MSI GT73VR Titan review: This gaming PC excels with a GTX 1080 and G-Sync panel - jaramillosentoo

With the arrival of Nvidia's brand-new Pascal-settled mobile GPUs, we're seeing an onslaught of dominating-last laptops that, for the first time, are healthy to give desktops a run for their money. We'Re also witnessing the arrival of all-new features in gaming laptops, thanks to the significant power afforded by the high-end GTX 1080 cow dung. With much twice the power of Nvidia's late flagship transferrable GPU, the GTX 980M, the GTX 1080 paves the way for higher-res panels, high freshen rates, and of course insane levels of performance.

Case in point is MSI's new GT73 VR Giant. It pairs the new GTX 1080 mobile GPU with a 17.3-inch G-Sync panel that runs at 1920×1080 result at 120Hz, making it the first laptop computer we've laid our paws on it sports a broad freshen up-rate screen. Arsenic such, it should deliver crazy-even-textured, high form-grade gaming at an unprecedented raze. (MSI also sells the notebook with an IPS 4K display at 60Hz, if you prefer a higher result over senior high frame rates, but it costs $300 to a higher degree this config.)

The configuration

Panel away, this is a pretty standard config for an ultra-loaded desktop alternate notebook. In addition to the GTX 1080, it includes an Intel Core i7-6820HK CPU: a mobile Skylake chip that runs at a 2.7GHz al-Qaida time with a 3.6GHz encouragement clock and sucks toss off only 45W of power. Yes, some gaming laptops go with an actual desktop part, like the i7-6700K full inwardly the Origin EON17-X. But before you bristle at the notion of a mobile chip defamatory the purity of your battle send, think that slimly lower time speeds interpret to much cooler operating temps, which read to to a lesser extent noise.

It's rather amazing how practically power this bad boy is capable of.

The CPU is opposite with a humongous 64GB of DDR4 running at 2,133MHz. A bit overkill, admittedly, but hey, you can load 5,000 photos into Photoshop if that's your variety of workload.

On the reposition front, MSI has endowed this notebook with a combination of drives that helps explain the staggering $3,599 toll tag. It's outfitted with deuce 512GB Samsung M.2 SM951 PCIe NVME SSDs in RAID 0 for the Operating system, too as a 1TB 7,200RPM 2.5-inch disc drive. The two SSDs are good for busy 3GB/s of sequential read speeds, and about 2.6GB/s of sequential writes—put differently, it's the quickest SSD combo money privy buy right straightaway.

In the face up of such decadence, upgradability seems alike a non-issue. Unruffled, in a few age you might want to exit the backplate and install some spic-and-span gear. On our test model there was a sticker over the buttocks underwrite that voids the warranty if halting, so upgrades aren't truly part of this notebook's deal. That said, we did take the cover up off and it looks the likes of on that point's only one empty bay with no wires leading to it. Simply the Drive in seems promptly swappable, only since at that place's already 64GB here, there's no point.

If you want to void your guarantee by removing the bottom cover, this is what you'll line up.

Inputs and outputs

When IT comes to ports and outputs, the term "fully loaded" once again applies. On the back of the notebook computer, between deuce exhaust ports that wouldn't watch out of place happening the Millenary Falcon, you'll bump Bolt of lightning 3, HDMI, miniDisplayPort, and a Killer NIC. There are also a total of five USB 3.0 ports, sound outputs, an SD card reader, and a lock slot.

Naturally, since we're living in the age of RGB lighting, this notebook has it. It's similar to what Beginning offers—instead of per-key lighting you can control three zones across the keyboard and number pad—but IT also features a perimeter light or so the trackpad as an additional zone. You can also take from a few presets such as Breathing and Wave, which are fun to keep an eye on.

You can change the laptop's zone ignition in the Dragon Center software.

The keyboard is made by SteelSeries and features island-style keys that rise above the deck few millimeters and are soft to the touch. They were fine for typing, but I much prefer keys that are sunken down take down and feel like they are going into the organic structure of the notebook when depressed. IT's a personal affair, I know.

The trackpad, then again, is quite pleasing, and felt spookily accurate end-to-end my testing. It supports gestures excessively and is a duck soup to use of goods and services. Just the left-and-outside click buttons beneath the trackpad are probably this notebook's biggest failing. They are incredibly stiff, and require way too much force to click.

A stellar trackpad is offset by some very unpleasant leftist-and-right pawl buttons.

Radiocommunication connectivity includes both Bluetooth 4.1 as well as dual-band 802.11ac with MU-MIMO courtesy of the Killer Networking 1535 card. At that place's also a big sound system of rules that gets louder than we ever thought come-at-able for a laptop computer. It has great bass and clear highs, and sounds fantastic. The battery is a small 75Whr social unit, sol you'll need to tote the gigantic three-Lebanese pound office brick for any exercis that exceeds a few hours.

Performance

Now countenance's talk turkey. We've reviewed a number of laptops that feature a Congress of Racial Equality i7-6820HK CPU, including the Asus G752VS and the Genus Acer Predator 17X, only no of them were equipped with the GTX 1080. The recently reviewed Ancestry EON17-X rocked the GTX 1080 but was paired with a desktop Mainframe—the Core i7-6700K—which was overclocked, to reboot. But the Origin and MSI are extremely similar otherwise, even down to the two-fold PCIe SSDs, so this seems the likes of the natural comparability. How so much conflict does the desktop CPU make compared to the mobile part? Let's find out!

3DMark Give the sack Strike Extreme

This inductive test is a staple of galore reviewers' testing regimen because IT's Eastern Samoa accurate as it is stressful. It's primarily a GPU benchmark, withal, as opposed to a game that allows the CPU and memory to intemperately influence the hit.

PCWorld

Thus the GT73VR was essentially tied with the Origin EON17-X, with just 100 points separating the two machines. The EON17-X had the amphetamine hand, but in that test that's the slimmest of margins and well within the allowance of error. Since they some use the Lapp GTX 1080 GPU, the space-reflection symmetry was expected. IT's also noteworthy that the GTX 1080 machines held a 25 percent advantage over the last GTX 1070 equipped machine we tested, the Asus G752VS.

Tomb Raider

In Tomb Raider, the Core i7-6700K in the Origin EON17-X was able to assistance the GTX 1080 quite a bit, as that laptop scored a decisive triumph over the GT73VR Titan. The performance difference between the two machines, despite having the same GPU, was a surprising 11 percentage, with some notebooks pushing to a higher degree 150fps at 1080p.

PCWorld

It seems the extra clock speed of the CPU helped, because when we turned upbound the clock speed of the GT73VR the gap closed to just six per centum. IT's also worth noting that, compared to the GTX 1070-powered Asus G752S, the MSI GT73VR was only 16 percent faster.

Middle-earth: Dark of Mordor

Tomb Raider is a trifle longsighted in the tooth, so I as wel ran Dwarf of Mordor with the 4K HD Self-satisfied mob installed. This free texture pack of necessity at least 6GB of GPU memory to run in good order, so it's a cause of death and the eccentric of game the GTX 1080 was ready-made for.

PCWorld

In this test the CPU didn't seem to shimmer a role whatsoever, as both GTX 1080-equipped machines were within spitting distance of apiece other. Compared to the GTX 1070, the GT73VR was simply eight percent faster, and so there's not a huge difference between the two GPUs in that game at this result.

Handbrake

Here I encoded a 30GB MKV file into an MP4 using the Android Tablet preset in Handbrake, which basically runs the CPU at 100 percent for an hour until the test is complete. It's as real-world as you can get, and a great bench mark for CPUs, atomic number 3 it scales precise well with clock speeds and heart and soul tally. It makes for an interesting head-to-head between the i7-6700K and i7-6820HK, which are essentially the cookie-cutter chip demur one is for the desktop moving at higher clock speeds. You'd think up the desktop part would wipe the floor with the mobile part, but that's not quite a what we saw in our tests.

PCWorld

Overall, the Origin EON17-X with its 6700K Central processor was faster than the stock-clocked MSI notebook, but merely by trio minutes. That's a very small gross profit, and when we overclocked the MSI GT73VR busy 4GHz for the length of the test the margin was reduced to just one minute, making information technology in effect a tie as both systems took roughly 40 minutes to perfect the encoding process. Overall this is a astronomic win for MSI and its decision to utilization a mobile central processing unit instead of a desktop persona since it's just as blistering, and the system was mostly inaudible throughout testing, even at 4GHz. The Origin scheme sounded same information technology was about to lift-off from our desktop.

The peerless caveat to this is the Ancestry EON17-X, which equally reviewed had issues jetting at its factory overclocked speed of 4.5GHz. Origin PC blamed a new Windows update and was stock-still working on a fix at press time.

Overclocking

MSI includes a software system utility hilariously titled Dragon Center that lets you tweak a bunch of the notebook's settings, including overclocking the Mainframe (and the GPU). By default the CPU will boost up to 3.6GHz, just MSI provides sliders to adjust the multiplier for each core all the fashio up to 42, ensuant in a time speed of 4.2GHz.

The first issue I encountered was that whenever I moved the multiplier sliders to 42, the notebook catchy-locked. It did this with the system idleness too, not under load. Aft a forced reboot the system would set the multipliers at 40 instead, allowing the CPU to run at 4GHz, which is a decent overclock from the ancestry speed of 3.6GHz. Simply it begs the question as to why MSI would propose the pick of running the CPU at 4.2GHz if the system of rules arse't even handle it. For what information technology's worth, we also tried running the GT73VR at 4.1GHz and it would reboot whenever the CPU was under full load, then that was too a non-starter. Acer's hold with its Predator 17X may be safer for overclocking noobs, which lets you set a maximum of 4GHz connected its Core i7-6820HK chip.

Ratiocination

Of course, the combination of eight orderly CPU cores running at 4GHz, two PCIe SSDs, a GTX 1080, and 64GB of Read/write memor ain't cheap, thence the $3,599 sticker. That's some arsenic costly as a laptop buns get (not numeration the even pricier 4K version at $3,999). There's a much more affordable config with the cookie-cutter parts except for just 32GB of RAM and a single 512GB SSD (along with the 1TB HDD) for $3,199 MSRP ($3,095 on Amazon River), and that's the one we'd prefer—a 512GB SSD is fine and near people Don River't need 64GB of memory.

Since GTX 1080-based notebooks are stillness hard to incu (conceive me, I looked), it's hoodlum to say whether the MSI is priced fairly. The Origin EON-17X also costs around $3,500 but has half the SSD capacity, and incomplete the memory, though it has a 4K show. Still, it seems fair to say the MSI GT73VR is priced fairly in the realm of extreme hardware.

What's more, I was impressed past how quiet the MSI GT73VR's is under load, which made the Origin EON17-X by comparison seem distractingly swishy. Even out with the CPU at 100 percent, the GT73VR was barely audible. Of course of instruction, when the GPU fires up, you'll hear that.

Overall, the MSI GT73VR Titan is an extremely solid platform. IT's loaded with next-gen technology, runs quietly mostly, and hovers at the summit of all of our benchmark charts. My solely complaint is with the 4.2GHz overclocking option, which turns prohibited to not represent an pick at all. Otherwise, this is one highly sweet gaming notebook that seems to have what IT takes to dominate its classify.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/410644/msi-gt73vr-titan-review-this-gaming-pc-excels-with-a-gtx-1080-and-g-sync-panel.html

Posted by: jaramillosentoo.blogspot.com

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