We owe you the second part of the tests for Zephyrus Duo. In addition to encryption, encoding, tests of memory and SSDs, this article provides detailed performance evaluation under Nvidia OptiX interface, display measurements, and most importantly, an in-depth analysis of operational characteristics. Heating, power and clock management are captured for the first time in detailed flowcharts across all modes (Turbo, Performance and Silent).
Power modes
The notebook offers the option to choose from Silent, Performance and Turbo power modes via ROG Armoury Crate.
All the tests were done in Turbo, but it’s worth looking at what differences the individual modes offer. You will definitely not expect some results. Again, we compare the same parameters, but this time in 3DMark in the Fire Strike benchmark.
The clock speed of the processor immediately shows an interesting development. In Turbo mode, there is a large drop from 4.5 to about 3.1 GHz. Other modes hold between 4.3 – 4.5 GHz and also note that Performance has a more stable curve and smaller drops than Silent mode.
Consumption more or less corresponds to the clock, and therefore Performance has it slightly higher than the Silent mode and Turbo again shows a drop as in clock speed.
Interestingly, despite the higher clock and consumption, the temperatures are lower in Performance mode, which is caused by a more aggressive fan curve. Due to the lower clock and consumption, the Turbo also has logically lower temperatures by about 20 degrees Celsius.
How’s the graphics card? No differences in the load as with Blender, as it is always working at full speed.
When looking at the clock speeds, however, there is a real difference between the modes. The Turbo literally demolishes the Performance mode and that again demolishes the Silent mode. The differences in clock speed are obvious, roughly around 200-300 MHz, which is certainly not negligible. I’m especially shocked by the high clock speed in Turbo mode, as it’s still a GPU in the Max-Q version.
Consumption corresponds to the clock speed and is therefore the highest in Turbo mode, lower in the Performance setting and lowest in the Silent setting. The differences are about 20 – 30W.
A surprise is heating, where one would expect the Turbo mode to be the worst, but due to the high fan speeds and the sound of a jet engine, the temperatures are lower than the Silent and Performance modes, which are very similar.
In the graphs we saw an interesting transfer of power from CPU to GPU in Turbo mode and practically identical Silent and Performance modes, where Silent is considerably limited for the purpose of quiet operation. But how do these modes really affect performance? In Fire Strike, there are always about 2000 – 2500 points between modes, which corresponds to a 15% difference. This is really interesting when you consider that you can get a third of the extra power from the Silent to the Turbo just by changing the mode. The tax is, of course, higher noise, but the flexibility of Zephyrus is very interesting.
