Gadgetory

excellent welcome everyone to Paul's review review of jo-ann tech lovers review of the msi ge62 apache gaming laptop today paul's review review is brought to you by pauls hardware net where among other things you can buy t-shirts like this one to impress your friends and to support the cause of course since this is a new series i'm going to give a brief explanation you see there's a lot of tech reviewers out there but how can you know which reviews to choose from paul's review review is here to review those reviews so you can be confident in your review watching decisions speaking of if you watch this video and you decide you want me to make more videos in this series please let me know by hitting that like button so Joann published her review of the msi ge62 apache gaming laptop on february 2nd on her youtube channel joann tech lover i'll do what everyone does and just skip straight to Joanne's conclusion I guess all that's left to say is muah see you next time actually before she said that she gave two pretty full lists of pros and cons but overall she liked the laptops gaming capabilities and features like the RGB keyboard and SD card slot for cons she mentioned the Windows key position on the keyboard which I agree with and the lack of an SSD which I'm gonna address later jo-ann's review was very thorough though which is awesome because it means that my video doesn't really have to be to provide some basis up for comparison here's my less thorough overview of the msi ge62 apache which has a starting MSRP of 13 $99.99 for the lowest end configuration that i have here the top is brushed metal with some angled contours that look quite pleasing but it is a fingerprint magnet as you might expect however the gaming G Series logo does light up and wind-powered on the front has centered Wi-Fi battery and drive activity lights with speakers on the left and right and then along the right side is a DVD burner USB 2.0 port SD card reader and power jack while on the left side you have separate mic and headphone jacks three USB 3.0 ports mini DisplayPort that can do 4k at 60 Hertz HDMI that can do up to 4k at 30 Hertz and you can do video from both of these to connect to tour external displays effectively giving you three displays at the same time then also there's an Ethernet jack for the killer e 20 200 and a Kensington lock along the back edge is a red accent stripe and exhausts for the duel fans on either side this is my preferred location for laptop exhaust by the way build quality overall is sturdy and according to the media kit the G 62 weighs in at five point two nine pounds or 2.4 kilograms which isn't too bad for a gaming notebook although the MSI website right now says five point nine five pounds which is what Joanne said which is why we say two different things when it comes to the weight of this laptop also it's only one point one four inches or 28 millimeters thick again not quite ultra book status but still quite trim for a gaming system inside you can see the 15.6 inch 1920 by 1080 anti-glare screen which msi says is an IPS level TN which i think is them trying to say it's one of the newer TN panels that doesn't suck and it does have pretty wide viewing angles and decent color reproduction for a nine non IPS display up here there's also a 720p webcam and then down below you have your full RGB backlit steelseries keyboard which has a ton of color configuration options in the software that joann did a really good job walking through in detail but i do want to point out that you have a range of shortcuts available via the function button on the keyboard and a couple dedicated buttons up near the power to turn the fans to max to cool the system if needed or to launch the SteelSeries engine software directly the keyboard backplate and trackpad are also finished in brushed aluminum which again looks nice but I wasn't particularly fond of using it on the trackpad as the texture provides resistance against your finger moving left to right but not up and down also as mentioned earlier I agree with Joanne that the placement of the windows button here wasn't my favorite I didn't do a full unboxing of this laptop so here's a quick look at that it is well packaged and comes with a pretty decent sized power brick which will add some weight if you're traveling also documentation and software's included including a 6-month xsplit trial subscription next I'll move along to specs but also into uncharted territory as I take on some subjects that Joann actually did not from the bottom of the G 62 we can see plenty of ventilation rubber feet and a warranty void if removed stickers I asked them aside what the deal is with these and if they really don't want people opening up their laptops they said that it's basically a preventative measure if you know what you're doing and you don't do something stupid like punching holes in the PCB or filling the housing with peanut butter then you'll still be okay warranty wise I've listed these specs on left though the highlights are the core i7 4720 h2 quad-core CPU nvidia gtx 960 5m2 gigabyte discrete GPU and eight gigs of ddr3 l memory as mention though this is the lowest end model so inside there's lots of expansion available the 2.5 inch hard drive is our only mass storage that ships with this laptop it's a one terabyte drive it comes installed so the downside to getting this version and then adding your own SSD later would be that you'd have to migrate the windows 8.1 operating system over but it does give you the option to choose your own m to drive or drives to fill any of these three empty slots higher-end models can come with SSD arrays pre-configured using these m dot two spots and something msi calls super raid 2 that can get you read speeds of up to 1500 megabytes a second that's pretty awesome you can also see to som slots the 2 speakers and the subwoofer for the Dynaudio speaker system and the dual fan cooling solution with three heat pipes dedicated to the 965 m also there's a six cell battery I did run some benchmarks so here's a quick look at those I got about the same fire strike score as Joanne and MSI for that matter just below 4800 by comparison a full-size desktop gtx 960 will score about 7000 on this test so not bad at all for a gaming laptop BioShock Infinite and Metro last light were also reasonable scores please keep in mind that I'm using the highest settings for these tests at 1080 with 4x anti-aliasing you'll be able to play these games just maybe not with everything turned up to ultra like that I also want to do a quick gaming demo so I just played through some Crysis 3 and some battlefield 4 since these are very demanding titles there's a quick bit of battlefield 4 gameplay for you guys basically I had to set everything to between high and medium settings in order to get a framerate that I deemed to be nice and playable which is above 60 frames per second right now I'm at about a 75 to 80 frames per second although is different a little bit earlier when I was running through the hallways but also as you can maybe hear right now the fans are kicking into pretty decently high gear but we are using the more strenuous setting in the msi menu x up a little crysis 3 yeah this game is just a really difficult one on a lot of systems so i had to mess around with everything and eventually I settled on pretty much low settings for graphics quality and everything am able to have fxaa on but I'm kind of hovering right around 60 to 70 FPS and sometimes dipping a little bit below I'm also doing pretty terribly right now I also noted that MSI included xsplit and has marketed this as a laptop not just for gaming but also for streaming so here's a quick streaming demonstration remember that streaming while you game on the same system is very intensive as the CPU also has to encode the upload stream on-the-fly so here is a live streaming demonstration I'm streaming to my twitch channel which is pulse Hardware I'm using just the laptop so I'm using the webcam to show my face to the stream I'm using the xsplit games game caster software that comes with it you get a six-month license for that I'm live streaming at 720p and I'm playing Bioshock which is giving again I tried to aim for above 60 frames per second so I'm getting 60 to 70 75 ish right now holding pretty steady and and I played Bioshock because it was a little bit easier on on it than Crysis 3 or battlefield 4 that I did earlier but uh doing really nice so far I actually have some people watching me on the stream you guys might be able to see I'm streaming at up there in case you didn't believe me but yeah CPUs getting up to about 83 84 GPUs about 65 and I am color me impressed that I'm getting such a nice smooth streaming experience all from this single laptop so to sum up my review of Joanne tech lovers review of the msi ge62 Apache gaming laptop I'd have to say that JTL did a very good job she was very thorough and she covered just about every aspect of the product she even mentioned some good details like recommending for example that you game with the AC power plugged in or it will switch matically to the integrated graphics or that the screen uses embedded DisplayPort signaling which has a range of benefits including power savings I then feel that her review ran a little bit long and that some more obvious details could have been left out just for the sake of brevity also I always want to see the internals of laptops but hopefully my video here will help satisfy that need for anyone out there who wanted to check out their upgrade options overall though great job Joanne and keep up the good work on your channel as from my opinion of the ge62 Apache I was quite impressed with the capabilities and feature set of this little laptop being able to game albeit at somewhat reduced settings and stream while using a webcam on a single laptop could make this a great option for someone just getting into streaming or someone who wants a mobile option for road trips I will say that the fans can be loud well under load and the system can get pretty warm too but I've definitely experienced worse in a laptop and the fans do keep the CPU and GPU cool enough for some pretty intense workloads also the MSI shift software that comes pre-installed runs in sport mode by default which overclocks the CPU and GPU just a bit while also increasing the fan speed so if you're ok with a little bit less performance you can do comfort mode or green mode which quiets things down with a small performance hit finally as with many laptops there are variations out there too so if you liked almost everything about the ge62 Apache you can try out the ge62 pro which has a gtx 970m or the GE 72 which is a bigger one with a 17 inch screen but I want to know what you guys think of this laptop of course but also of Paul's review review in general because I actually had a lot of fun with this video and I'd be happy to make more just like it if you want me to so hit that like button comment share the video subscribe if you haven't yet and don't forget to swing by Paul's hardware net to check out my store see you next time everyone