Gadgetory

welcome back to Hard Rock's today I'm taking a look at the msi gs70 flagship gaming laptop with intel's hit gen coffee like CPUs inside a lot of you guys have been asking me to check out and slapped up so today we'll be going through hopefully everything you want to know so the GS 65 is essentially the success of the MSI's previous slim gaming that top the GS 63 which I've looked at previously msi had used the g 63 design for a couple of generations now but this new tier 65 design upgrades many areas including the hardware and design it still uses a 15.6 inch 1080p display but we're now looking at slimmer bezels and an upgrade to a 144 Hertz refresh rate hardware wise there's nothing out of the ordinary for a high-end laptop in 2018 the CPU is Intel's Core i7 8750 H that we've reviewed previously and the GPU is invidious geforce gtx 1070 max q there's also 16 gig of ram and a 512 gig SSD in my review unit though that combination does vary in different regions msi clearly wasn't happy with gigabyte claiming all the accolades for its slim bezel gaming laptop the aro 15 X so they too have gone this slim bezel approach here the GS 65 s bezels aren't quite as slim as what we see with the Aero 15 X but they are much slimmer than on the GS 63 and crucially msi has achieved this without giving us a nostril vision webcam as you can see the top bezel is slightly thicker than the sides and in there msi has managed to fit in a webcam with slimmer bezels comes a smaller laptop and comparing dimensions reveals the GS 65 to have a slightly smaller footprint than its predecessor about 22 millimeters has been shaved off the width with a similar depth all while maintaining the same 17.9 millimeters of thickness these aren't massive figures but any size reduction while still including the same hardware is welcome and it keeps the laptop as portable as possible plus it's still reasonably light at just one point eight eight kilograms I always like the design of the GS 63 but this new GS 65 is simply a class above it's by far the best-looking MSI laptop ever with an excellent metal shell and subtle yet attractive gold highlights around the lid trackpad vents and more almost every area of this slim chassis has been refined it now exudes premium quality small touches like simplifying the logo on the lid and removing other game elements have worked wonders and if we remove the annoying stickers below the keyboard the minimalist design only becomes more impressive the key thing with the GS 65 design is despite opting for a high coil in metal chassis MSI hasn't compromised the cooling solution there are still a ton of vents on the system including the sides rear top and bottom we've seen with laptops like the razor blade that a metal design is good but it can limit the cooler quite significantly however this doesn't appear to be the case with the GS 65 despite a significant amount of edge space going to the cooling vents there are plenty of ports on this laptop three USB 3.0 type-a ports Thunderbolt 3 USB C Ethernet HDMI 2.0 mini DisplayPort and two audio jacks unfortunately there's no SD card slot which would have been handy for professionals however I am glad MSI moved the position of the power button back to a more sensible location above the keyboard used to be on the edge and it was pretty easy to accidentally press it speaking of the keyboard MSI has used their standard steel series design with perky RGB LED backlighting notably there's no numpad on the GS 65 which I tend to think should come with the 15 inch laptop the arrow 15 X for example does manage to cram a numpad into a similar chassis not a big deal for games though is mostly a nitpick the travel distance from this keyboard is rather unimpressive MSI has opted for an ultrabook style switch with a shallow rubbery response I prefer a more clicky design and I know it is possible with a laptop keyboard but the limited amount of space MSI has allocated to the depth of these switches has no doubt constrained this keyboards performance on the other hand the trackpad is very responsive and an improvement to the old elin days though mostly you'll want to use a proper mouse for actual gaming removing the bottom panel of the g65 reveals a flipped motherboard unfortunately while you can see the battery and cooling components to a small extent any access to the RAM and MDOT two slots is fairly difficult as you have to remove the entire motherboard and cooling assembly first there are a lot of small fragile connectors along the way so it's not something I'd advise for the casual user however if you do want to go down that path you will find a spare em not to slot and a spare dim slot interestingly MSI has used a triple fan cooling design here with a single cooler on the left for the CPU and a dual fan cooler for the GPU on the right the extra fan for the GPU is a bit unique though the heatsink design isn't anything unusual and actually provides a good amount of fin area certainly a lot more than the air of 50 X before heading into performance I did want to touch on the display as I mentioned earlier it's a 1080p 144 Hertz IPS type display and while it doesn't include g-sync I do appreciate the high refresh right now I really hope this becomes standard in gaming laptops like with the bezel size it's clear that MSI are targeting the area 15 X with this displays calibration while not X right Pantone certified the Gio 65s display is much more accurate than any MSI laptop I've reviewed in the past it's not perfect but an average CCT of 68 or 4k is decent to go along with average Delta ease of 2.2 in grayscale 2.2 to in saturation and 2.73 in color checker for the best results these figures should be below 2.0 at least however considering past efforts this is a pretty decent improvement unfortunately perhaps as a result of tighter calibration brightness and contrast are unimpressive it does reach just 248 nits of peak brightness and that's not great and neither is a sub 1000 to 1 contrast ratio both of these areas are handily beaten by the error 15 X which packs a similar display and somewhat superior calibration let's move on to performance now and I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this as I've previously covered a lot of this systems hardware in other reviews the core i7 8750 h ng force gtx 1070 max-q combination I've covered extensively in previous stats so if you're interested in both CPU and GPU performance unser jest checking out my original coverage of the i 78750 h however it is still important to benchmark the GS 65 specifically to see if there are any performance anomalies or other interesting talking points relative to the original results we got through the CPU and GPU and there's one that sticks out immediately the factor system has single channel memory compared to the dual channel configuration we used in our initial i7 a 750 H benchmarks as I showed in my review of the gigabyte arrow 15 X which also used a single channel memory the reduce memory bandwidth provided by this sort of configuration does hurt both productivity and gaming workloads in some instances this chart shows the performance difference between the msi ge62 5 and our original dual channel memory i 78750 H benchmark results in a range of productivity tests some workloads like encoding rendering and Excel are largely unaffected by single channel memory others like the Adobe suite compression and MATLAB are more heavily influenced by reduce memory bandwidth and as such can be up to 29% slower if you plan on using apps that are memory bandwidth sensitive and suggest chucking in an extra stick of RAM to get dual channel bandwidth how does the GS 65 stealth in it fare in a direct comparison with the gigabyte error 15 X well both of these laptops have single channel memory and in most tasks you can see the GS 65 is slightly slower for the most part we're only talking about a 5 percent performance difference or less and this is down to a simple hardware difference the aro 15 X uses ddr4 2666 for a single stick which is the maximum ddr4 speed coffee-like supports while the GS 65 uses ddr4 2400 again this is something you can address yourself with a ram swap but with a 5 percent difference it might not be worth it in a lot of cases if you're thinking of upgrading from an older laptop with the i7 7700 HQ inside you can expect to see hefty gains in productivity workloads the eye 78758 provides an upgrade from four to six cores clock speed boosts in every situation which allows it to provide huge performance improvements in multi-threaded tasks Cinebench r15 Excel 7-zip decompression and x264 encoding all benefit the most with gains up to 64 percent and typically at least 50 percent more single photo tasks tend to see single digit gains but there's still an improvement here so we'll take it here's the Cinebench r15 chart that shows how the GS 65 stacks up in more concrete numbers rather than relative terms again if you want to see more charts like this and more in depth discussion on the AI 78758 check my original coverage of that cpu and keep in mind the relative differences we've looked at so far as for gaming with the gtx 1070 max-q in general this GPU when paired with the i7 8750 H is quite capable of 1080p ultra quality gaming at around 60 fps in the latest titles obviously the most punishing games will tax this GPU a bit harder than that as its performance it's between a gtx 1060 and a fully fledged ATX 1070 but overall it provides a decent experience again as we're looking at single channel memory some games don't perform as well as an equivalent system with dual channel memory games like Assassin's Creed origins battlefield one pray and Mass Effect Andromeda and he took a noticeable degree looking at 1% low results with typical performance drops around 20% though it can be as high as 40% in some cases other games like rise of the Tomb Raider Star Wars Battlefront 2 dirt 4 and GTA 5 are less heavily impacted with either no performance drop or just single-digit drops when comparing the GS 65 to the area of 50 next performance is pretty close on average though this slower memory speed of the GS 65 does have a small impact across the board some games exhibit a double-digit performance loss relative to the area 15 X while others are either equivalent or slightly faster on average we're looking at about a 3% difference which isn't that much at all we've found previously that in a like-for-like system configuration you get around 10% performance boost from the AI 78758 we're moving from a core i7 7700 HQ at least when the GPU is too at gtx970 max-q however again memory bandwidth does have a say in this if you're moving from a dual-channel 7700 HQ system to a single channel 8750 h system you actually see a performance loss on average or at the very least no significant gain in games if you're deciding what GPU is right for you here's a quick breakdown of how the gtx 1070 max-q slots in among other popular laptop GPUs it's around 20% faster than the GTX 1060 but upwards of 12 percent slower than a full gtx 1070 and the GTX 980 max-q tends to be around 25 to 30 percent faster no laptop review would be complete without discussing thermal and acoustic performance in such a slim laptop you're never going to get amazing results in this department especially with such powerful hardware the msi does do as much as possible to keep things in check the GS 65 is neither outrageously hot nor definitely loud as a result when playing watchdogs to the g65 CPU reaches around 89 degrees Celsius while the GPU set at 86 degrees ideally I'd like to see the GPU a bit cooler than that that's fairly hot for a laptop GPU but CPU temperatures are in line with other gaming laptops in CPU only workloads you can expect the CPU to sit more at 81 degrees with no throttling unless you're running a power virus acoustics is where I was more impressed with the GS 65 under a watchdogs to load the system's triple fan cooler produced is 44 DBA of noise which is significantly quieter than its main competitor with identical hardware the area 15 X the impressive aisa predator Triton 700 edges both laptops out in this test but either way the g65 s cool annoys is relatively easy to drown out with game noise in a CPU only workload hand braking coding in this case the cooler wasn't as loud at 40.6 DBA that's mid-range for a gaming laptop of this size though again notably quieter than the aro 15 X as for battery life the g65 includes an eighty-two watt hour battery which is fairly sizable for a 15-inch laptop but not quite as large as the Plus what our units we see in the best devices as a result battery life is roughly where I expected for a gaming laptop not horrendous like the early days of gaming laptops but not amazing either you won't get ultrabook battery life out of this system but it is capable of a decent amount of usage away from the charger especially if you're just doing light tasks like web browsing like with most portable gaming laptops the msi ge62 5 stealth in is pretty expensive at 2100 US dollars for the newest configuration to what we used it's not unfairly priced though as competitors like the gigabyte aro 15 X and a soos ROG Sepphoris cost a similar amount and what you end up going with does come down to the features and other aspects in that case when considering everything this laptop provides I really like what msi has brought to the table this is clearly their best gaming laptop ever bringing a superior design smaller footprint and improved performance compared to the GS 63 the build quality is fantastic and the cooling surprisingly decent in acoustics providing a better experience than the Aero 15 X its closest competitor in both aspects my main concern is the use of single channel memory out of the box which leads to reduce performance compared to a dual channel setup though this is also an issue with the Aero 15 X however the internal layout of the GS 65 makes this problem difficult to fix on your own it is fixable just you'll need to take out the entire motherboard and be careful in the process a slight nut though MSI has really nailed this laptop it's a great Buy and I love seeing companies continue to iterate on their designs and produce even more compelling hardware that's it for this review of the msi gio 65 if you're interested in this laptop you can check its current price using the links in the description below support us on patreon and if you're a fan of what we do catch you next time you