Hybrid, Discrete, Overclocking?

For this particular sample, squeaking out some additional performance came pretty easily. First of all, I began by disabling the onboard Intel GPU and forcing the RTX 3070 to be used all the time. This does affect power use a bit and sometimes results in added fan/air noise. Fortunately, MSI includes a simple way to do this within Dragon Center.



I ran both Time Spy and Port Royal benchmarks from 3DMark to compare the difference and saw a modest performance gain. Other than the aforementioned reduction in battery life and a bit of airflow noise, there was virtually no impact to daily use. Since I don't find the fan noise bad at all, I enabled maximum fan levels and maximum overclocking and repeated the tests.


+200 MHz to both the GPU and GPU memory isn't something I'm not going to use. I tried to keep the fans from running their maximum RPM all the time and was impressed to see that fan noise with the overclock was relatively the same as with the system at stock.