Gadgetory

hey guys and welcome back to hardware own box today we'll be taking a look at the msi gt80 3 vr 7 RF Titan SOA this is definitely the most powerful gaming laptop that i've ever reviewed it's got 2 nvidia geforce gtx 1080s in sli inside one with an intel core i7 7920 HQ processor 64 gigabytes of ddr4 ram and two 256 gigabyte SSDs in raid 0 so there's a ton of powerful hardware in this laptop and of course it does come at a price this laptop will set you back more than five thousand US dollars and more than seven thousand Australian dollars so you'll definitely have to pay a high premium to get this powerful hardware in a laptop form factor the first thing you'll notice about this eighteen point four inch laptop is that it is absolutely enormous it is 5.5 kilogram heavy it's 69 millimeters thick and while you can take it around it is somewhat portable it's not nearly as portable as some of the smaller 15 and 14 inch gaming laptops that you can get today this laptop is meant to be sitting on a desk for the majority of the time part of the reason for this as well as that it requires two enormous power bricks to power the two GPUs inside each of these huge bricks is heavy they're 330 was each for 660 watts total power draw and if you wanted to bring this laptop to someone else's house for example you also need to lug along these two enormous bricks so that's something to keep in mind and kind of tracks a little bit from the portability of the laptop as this laptop is so large there's quite a lot of room for ports around the edges now as impressed with the array the msi includes here you'll get on the right-hand side 2 USB 3.0 type 8 ports on the left-hand side there's two 3.5 mm audio jacks and s/pdif optical audio out there's also a hi-fi audio out so it's got all your audio needs covered right there three USB 3.0 type-a ports and an SD card reader on the rear there's HDMI 2.0 Ethernet Thunderbolt three mini DisplayPort and of course the proprietary power connector it's also worth mentioning this top comes with 5 3 watt speakers inside which I you know reasonable enough quality for a laptop but let's be honest if you're playing games watching movies or listening to music you'll probably want to plug in a set of headphones or external speakers or something like that of course there's a lot of ports to set on this device one of the things you've probably already noticed about the GTA III VR is that it includes a mechanical keyboard so I guess if you have this much space to use on a laptop you may as well put in a cherry MX keyboard on here powered by SteelSeries as well each of the key switches is a Cherry MX RGB speed silver so it's very fast one point two millimeter actuation 45 grams of force required it's a beautiful keyboard to use for typing and gaming yet fantastic tactile feedback of course it's leagues better than any other sort of gaming laptop keyboard that I've used it's in fact well it's pretty much equivalent to the mechanical keyboard I use on a daily basis with my desktop so there's not a whole lot to complain about here one of the things I will point out is that because it's a laptop the keyboard is raised slightly more than you typically see per se just a standalone peripheral keyboard so there's also no wrist rest so these two things combined don't make it the perfect sort of laptop for typing out documents or anything like that but I think while you're gaming you'll find the mechanical keyboard to be awesome and of course it's RGB as well so you can go into the SteelSeries utility include on the laptop and customize all the individual keys to whatever color you want there's number of presets as well to choose from so you can do a number of cool effects like you see on most RGB keyboards bass days that certainly adds a little bit of flair to this laptop and it's nice to see one of the most contentious issues about the GT 83 VR is something I've seen a lot of comments about is the position of the trackpad on the right hand side of the keyboard instead of below it of course because there is the mechanical keyboard here they couldn't put it in a standard laptop position and that lives in a somewhat this awkward position on the side here I thought this would be pretty terrible to use to be honest but when I got my hands on the laptop and I started using the trackpad in this awkward ooh script you can see here it wasn't actually that bad browsing around the operating system is possible and quite easy to do in this position and well it actually surprised me quite a lot in that regard of course you won't want to use it for gaming at all it is quite bad to use there but of course most people replug in an external mouth like you do with most gaming laptops the trackpad also doubles as a numpad but there's no physical keys so it's like typing on a touchscreen and experience there isn't particularly good but I guess if you need it is ver and included here before I get into the performance of the GTA V 3 of you I just want to touch briefly on the display because it's quite an odd choice here by MSI they've gone with an 18 point 4 inch 1080p IPS LCD and just 60 Hertz now as I'll know earlier I mentioned that this laptop has two gtx 1080s in sli inside which to be honest absolutely crushes games at 1080p 60 so i really would have preferred to see is a higher resolution display like 1440p or 4k because these GPUs are well suited to those resolutions or a higher refresh panel with g-sync something like 120 Hertz at 1080p which we've seen before in laptops so it's a very odd choice to limit you to 1080p and 60 Hertz in such an expensive laptop but I think what msi is trying to do here is they figure you're going to be plugging in perhaps an external display that has either higher resolutions or higher refresh rates and I think to get the best experience ever gta3 vr you will be wanting to use an external display moving on to the performance here and first of all be looking at the CPU specifically has the core i7 79 20 HQ compares to the more commonly used 7700 HQ which you'll find in most gaming laptops the 79 20 HQ is a 3.1 gigahertz base clock over 4 cores with a boost up to 4 point 1 gigahertz in some situations compared to the 7700 HQ we're seeing 5% more performance in center-based single-threaded and 10% more in multi-threaded in our x264 encoding benchmark we are seeing an extra 10% they're up to 20% more performance in winrar 12% more performance in the PC mark work test and overall we're looking at 13% more performance on average so it's a decent little bit more performer 17700 HQ but nothing earth-shattering from the slightly higher clock in the 7920 HQ it's also worth mentioning the 3d mark time spy benchmark which is the most graphically intensive of all the 3d mark workloads compared to the MSI gt70 3br which includes just one GTX 1080 the GP 83 VR which is GTX 1080s and SOI is 68 percent more powerful so we're seeing not 100% scaling from the SOI configuration here that's mostly due to a CPU speed limit moving on to games testing now and I tested the GT 83 VI here at 1080p because that is the screen resolution of this laptop and we'll start with some older tiles so in Tomb Raider I thought 91% more performance from the penalty SOI compared to the GT 73 reales just a single GT x 1080 inside so there's pretty decent scaling here in this title but some of the other older games I tested like Metro last lights or no change in performance BioShock Infinite was an additional 20% from the exit of GTX 1080 and middle-earth of shadow of mortal and extra 10 percent performance from the extra 1080 so not a whole ton of extra performance here from the additional 1080 but most of these titles are limited by CPU performance and run well over a hundred FPS at 1080p in Grand Theft Auto 5 I saw an additional 20% performance from the extra 1080 so again not a huge change here in Batman Arkham Knight I saw no change to performance in newer titles like rise of the Tomb Raider I saw an extra 44 percent performance improvement where the GTX 10 a DSLR is running with maximum settings at just over 60 fps in that configuration in Deus Ex mankind divided again no change to performance here which is a little bit disappointing to see from a modern title that I here supposedly supports SLI but you know I actually didn't see any performance improvements here in a few other games that I don't have charts for like hitman actually turning on SOI hurt the performance of this title in DirectX 12 compared to running with just a single 1080 and in the game like civilization 6 this game is so heavily dependent on the sea you that adding in an extra 10 80 as well doesn't really impact the performance too much at 1080p with most of the games that are usually test with running at well over 60 frames per second with the GTX 1080i so I I thought I've really got to find a game that will show off the performance powerhouses for GTA III VR at 1080p and that game was watchdogs to cranking up all the settings here to their maximum and running out four times MSAA I managed to bring the average frames per second down to around 40 to 50 during just you know driving around the city and having a bit of fun so there are some games out there that will punish the GTX 1080s in this laptop and you won't be able to hit 60 frames per second but of course you can simply turn the msaa down to two times or crank some of those shadow settings down slightly so if you run again well over 60 frames per second with minimums above 60 as well watchdogs to was just one outlier that I could find most titles that I tested with ran at above 60 frames per second and minimum is above 60 at 1080p so use the real power of the GT X 1080 SLR inside this laptop you really will want to plug in a 1440p or 4k display and game of those higher resolutions because you're really you're spending $5,000 on a laptop with top-end performance you'll want to really make those gtx eternity sol run a hundred percent utilization and for that you will need higher screen resolutions or something with a higher refresh rate I'll also briefly touch on the thermal performance of this laptop of course it has a beefy cooling solution inside but I did see in my punishing i-264 test that the CPU was sitting at around 95 degrees Celsius and one of the GPUs was sitting at 88 degrees Celsius the second GPU is around 78 degrees Celsius here and this isn't really a real-world indication of what you'll see in games typically I sort of see you sitting more like 85 degrees C and the GPU also at 85 degrees C in most games but if you are punishing this laptop and running everything at 100% you will run into a few thermal issues here I think maybe running the C period 95 degrees C is a little bit hot but there is a turbofan button you can press on this laptop it cranks the laptop from quite loud to extremely laughs sort of noise levels but that does reduce those temperatures by five to ten degrees most of the time and whilst the up does run somewhat hot and quite loud there is room for overclocking through the msi dragon center you can push it up to 4.2 gigahertz on all four cores on the CPU and you can also add an extra two hundred megahertz to the clock of the GPU this doesn't have a massive impact on the thermals of this laptop so for most of you out there you may as well just push it to the limits and see what it can do because well you spent $5,000 on a laptop so you may as well try and get as much performance as you possibly can having now used the msi gt80 3 VR for a couple of weeks now there's no doubt in my mind that this is the most powerful gaming laptop I have ever tested it's not significantly faster than a single GT X 1080 laptop at 1080p but if you are planning on plugging in an external display something that's higher resolution like 1440p or 4k or if you want to use something higher refresh you really will benefit from the extra GT X 1080 inside the GT 83 DVR and I think that's pretty much what you'd expect from a laptop that costs five thousand dollars or seven thousand Australian dollars you will want the most power possible in a laptop form factor and you definitely get this with the GTA III VR I was also very impressed with the mechanical keyboard that is included here gives great tactile feedback in games and of course it's RGB as well so you can customize it to however you like I think that's really something that you want when you're spending this much money on a laptop I'm still not quite sure who has five thousand dollars to spend on a gaming laptop but if you do have that sort of money to burn it and you want the most powerful Hardware you can possibly get MSI will provide it to you in the GTA III VR unless that's it for this video review I hope you guys enjoyed it I'm your host Tim and I'll catch you in the next one