Gadgetory

if I learned anything from the last video it's that you guys seem to think that BEC is a green-screen okay that's really outside gaming laptops this is one of those topics that even bringing it up makes some of the highest end enthusiasts in the community cringe because often they're considered to be too heavy too hot and a terrible value now I would normally agree with that in fact I wasn't even doing laptop reviews for the first four years of my channel I felt that there was no point and I was with you guys when I said that they were too expensive for which get but that's all changed now let's talk real quick about gaming laptops and who might actually want one maybe we should start with what is a gaming laptop well typically gaming laptops just have discreet graphics it's the only thing that really makes them different usually they have a little bit faster CPUs maybe a little bit of overclocking available to them but usually they're pretty locked down and very limited now that's where this comes in this is emphasized new flagship the GT 73 we are tightened I've been using it now for about four months I told the company that I was going to be doing some extensive testing on this in all sorts of environments including traveling and I wanted to get a real hands-on experience with this without just playing around with it and then saying oh yeah this is a gaming laptop and this is hell performed I actually rendered all of my CES videos on this guy I rendered my video from San Francisco on this guy and so far since I've been here in the office the only computer I've been using is this guy now the only person I could really see wanting this level of power a laptop would be be traveling power user now that's what I used to do for my company one for almost ten years I worked in IT I traveled to our various satellite offices and our customers and clients that we service sometimes on the road up to three weeks at a time when I had a little HP probook that had you know integrated graphics I could barely even play a game like League of Legends and trust me when I say that three weeks in the hotel with no gaming and nothing to do made for a very depressing trip so obviously something like this would have been welcome but that was also back in the mid to late 2000s and there wasn't that much power to actually be had in a notebook but that's all changed due to the efficiency of GPUs and CPU today now this unit right here it specifically featuring 268 20 HK it is an unlocked overclockable chip we'll talk about that in a second but it also has a full-blown GT X 1080 chip in here giving you an extremely good gaming experience it's not a 1080 M or some sort of an M version of the chip which you know usually has lost CUDA cores and less power this is the same exact thing you would get if you bought like a founders Edition card and yes it is also overclockable now even though we've seen some great efficiency improvements on CPU and GPU cooling is still something that's very important and that's what MSI has definitely thought out on this particular unit right here the entire bottom is nothing but one big giant vent it's got completely open intake on the bottom and it's got four exhaust ports one on each side and two on the back now speaking of the back it's got a very cool look that's something that a lot of people tend to not like about gaming laptops they tend to be very over-the-top and very gaudy and this one's kind of on the edge of that depending on what your tastes may be but I think it has kind of a neat like sort of a lamborghini aventador look to the back of it that's obviously going to be subjective to taste but I think MSI kept it pretty toned down compared to some gaming laptops that are out there MSI also offers full tailoring of these so that you can outfit them to kind of meet your need to bring the price down in some areas like for instance is available in a 4k I opted for the 1080p 120 Hertz panel because what the 1080 it's still not enough power to do 4k gaming and the 17 inch screen with a 4k display in my opinion is just not very smart so attending 2p 120 Hertz was perfect especially for gaming and the 1080 has no problems keeping up with high frame rates and very smooth g-sync 120 Hertz because it is this is also a GC panel it also has an SSD raid setup in here as well as an SSD main drive so we are getting extremely fast performance on this thing if you don't want all that of course you don't have to configure it that far up now it also features the SteelSeries keyboard in here so it's got LED lighting you can configure them by zones or individual lights however you want to do there's a lot of customization here now let's talk about overclocking because that was something that was important to me especially since I'm doing my rendering on this now this is a full four core eight thread 6820 HK like I said that I currently have clocked to 4.1 gigahertz how big of an overclock is that well this chip actually ships out of the box at 2.7 gigahertz now it can get a little bit noisy if you're doing things like rendering and whatnot but you can also go into the msi software the dragon app and actually set up fan profiles with the lighting profiles and all sorts of screen customizations and thai blue filters and stuff like that so really you're getting the same type of experience you would on a desktop in a very much more portable form factor the gtx 1080 is also overclockable on this thing so you have complete overclocking of CPU and GPU but of course you have to keep in mind that if you do that you are going to definitely ramp up the heat that's in the thing which you're going to want to keep it cool with an aggressive fan profile which means noise in fact it even has a button on here like a turbo button for the fans so if you're doing something that's really strenuous and you just want to say hey fans though as fast as you can or you can push that but keep in mind you might make your neighbors a little upset it kind of looks like a jet in the back sounds like one two now I was able to get about an hour of gaming time on this with it on the high performance profile which means no slowing down of CPU and GPU and dimming of the screen try and save battery life but a solid hour with this much hardware it's actually not that bad the downside though is check out this power brick yeah this thing right here is about the size of some laptops altogether it definitely weighs a few pounds as well something to keep in mind yeah now the cool thing about this having a full sized GT x 1080 GPU and there is that pretty much any game I play with the 120 Hertz 1080p panel it's pretty much locked at 120 fps the g-sync in there does a great job of keeping the frames really smooth I play games like Grand Theft Auto 5 rise of the Tomb Raider Diablo of color Diablos not very demanding on games but any game I threw at this it had no problem whatsoever just churning out the FPS and giving me a very usable experience a usable man was damn good experience 120 FPS locks on most games would even a game like a grand total 5 like I said a lot of CPU usage in that game has no problem keeping up whatsoever I definitely wouldn't recommend though putting this on your your lap if you still value maybe having kids in the future it gets a little hot at time now one thing I want to talk about real quick that you should probably keep in mind on a laptop this size and the size of the vents right here in the back of the laptop they're big enough for small objects to kind of work their way in there if you have any sort of debris or anything in your backpack see if you can hear it oh one just fell out ok that's good in my backpack I left one of those little I didn't see it in the bottom of the little silicon packs that are designed to kind of like I guess absorb moisture or whatever they're there for when they're in shipping it broke open and then all those little pellets went in here thankfully there inert and they're not like any sort of conductive piece of stuff but I've already taken the bottom off this thing and put it back together and then I traveled to the airport San Francisco and came home and there was more rattling I said what the heck and I finally figured it out so keep your backpacks clean small little objects can work their way in there which is not good so my guys tell me what you think about gaming laptops in general I know they're typically a love it or hate it type of product and typically the only people I find that actually appreciate them or understand their purpose are people like me who are power users who travel and want the power to go with them at the sacrifice of weight noise and a little bit of extra heat this guy right here is definitely giving you desktop performance and something that can fit in your backpack which I think everyone should appreciate but it's not cheap I mean these can go up to well almost endless but this one right here is about $3,200 not cheap now the four months I've been using this I have not experienced any sort of weird issues with the hardware itself I've really put this thing through the paces I overclocked it on day one it's from running a full speed overclock nonstop it's sitting here right now at the desktop at 4.0 5 gigahertz it's actually set before point one but like I said because the P clock adjustments it goes down slightly fewer power users you know what that means with the SSD raid array and 64 gigabytes of ddr4 in this laptop I have to say that I am absolutely in love with the performance of this thing now that's exactly what I requested from MSI I need I said I need something that I can play my games on in my you know pcmr high refresh rate high fps you know I can't go down to 60 anymore because I'm a panel snob now and I need something that can also meet my needs with rendering and I rendered a 50 megabit 4k video the tour that you guys saw this 11 minute video in just under 20 minutes that's not bad at all for a laptop that's fantastic all right guys time to go thanks for watching today's video I hope you learned something about some gaming laptops at least seen how far we've come and even just the last couple of years in terms of small form-factor computing power so I'm going to go now once you guys hit that like button if you enjoyed today's video give me some more topic ideas you think I should cover and as always I'll see you in the next one