Gadgetory

engineered to handle the most demanding networks ultimate power uncompromised speed meet the Linksys hello everyone this is Dimitri with heroic Knox and today we're going to take a look at an extremely powerful gaming notebook from MSI featuring invidious latest Maxwell GPU this is a ge70 from their apache series and like with any notebook in this class price is determined per configuration the base model starts at 1300 and this is actually pretty affordable considering the hardware packed inside this machine so let's take a look what we have here is a core i7 at 3.4 gigahertz at turbo mode 12 gigs of ram nvidia gtx 860m with 2 gigabytes of vram and windows 8.1 on a painfully slow one terabyte mechanical drive that is the sole bottleneck for this powerhouse the GE 70 is a 17 inch notebook 17.3 to be exact with a 1080p display and an integrated HD webcam this is an LED backlit panel with very good side to side viewing but contrast suffers significantly with vertical angle adjustment it's a non glare display and does open up at an acceptable wide angle the screen is bright and also vibrant and I love the amount of real estate you get with the 17 inches the notebook for the side is actually surprisingly light at 3 kilograms and at only one point six inches thick so it's quite portable for this form factor and also take a look at the size of the power brick it's very small for a gaming notebook so I'm really happy about that aesthetically the ge70 carries the standard boring MSI notebook feel nothing has changed that within their Apache series much with the brushed aluminum body throughout so expect to have a fingerprint covered shell the moment you lay your hands on this thing the logo does illuminate in a subtle white glow it's very nice and aside from the keyboard there are no additional lighting with the g17 the brushed aluminum also found its way into the internal frame with the glossy accents surrounding the keyboard and while that looks great this is absolutely not a place for black brushed aluminum this is a shot after 10 minutes of me using the keyboard and I certainly don't want to constantly wipe the surface and I really dislike this material choice here the trackpad is also slightly grainy making smooth navigation almost impossible and quite frankly a real pain after 15 minutes of use as it picks up the oils from your fingers the left and right click are also very hard to press requiring a lot of force and many times it would register the left click when just tracking on the surface or get stuck with the continuous left click without me even touching the trackpad so I'm very impressed on a better note though all the notifications and activity LEDs are located right where they should be below the trackpad now moving on to the keyboard it is designed by SteelSeries with great tactile response and quick bounce and the keys are actually slightly heavier than my MX cherry red switches also the keyboard does exhibit a lot of flags so I wish there was a bit more solid support underneath there are three colors zones that you can play around with with multiple color modes like this music mode that changes color based on music playback it's quite fun the game mode that only illuminates the left portion with a fade on the right and many others that could personalize your experience the keys are curved as well and the height of the notebook was not a problem at all for either typing or gaming obviously however in the main heat pockets with the g7 TR on the side where the exhaust is on the left with the entire left side getting noticeably warm along with the area underneath the space bar so my left hand was constantly sweating and thus leaving that mark that nasty mark on the surface while the temperatures were not an issue with the CPU and the GPU hitting around the 90 degree mark it was still fully stable but there's no other exhaust on the other side or the back this leaves a lot of heat concentrated on the spot where you don't want it the most on your left side it's for connectivity on the left we have an SD card slot audio jacks with two USB 3 ports an HDMI 1.4 so it's fully capable of 4k output at 60 Hertz but they are all sort of crammed into this one spot populating all which may cause clearance issues and this should not have been overlooked and spaced out a little more then there's a side ventilation that we've taken look before power plug and the Kensington lock on the other side we have a USB 2 port optical drive that's rather loose when it's out it's not a big deal but I thought I'd mention it there's a high power USB port for charging and powering power-hungry USB devices VGA output and also a Gigabit Ethernet the ge70 does feature AC wireless as well so network performance was always top-notch one thing I'm impressed with are the speakers these are from Dyna Audio and I'm very happy with the sound quality and the placement the a located right beneath the panel providing excellent directional stereo audio with red lining underneath the frame that looks pretty exceptional very small subwoofers are also located at the bottom for a little bit extra bass response they don't exactly rumble or vibrate the machine but instead provide a full range like sound now it's finally take a listen at how loud this laptop is hey this is three tree with her broken ox and today we're checking out a wireless solution for your gaming needs and I'm going to say this would be a truly cross-platform audio solution between consoles PCs Macs or any other device that outputs audio taking a look at the bottom one thing that really bothered me was the non warranty friendly user upgrade the belly of the notebook is removable with a few screws to get your RAM and drive slots however the last screw is covered in the warranty void if altered sticker and in the market where these types of upgrades are very common MSI's should allow users to upgrade that painfully slow terabyte drive and perhaps reconsider their warranty policy next is the noise test that complements what I just said about upgrading that terabyte mechanical Drive as you can hear the drive spinning that's very annoying especially when this happens all the time even when on idle the fan is audible and can yet actually pretty loud when gaming now there's even a dedicated fan speed boost button that helps with cooling but it sure isn't quiet and beside it is a color switch button for the keyboard to quickly cycle through the color options now let's talk performance numbers and being gaming oriented battery life is very important the G 70 does come with a removable 44 milliamp hour battery that recharges to 100 percent while powered off in just two hours as for gaming time I got 42 minutes with Metro last slide benchmark on the loop on battery and since this also features invidious battery boost technology that basically works to manage resources that are needed for a specific frame target so it will adjust frequencies and voltages of your components I get extra 5 minutes of gameplay with a 30fps target while 1 minute less with battery boost at 50 FPS so gaming on battery in this sort of worst case scenario still looks pretty disappointing the ge70 does underclock both the CPU and the GPU quite heavily while on battery resulting in less impressive results requiring you to play at 720p for decent frame rates the CPU frequency drops from 3.4 gigahertz plugged in to 1.3 gigahertz on battery while the GPU drops from about 1 gigahertz mark to about 650 megahertz so in Crysis 3 at 720p on medium we get an average of 41 fps Metro last light and 720p on medium we get about 40 and Assassin's Creed 4 at 31 fps and also to demonstrate the performance dropped while on battery 3dmark scored 28 12 while plugged in we had a score of 49 34 this is a 43% performance drop while on battery however when plugged in playing the latest triple-a titles maxed out yield some while performance for the price and form-factor color duty ghosts' averaging in 56 fps with full AAA BioShock Infinite at 60fps easy Metro last light is very demanding maxed out at 35 fps Assassin's Creed 4 at over 30 frames a second which is nice Crysis 3 drops anything to eat sneeze fully maxed out so 22 FPS isn't particularly surprising in battlefield 4 and ultra preset averaging at 37 FPS of course maxed out gaming performance is important for sort of comparative analysis but in reality it does come down to playable settings with each system so optimizing the game through GeForce experience is both very simple and yields very satisfying frame rates at 1080p and high settings now I know it's been a long one here but let's quickly recap the ge70 is light and things for its own factor with a very small power brick steelseries keyboard is excellent in terms of feedback and backlight as well the display is vibrant although it's not an IPS Dynaudio speaker is a very satisfactory and the ge70 features the latest Maxwell NVIDIA GPU that yields very capable gaming results on pretty much maxed out settings and the $1,300 this is very impressive however regardless of how attractive this price point may be there are so many small details that have been overlooked like the OL aluminum casing inside that leaves your machine looking terrible after use the trackpad is both difficult to press and lacks smooth tracking making navigation in Windows true patience tests all the ports on left side are way too close together and might introduce clearance issues plus only one exhaust on the left it gets quite loud and heats up the entire left side of the notebook causing unavoidable hand sweat user upgrade for the drives and memory are also locked up with a warranty sticker making the painfully slow 1 terabyte drive a real bottleneck for Windows tasks if you're used to working off speedy SSDs and lastly the performance of battery is both disappointing into poro scales as squeezing out about 45 minutes of gaming and the significant drop in performance that would not think we want to gain while on the go and before we conclude make sure to watch our Maxwell overview video outlining all the features and many other things that we haven't really touched up in this video by taking the g 70 for what it is at $1,300 how you feel about the sort of the overall package leave your comment down below let us know how you feel make sure to subscribe and like if you want to see more gaming notebook reviews and as always thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next one