Gadgetory

we already talked about MSI's penchant for bloatware in our previous msi ge70 to 7r e laptop coverage but today we're reviewing the laptop in full and we won't really be talking about the software since there's a fully independent video just on that topic this laptop has a 1050 Ti a 7700 HQ i7 processor and is priced at 1200 to 1300 dollars which makes it an interesting candidate for what could be a smaller form factor notebook for gaming but ends up being a bit larger at 17.3 inches before that this video is brought to you by Corsair is it new Vengeance RGB LED Ram which ships with custom screens ICS for better overclocking performance and stability given that memory is highly relevant for performance with new rise in CPUs now is a good time to do research on high performance kits start with the Vengeance RGB LED kit at the link in the description below so start off with just the hardware on this one it is again 1,200 to 1,300 dollars it includes an i7 CPU and the GPU is a 1050 Ti that makes this combination of hardware pretty appealing for a smaller form factor but again this screen comes in at 17 point 3 inches so it doesn't quite fit what uh what my preference would be for form factor with the components however we can still look at the thing as a whole and then obviously if you wanted a smaller one they have smaller options with similar components it's just the thermals in the noise will be a bit different but that notwithstanding let's look at the solution on the inside here then work our way around the rest of the unit for the hard drive this particular model at the price is one terabyte hard drive 128 gigabyte SSD there suppliers do change these if they don't specify them however this one is actually a 128 gigabyte SSD from Toshiba and then the memory is 16 gigabytes - this one has got 2 8 gigabyte DIMMs right there for the rest of it the cooling solution is handled by two fans there's a 2 band setup which does impact noise as we'll see a bit later in the noise testing one fan on each side the CPU is oriented is positioned here on the units and the GP is positioned here and these two share a cooling solution to sum that now the CPU is a bit isolated because it's got two of its copper heat pipes that feed over here and get cooled largely by this fan whereas the GPU is going more over with these pipes but it does have one that runs alongside the CPU cooling and in between that line from the GPU to the my right side of the notebook there are some of the power components so you get the MOSFETs and then doctors over here where MSI has another aluminium plate that covers those and it's connected via thermal pad and that covers most of the power components they don't cover all of them they've got the inductors contacted from the thermal pad to the aluminum plate and then one of the power components one of the FETs down here and one of the inductors is not covered seems a bit odd but whatever I guess they didn't want to do it so that's that's the cooling design this design actually as we'll see in thermal testing in a moment where it's pretty damn well and the reason it does work well is because of that 17.3 inch form factor for the screen so it's a wider notebook which means you have more real estate to deal with the thermals that's the biggest challenge with thermals on these things because they have more surface area to spread this out with pretty a pretty big amount of copper I mean that weighs you down a little bit but the trade-off is better thermals so that helps with cooling but it does have a weird trade-off where because of their thermal solution is flanking the battery the battery actually ends up quite small and that's another thing we'll look at the battery testing so this battery could be a bit larger and this is something that we wish MSI might consider in the future if as I did something like ditch this and I know this notebook is one of the few form factors where it'll just barely fit an optical drive and people want that while some people anyway but if they'll ditch this and maybe relocate some of their cooling solution then they could run a larger battery and that is one of the trade-offs side this this kind of stuff gets into the personal preference a bit but with a laptop like this my preference is better battery life and get rid of the optical drive and give me another hour of battery if you can do it and that would be past I really relocating some of this stuff elsewhere in the system but let's get into the benchmarks now we're going to start with the Kulina stuff thermals go with the noise bridge that talk FPS and battery as well as always for full testing methodology check the link the description below for all that detail in the article starting with thermals we ran two games on loop for thermal testing and real-world scenarios we use dirt rally and Metro last light both of which are easy to configure for endless loop in and are reliable and login they also produce an upload on the CPU and the GPU to produce a good amount of thermal torturing without going to a full tortured test for the first chart the Metro last light chart we see CPU temperature climbs until it hits about 80 Celsius ambient is represented at the bottom of the chart and we see frequency is sticking to roughly 30 400 megahertz for the entire test there are no clock drops here so no thermal throttling occurs on the CPU cooling is reasonable given the small form-factor of the laptop though the stretch that body does help spread that heat over a larger area GPU cooling has us at around 68 to 70 Salty's in this particular test which shows us dropping about 50 megahertz off the GPU clocks as time carries on that's not too bad overall and pretty good thermal performance when considering the CPU and GPU are sharing a very small enclosure and solve the cooling solution now it does get a bit loud but we'll talk about that in the next section as heard dirt rally we see the CPU running at around 70 to 75 Celsius with the GPU running at about 65 c so lighter workload here there's no thermal throttling on the CPU once again with the limited clock reductions on the GPU still present it's more or less confirms the previous results if you're wondering what some of the spike enos is in the frequency charts that's just because the benchmark loops and whenever it loops the frequency isn't as in demand moving into noise this chart shows the fan curve ramping over time this test was conducted over about a half hour period allowing a gaming workload to run on loop for the full 30 minutes while plugged in as is shown clearly here we're seeing the fan curve ramped quickly into the range of 45 DBA where idle operations that close to 32 zba of course this isn't the full picture with noise the frequency is a bit higher that we're not currently plotting a frequency spectrum analysis the noise of floor is about 26 DB of the room for reference the laptops fans run loud when gaming but that won't be a problem if using headphones it will however be a bit of a problem trying to use speakers or the fan ramps up in a more public setting where you're going to get some glances for all the wine coming out of the machine this is something that MSI is working on with the new max-q laptops pack from Nvidia where Nvidia is sort of enforcing a 40 DB a noise output from the machines guard list for the GE 70 to 7 re in its current form expect about 40 to 45 DBA when gaming and about 32 DBA one idle which is a bit louder than desired but not terrible for the primary battery life test we're looking at office tasks with all the bloatware removed and we saw a battery life about 109 minutes when running a PC mark office on loop until that's of the battery the tasks included spreadsheet management a lot of word processing on some video playback which would be comparable to YouTube viewing fps benchmarks were already shown in a separate video but we'll recap them briefly here if you want more details go check out that one and for a summary of the 1050 TI's results we've got this charts this is one without comparing to other laptops we'll recap those in a moment generally speaking the 1050 Ti and i7 combination is perfectly adequate for 1080p gaming on a notebook and that's particularly true considering our tolerances for FPS are looser with laptops and desktops the lower power consumption and form factor receives greater importance that increased performance in this type of use case and we're running at least high settings on everything and seeing good performance overall comparatively as we shown this old mordor benchmark since laptops are loners and we don't hang on to them the 1050 Ti outpaces a 970 m sits behind a 980 m the gtx 1060 is a fairly sizable upgrade with what is about a 32% performance uplift but may not be necessary for everyone we can see this scale continued fairly linearly in other games - like our black ops 3 benchmark 1050 Ti lands again between the nine Sony m10 60 and this one and our deprecated overwatch training test we since replace that with batch testing though detailed in ours for overwatch graphics optimization guide and also detailed in our tentative DTI of benchmark video for laptops initially being that laptops are so specific to what you need if you need something that's a larger screen size like 17 inches which is really a country and territory of desktop replacement though this one's a bit lighter and smaller than most of those if you need that screen size it's a fine laptop and the price is pretty good but generally speaking this kind of configuration with an i7 or something like that and a 1050 Ti would be better served in a 15 inch form factor 15.6 inch form factor where it's more portable you can actually open it on a plane this one you really can't can't I mean if you're on a plane and you're using the laptop you can end up with it about this kind of angle on the screen speaking from experience so that's kind of problematic with these larger screen sizes but again it's something that you trade off if you're using that as a desktop replacement at home other kind of smaller points of notes that may or may not be relevant to you the keyboard although it is a full size keyboard with numpad support and all of that does have function button requirements in order to use some things like home or end which are things that I use frequently when doing editing like as in written article editing so that's problematic for me it may not matter for you if that's the case then ignore the complaint but otherwise when you have this much space for a keyboard speaking personally I'd really like to see those keys like home and end and some of the other ones on here expanded out and actually given a dedicated key on the keyboard because I have a 14 point something in the laptop that's from 2012 and it's got a better keyboard than most laptops on the market today which is why I haven't upgraded but that's that's just on the keyboard side software is a problem if you buy one of these laptops again the hardware is fine actually the cool institution is pretty good it performs really well under any kind of load where you're sharing the CPU and GPU and that's all enclosure but the Psalter is terrible so you bought if you buy this thing just remove it all install windows clean and you have a much better experience out of box and you're not going to have weird boot time issues once this has a clean OS on it it it's not 18 seconds eighteen point four or something like that whereas the stock configuration is closer to 40-plus so keep that in mind as well but overall the unit is okay the hardware is good software not so much let's ignore that to say blowed away clean OS the hardware's okay cooling solution is good one of the better ones on the market it just comes down to things like how much do you care about keyboard button placement and how much do you care about things like screen size and noise might be better to look at a smaller screen size maybe the ge62 where you can cut off about two inches right here and slightly increase the chassis height instead might be a better trade-off for you but overall as always links the description below for more information thank you for watching you go to patreon.com/scishow and I stop stop directly or subscribe for more I'll see you all next time you