Benchmarks: CPU
There are two MSI GT72 laptops in our comparison - last year's model, armed with a quad-core Intel Ivy Bridge CPU, and this year's GT72S upgrade, outfitted with quad-core Skylake.
The latest-generation chip is clearly a step up and in our CPU-centric benchmarks offers up a healthy performance increase in either single- or multi-threaded workloads. It's interesting to see the Broadwell-based Aorus X5 come out slightly ahead in the Cinebench benchmark, though Skylake's architectural enhancements are more keenly felt in the demanding HandBrake test, where the GT72S races clear of the pack by maintaining 3.6GHz across all cores.
