Gadgetory

with its factory tuning and data center DNA and Intel 730 series SSD is an amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts by popular demand here is my video about the msi gs70 sexy gaming notebook that made big waves at CES 2014 so let's start with a brief rundown of the specs it's got a Haswell 4th gen core i7 4708 q quad-core processor that's clocked anywhere from 2.4 to 3.4 Giga Hertz depending on the turbo-boost frequency it's got a 15.6 inch 1920 by 1080 matte IPS display that uses embedded DisplayPort rather than a more traditional notebook interface internally although don't worry too much about that all you guys need to know is it looks very beautiful and motion blur doesn't seem to be a concern here huge points for using a nice IPS panel and not using a TN panel on a gaming notebook I hope those days are behind us it's got 16 gigs or 12 gigs of ddr3 memory depending on the SKU and it comes with the gtx 860m 2 gig with gddr5 memory graphics card although there's a pro model coming later that will have an 870 m and will upgrade the screen to a 3k IPS panel for storage it has a 128 gig M SATA SSD with either a 1 terabyte or 750 gig 7200 rpm Drive and for network connectivity it's got a 70 260 802.11 AC intel wireless card that also includes bluetooth as well as a killer e 20 200 Gigabit LAN implementation with packet prioritization the power brick is a little bit on the larger side but at least it's thinner than a typical one there could be some improvement here especially with what we've seen from a razer with respect to how power bricks can be innovated on physically the laptop is absolutely stunning it's only nineteen point eight millimeters thick that makes it about 10 percent thinner than gigabytes P 34 G and 10 percent thicker than the Razer Blade 14 it weighs only one point nine eight kilograms which makes it marginally lighter than the Razer Blade 14 in spite of its significantly larger screen and overall size this is achieved with a special magnesium lithium alloy construction that manages to feel solid in spite of the lightness of the material the overall build quality of this notebook is a really strong point there's about as much flex in the screen as my GX 660 from a few years ago except it's much much thinner and better looking so we'll do a short tour of the ports around the outside of the notebook it's gonna drop that there okay so on the left hand side we've got a ventilation port as well as a Kensington lock power into USB 3 ports microphone and headphone jacks at the front we have all the indicator LEDs with everything from drive activity to wireless - caps lock then on the right hand side we've got a USB 3 port SD card reader very nice Thank You MSI for including that I still use them HDMI out mini DisplayPort out that the hard-wired Gigabit LAN I was talking about and another ventilation port then at the back we've got two more ventilation ports and that is pretty much all she wrote now on the top of the notebook once you've opened it up you can see there's a massive grille here that I initially thought was for speakers but actually it's for ventilation the speakers are located instead near the bottom of the front of the notebook and beyond pointing out that their performance doesn't feel worthy of the Dynaudio co-branding I don't have too much to say about those speaking of branding though the back of the notebook is absolutely beautiful the brushed aluminum finish here looks even better in person than it does on camera and the subtly illuminated gaming series branding reminds me of a performance vehicle rather than tacky gamer bling like on MSI's earlier gaming notebooks the one disadvantage here as you can see I'm wearing gloves is that it does tend to fingerprint pretty aggressively the keyboard and touchpad locations both Luke and I noticed almost immediately that something was a little bit different about the this layout but it took me about 30 minutes and a measuring tape to find exactly what was bothering me first up the touchpad is offset to the left and aligned directly below the home row second the touchpad and the keyboard have been moved down to make room for the grill and loan power button up at the top this gives it a smaller wrist rest surface compared to other notebooks this size the last thing I noticed was that the real patient of the start button is an unnecessary decision on a notebook with a fully programmable keyboard more on that later by the way shifted the space bar to the left quite a bit and I use my right hand for space most often and it threw me off a bit at first to be barely hitting the right edge of the spacebar rather than being closer to the middle but aside from those niggles about the layout the tactile response of this SteelSeries co-branded RGB backlit keyboard is surprisingly solid and its lack of flex combined with a surprisingly long key travel distant makes it feel great considering that it's on a notebook this thin all in all I was impressed with how quickly and accurately I could type after a short adjustment period and I consider the inclusion of the SteelSeries engine software powering it a bonus at this point it gives you four layers of remapped or macro functionality for every key per profile an unlimited number of profiles a wide variety of led effects including wave breathing in multiple colors and even some other neat features like a heat map of your most frequently used keys so you can analyze your gaming style and optimize your key mappings for the shortest travel distances the touchpad is less exceptional so all I'll say is that the subtle chromed accent around the outside looks really really sharp other than that it's a touchpad and ok changing gears a bit I really wasn't sure where in the review to put this but this notebook features Nvidia's new battery boost that lets you save GPU power by entering a limit to the number of frames the GPU will drop per second when the laptop is on battery I found a spot in crisis that runs at 50 FPS on wall power and 40 FPS on battery normally and I ran it both with a 30fps limiter and without it then I used a time-lapse camera to see when the battery actually ran down my limited scenario I only did one test achieved 47 minutes of playtime versus 45 minutes of playtime without the limiter so I'll take the 10 FPS over the 2 minutes of extra time in this case but it's obvious to me that this feature requires some more investigation so the only real takeaway here is that if you're not playing at low details or running older games that your GPU can plow through at really high frame rates you're unlikely to see the 2 time's battery life that nvidia says the technology is capable of delivering some other thoughts now both razor with the blade 14 and gigabyte with the ARS x7 made a big fuss about their cooling implementation but MSI has been relatively quiet and even covers up the bottom of the notebook with a big warranty void if removed sticker to prevent inexperienced users from mucking about in there but the good news is that as long as you don't physically damage the inside they will still honor the one-year global and to your local warranty so let's find out what makes the GS 60 so cool while keeping it within reasonable noise levels first up it's obvious why on the side doesn't want end users trying to upgrade this thing other than the tuna half inch hard drive and Wi-Fi module nothing is accessible without removing the entire motherboard we can get a good look at the cooling solution though so there are two blower fan cooling modules that are connected via heat pipes to the CPU and GPU and that pull air in from both the top and the bottom of the notebook when it's open and then exhausted out both the sides and the rear we can also see that the sound system includes two speakers that I didn't notice before that fire down and away from the user at the back of the unit although they didn't help much I also noticed while I was poking around that while MSI's website says the SSD is M SATA the slot is plugged into is in fact MDOT to a newer standard that is a derivative of SATA Express and capable of higher throughput than M SATA with an appropriate SSD on top of that there are actually two of them and MSI confirmed that they are both functional and a handy notebook owner could easily throw a couple of MDOT two SSDs in there in raid zero for a hefty storage upgrade with that out of the way let's take a look at our actual temperatures for a gaming notebook I expect the keyboard to stay relatively cool so as not to heat up your hands while you're gaming and I use the chassis temperature near the rear exhaust as a gauge of the overall cooling efficiency of the notebook I run Crysis 1 for both of these tests and I'd say the results are great to the point where the trade-off between cooling and onboard sound may have been worth it but that's going to come down to the individual to make that decision alright so who's the competition for this notebook obvious ones are the Mac Pro 15 inch the razorblade 14 or maybe the ARS x7 but those are all somewhat different sizes with different feature sets and very different price points so that makes the conversation here less about how does it stack up to the other well built yet thin and superlight 15.6 inch gave me great notebooks with HD displays since there ain't really much out there and more about who is this product for I mean well the short answers that is targeted at the same sorts of folks as those other models that is to say on-the-go gamers but with a couple of features that really differentiate it it's weight - screen size ratio is a big one and so is the inclusion of a full size number pad something that will be important to many road warriors who want to get some work done on the thing while they're traveling the great feeling keyboard and the fact that all the gamer bling except the badge on the back is optional and can be configured in software it keeps this notebook from falling into the no one with the money to afford this would want to be seen with it trap and finally the strong specs very limited bloatware although I did see a copy of Norton there and fairly aggressive pricing compared to other well-built thin gaming notebooks makes it a very compelling option speaking of compelling options cheero is back with another deal for Linus tech tips viewers they're gripped two portable batteries on for $9.99 at the link in the video description it's small and hand shaped so you can carry it around with you and it's one amp charging port is hooked up to a surprisingly large 5200 milliamp hour internal battery that has enough capacity to charge an iPhone twice with capacity to spare and even the beefiest Android phones at least once or more it's available in four different colors I've got the blue one here and the high quality internal battery can be recharged around 500 times now if this sounded like a sales pitch I'm about to make things even worse because act now and I'll throw in this flashlight a $9.99 value free of charge wait that can't be right oh wait that can't be right hold on sorry no no it's not free of charge it's rechargeable and the grip too is the flesh LED for a flashlight so fantastic anyway guys like and share this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it and leave a comment on the Linus tech tips forum linked in the video description if you want to discuss this product or you have any constructive criticism for me and my team also linked in the video description is our support link with options to buy t-shirts like this one give us a monthly contribution or give us a kickback whenever you buy stuff on Amazon including this one that'll be an affiliate link that's in the video description check it out if you enjoy our videos it helps us out a whole bunch and as always guys thank you for watching and don't forget to subscribe