Gadgetory

there are really only two kinds of gaming laptops that I get personally excited about the massive power-hungry mind-blowing ly fast super car class ones like this dual DT X 1080 monster from Sager that I reviewed recently and the lightweight thin but still potent class that seems to have emerged as a direct response to the original razor blade back in 2013 and this one is part of the latter family meet the msi freshbooks is the super simple invoicing solution that lets you get organized save time and get paid faster click now at the link in the video description to try it for free ok specification time the GS 63 VR as MSI not so subtly implied right in the name Rox on VR ready enthusiasts grade configuration including and Intel Core i7 6700 HQ quad core processor 16 gigs of DDR 4 memory a 128 gig nvme SSD and a GeForce GTX 1060 with 6 gigs of gddr5 vram and as expected they crammed all of this into the same chassis as the GS 63 VRS gtx 970m equipped predecessor that means a 1080p 60 hertz IPS display whose deep black levels look good but failed to help it stand out from the crowd with any wow features like touch higher refresh rates or g-sync a large speaker grille with a bottom mounted subwoofer that both sound decidedly ok and a 720p 30fps webcam that falls squarely in unexceptional territory let's talk i/o now and I'll be making a lot of comparisons here to my daily driver razor blade the GS 63 VR has a bigger screen so it's both larger though not as much as you might think thanks to its smaller bezels and thicker than the razor blade but while this slightly greater Z height means that MSI can't take sexy pictures of it next to dimes it does allow it to have a built-in Ethernet port that's one less accessory to buy and carry around to go along with its otherwise also fairly complete load out including standalone the hemic 2 powered headphone and microphone jacks 3 USB 3 5 gigabit ports an SD card reader and killer Gigabit Ethernet on the left with a power button USB 2 weird right USB type-c Thunderbolt HDMI 2.0 and mini DisplayPort 1.2 on the right which I guess leads to my first complaint I get that MSI is dedicating pretty much the entire back third of this notebook two cooling vents but the effect that this has on mousing space is not a desirable one the power brick thankfully terminates in a right angle connector but if you were to plug in oh I don't know an external Thunderbolt Drive or an external monitor of some sort expecting to use the included keyboard you'd likely find yourself pretty annoyed by how much room you have for your mouse which leads then to complete number two the GS 63 VRS power brick delivers 10 percent more power than razor's brick while being way bigger this isn't important on massive gaming beasts where I generally don't even mention them unless they come with 2 or something like that but it's the kind of thing for a machine that you expect to carry around every day maybe in a briefcase that actually matters because the must-carry accessories are part of the whole package and since I'm on a bit of a complained roll here let's talk bloatware why is winzip on here Norton really and what the hell is magics there was so much junk pre-loaded on this thing that I had no idea to whom my super angry letter about the 100% CPU usage reporting bug should be addressed I thought maybe the culprit was the killer networking suite but removing that didn't help the Windows 10 anniversary update didn't help and even after a factory reset the behavior persisted so I emailed the manufacturer turns out it is a feature of dragon suite that fools Windows intentionally to keep it from entering a lower power state to speed up data transfers over SATA and dot 2 and USB I am oh that should be disabled by default and come with a warning when you turn it on because I spent about an hour tearing my hair out trying to fix it anyway though the good news is that was a simple software toggle and the rest of that stuff can be fixed with a good old fashioned add/remove programs purged so I'm going to get back into the hardware now the keyboard is RGB with three lighting zones and SteelSeries engine software to handle your macro and key rebinding needs having a number pad again is but I'm still going to give the keyboard of B it is quiet but I personally prefer a sharper tactile bump even so though with a little less deck flex and function up/down arrow reassigned to page up and page down instead of brightness up and brightness down I would increase that to a B+ with the touchpad falling into a pretty similar category two-handed operation works like a charm and the surface feels good but I really don't like their acceleration algorithm and the Elan software doesn't offer much in the way of tuning options out of the box let's move on to performance when Luke said at the GTX 10 series notebook GPU launch event that he was disappointed they wouldn't let him benchmark the 1060 which he thought was the most interesting of the bunch I think he nailed it my points of comparison for this video since this is my first 10 series single GPU notebook are the gtx 970m in my daily driver blade 14 the last gen thin gaming GPU of choice and the GTX 980 desktop version in MSI gt70 2's anniversary edition and the performance here blows me away and it should do the same to you that in a single generation we've cut the difference between this and this in half and this is all while showing off some very impressive thermal performance it's hard to say how much of this is thanks to the gtx 1060 until I get some more samples and how much is thanks to MSI's approach to cooling which you can see with our internal shot has them really taking advantage of the extra area inside the GS 63 VR with three fans and many heat pipes on an unusual upside-down motherboard configuration but it works and MSI even managed to squeeze user upgradeable sodium slots in there they aren't easy to get at but they're in there so this machine is quieter than most and much cooler to the touch than any other thin and light gaming machine that I've used yet the weird moleskin covering on the bottom actually seems to help too it slows heat transfer to your skin when you have it resting on your laps kind of a nice touch and the positives keep coming battery life ain't too shabby either one and a half hours while running Christ three is nothing to sneeze at considering I didn't even crank the brightness down so bottom line then while Emma sighs GS 63 VR might not be the thinnest or the smallest thin and light gaming machine it utilizes its extra size very well to deliver more i/o including Thunderbolt 3 a bigger display beefy cooling and a number pad for folks who work as well as play and thanks to its magnesium lithium alloy chassis it's slightly lighter even than the razor blade that is to say if we ignore the obnoxious power brick while also costing less I'm not a huge fan of the 120 gig SSD one terabyte hard drive config in this particular unit larger SSDs not only hold more but they also perform better substantially better like I noticed it but throw a bigger SSD in there and the GS 63 VR is a really solid platform that will make a lot of gamers happy but you know what isn't bloatware tunnel bear tunnel bear is the simple VPN application that makes it easy to browse privately and enjoy a more open internet with tunnel bear turned on your Wi-Fi connection is secured and your online activity is kept private from your internet provider advertisers and basically anyone looking to track you or profit from your data tunnel bear has a top rated privacy policy and does not log your activity and most importantly it is easy to use with a 500 megabyte free trial with no credit card required so you can see if it's right for you so check it out at the link in the video description and if you choose to get a year of unlimited data you can save 10% I go in a tunnel bear comm /l TT so thanks for watching 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