you this is all at 1080p resolutions so if
you tweak around with settings here and there I think the MX150 would be
absolutely a perfect companion especially if you're travelling and if
you just want to throw in something on an ultrabook
now I also want to dig in a little deeper into some other tasks you see a
Finan like 13-inch altered book with a price tag like the stealth would
typically be expected to pull double duty for content creators and
professionals while they're away from their office
because they normally used a workstation PC to get their job done but can MX150
really make a difference in terms of rendering performance and other tasks
that would typically bring an ultrabook with intel's integrated graphics
solution down to its needs let's start with handbrake for video transcoding and
here the MX150 couldn't even be used because it lacks the N VNC encoder
however until squick sync hardware video encoder does an amazing job and cutting
down times versus just using the CPU there's also very little change in
Premiere Pro since this program also uses the NBN C to accelerate rendering
times but I also have to mention that Intel's QuickSync doesn't come in handy
here since it used to reduce rendering times and I think the reason and I think
this might be you know it's just my theory I think what's happening here is
that when Adobe recognizes that the system has you know Intel CPU and
integrated GPU as well as a discrete graphics card and when you enable quick
sync Adobe things that okay I'll just offset some of the loads equally or
distribute it across the discreet graphics card the integrated GPU and of
course a CPU but since the MX150 doesn't have an Nvidia encoding engine
it just freaks out and I think that's what I think and it just offsets all
that load to the CPU and the integrated GPU just sort of kind of it doesn't get
utilized to its best and I think that's why it takes significantly longer to
render you know 4k videos or whatnot so I don't think the MX150 is you know a
greater solution when it comes to just play back or not play back but just
rendering performance in Adobe Premiere now v-ray is a rendering program that
can be added to a huge number of applications like Sketchup Maya cinema
4d and more in those cases it is usually used to render high detail scenes which
means it takes a ton of system resources here the MX150 makes a huge difference
since CUDA can be processed through the rendering quickly while the CPU is left
aside for other tasks blender is a bit different with the 1/3 CPU and the MX150
being pretty close in rendering times so it doesn't look like Nvidia's
card gives an advantage here alright guys so while I was running v-ray and
blender I did notice that the CPU was only being utilized by like
five to ten percent in order to process the final image and the reason for that
is basic pretty simple those programs primarily use GPU to accelerate or
render the final output now that got me thinking would it be possible to run
parallel rendering tasks that could use voltage CPU and the GPU without actually
sacrificing on output time now I know this might not sound like a big deal but
for professionals this could be a huge time saver because think of it this way
for many design and architectural projects you will obviously require
multiple renderings at different angles now there's a revision made at some
point those renderings will obviously have to be reprocessed and if you're
doing one at a time it just takes forever but think of it this way if you
can pop out two at a time while traveling or if you leave the CPU to do
other tasks that could be an awesome reason to look into something like at
the MX150 now in order to do this I open up two instances of these programs
and a set one for CUDA and the other one for CPU and the results are pretty darn
interesting you see when processed individually the
CPU took about 12 minutes to complete and the GPU took about 15 minutes
however when the MX150 in the CPU are running on two different renderings in
parallel both will be done in just over 15 minutes sure the CPU does take a
little bit longer but in this case you'll be able to almost double your
output now v-ray uses a bit more processor resources when the GPU is
rendering so when both are running at the same time the CPU time increases by
quite a bit however you are still much better off running two scenes together
on different pieces of hardware then waiting around for 2cp renderings to
complete one after the other all right guys so what about battery life now I
wanted to mention right away that while I made sure that the MX150 wasn't
working during the IGP tests it can't be completely turned off so it isn't
drawing any power even when it isn't in use it remains in hibernation which
still requires some battery flow so take that into account dedicating the IGP to
graphics tasks obviously does extend battery life and not having the MX150
at all would probably result in even longer times a GPU with a 25 watt TDP in
a slim and light notebook will obviously have a pretty big impact on how long it
can remain unplugged so take that into account before
jumping onto the MX150 train so I guess it's time to wrap things up you see at
the very beginning of this video I had a very simple question is the MX150
really worth it over Intel's integrated graphics card and the
answer to that really depends on what you're looking for in a 13 interested in
light ultrabook you see if you're someone who things that you're going to
be using applications like v-ray or blender if you're an architect or
designer that sees yourself taking advantage of you know those extra cuda
cores to accelerate your rendering output or if you're just thinking of
doing some light gaming here and there and if you're looking for a pretty
compact notebook then the MX150 is actually worth it although keep in mind
keep in mind that you need to make sure that what model you're getting because
there are a lot of notebooks out there that come with the two gigabyte 10 watt
TDP GPUs and of course there's the 25 one 4 gigabyte model which is found on
the Razer blade stealth so that's definitely something to consider but in
my case I really can't use something like the Razer blade style because for
video rendering or for content creators or video editors the MX50 is of no use
because it doesn't have the in encoding engine and it just wouldn't really make
any sense because it's your rendering time so it almost quadruple so that's
where I would look into something with that's a little bit more powerful like
GTX 10 series card or even the latest r-tx GPUs although they're they're very
expensive so yeah and guys remember parallel rendering is just not for
notebooks featuring MX150 graphics cards because you can apply the same
concept to your desktop workstation PC or even your a laptop that has capable
hardware because if you can utilize every single piece of the hardware to
accelerate your particular rendering task then it's a win-win also don't
forget if you're just looking for something that can do casual tasks like
browsing the web watching you know content or something like that just
normal stuff they're better off going with the laptop that doesn't happy and
x1 to GPU because yeah first and foremost you're gonna get longer battery
life and it's gonna cost you a lot less so that's it for me thank you very much
for watching let me know what you guys think about you know in videos MX150
GPU and what do you think of it slowly trying to enter into the Ultrabook
market because I see that or at least I think it's dot it's going to become the
Train for 2019 so I want to know your thoughts
about that and of course what do you think of the performance and of course
things on parallel rendering the idea of that I mean both hybrid connects thank
you so much for watching make sure to check out some relevant content over
here subscribe to our boot sequence channel and I'll see you in the next one