Gadgetory

today I have a very unique skew to unbox and I use terms like like skew with you guys but I know you don't necessarily know what that means so skew stands for stock keeping unit and that means that it is a particular configuration of notebook that has a unique identifier like a part number whereas the shell that is what the notebook looks like could have any number of SKUs associated with it if you had different configurations like different CPUs amounts of memory graphics cards or whatever else so this skill is unique this is using MSI's GTS 685 shell so it is a 15.6 inch notebook it has their Dynaudio in my testing significantly better than average speaker system it has their LED lighting strips it has it's got a decent keyboard on it it's not the best it's not the worst it's got their built-in overclocking I'm just opening this up as quickly as I can here because the most interesting about thing about this notebook is actually nothing to do with the shell but actually the configuration inside so we're gonna grab the battery because we will need that for later so it comes with a battery comes with a copy of dirt3 as well as your utilities QuickStart guide manual all that good stuff it comes with an enormous power brick do the old iPhone comparison oh actually the iPhone comparison might not necessarily be valid if I have it in a case so that's how big it is you can go ahead and get a better angle of that from the side maybe to show them the thickness while I'm sorting out other things over here so yes it's an enormous power brick and the reason for that is that while this is a core i5 notebook that's actually fairly high price this is a $1700 notebook at retail what's cool about it is the fact that it has a ix 580 em inside a 5 atm so why would you have a GTX 580 em with a core i5 dual core CPU and the answer to that is because I thought it was a good idea so I asked MSI based on my request to create this view what they've done is compared to other similar models they have downgraded the CPU from a quad core to a dual core that is from an i7 2 and i-5 they have downgraded the memory because normally a system of this caliber that is about a $1700 system would come with about 16 gigs around these days they have downgraded the hard drive so instead of going with dual hard drives in raid 0 which they are apt to do with with this particular shell because it can hold 2 drives which is a very very cool feature and so now you've got one empty drive which you can throw an SSD in once you out once you receive the notebook and then they've used all of that extra budget that we saved on all those other things and upgraded the GPU to a 5 ATM so what does this mean for the usage model of this notebook well for one thing don't buy this notebook if you're a video encoder if you're a video editor or if you're planning on doing any serious 3d modeling work or anything like that because the dual core is gonna really slow you down even though it does have hyper threading however if you are a gamer this system is going to be delightful because most all of the downgrades that have been made to the system are not going to really affect games too much so yes we've gone to a dual core CPU but it's clocked higher and most games are still preferring to use fewer cores at higher frequencies so there's that the 8 gigs of ram is still more than adequate for pretty much any game that's out there right now although you can upgrade it if you want the additional graphics card firepower is what's really going to deliver that buttery smooth performance so what else do we have here that I'm missing so it has a map screen which is great so many gaming shells come with glossy screens these days because they are cheaper in order to achieve the contrast that the manufacturers are going for it is an LED backlit panel as you know Wireless and got your eco button Bluetooth Wi-Fi all those intro it just turned on the Wi-Fi fascinating all those interesting features you can actually change I don't know if it's gonna work now when we're not booted up into the OS but you can actually change the lighting effects so you can turn on and off the ones that are on the sides the ones that are on the front and then the MSI logo I think is lit all the time here on the back we're gonna have a bit of a closer look at the notebook itself though so it's fairly thick although this is probably about as small and thin of a shell that you're gonna find a GTX 580 in at any point in time here's a cool thing going along with their Dynaudio better audio for notebooks theme you've actually got dedicated 5.1 out ports which is very cool we've got USB you got a DVD drive on the back you find your power your Gigabit Ethernet your VGA your eSATA your HDMI this is the perfect combination I think because you still do run into needs for VGA from time to time but HDMI is smaller and more compact and DVI so very convenient you've got huge exhaust fans here and here and you will need them the GTX 580 is a beast we've also got a USB 3 ports 2 of those an SD card reader another USB 2.0 port and then on the front we just find some vents that they're not actually vents they just have lights behind them so they glow orange when you set it to do so upgrading this notebook is a piece of cake I've actually done it on my channel I think and with this particular shell not this skew but yeah you can see one of your drives there so you just take off this whole panel and you can access your memory upgrades as well as your hard drive and you can have a look at that expensive fancy GPU that you just spent a lot of money on because a GTX 580 M is not cheap so thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at I never even told you the SKU this is the GT 6 8 5 8 1 8 us oh he wants me to hold this up okay sure and it has an HD webcam which I didn't mention yet and that's pretty much it so this is this is as close to a custom Lynas edition skew as it gets because this ski was created based on my request for a more balanced configuration so I downgraded everything we didn't need and I wanted to beef up the GPU as much as possible to deliver the best possible gaming experience on a notebook within a sub $2,000 budget it's actually a few hundred dollars less than that so we're actually going to be testing it against another notebook on my NCIX Clown channel so you're gonna want to make sure you're subscribed not only the Linus tech tips for more unboxings and videos like this but also NCIX comm so you can see the showdown between this one and the similarly expensive Asus model with of GTX R 560 and a quad core and lots of RAM and all that all the other bells and whistles