with its Factory tuning and data center DNA an Intel 730 series SSD is an
amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts by popular
demand here is my video about the MSI gs60 ghost the super thin super 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 4700hq quad core
processor that's clocked anywhere from 2.4 to 3.4 GHz depending on the turbo
boost frequency it's got a 15.6 in 1920
x 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 skew and it comes with a GTX 860m 2 gig with gddr5
memory graphics card although there's a pro model coming later that will have an
870m and will upgrade the screen to a 3K IPS panel for storage it has a 128 gig M
SATA SSD with either a 1 tbte or 750 gig
7200 RPM drive and for network connectivity it's got a 7260 802.11 AC
Intel wireless card that also includes Bluetooth as well as a killer e2200 gbit
landan 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
Razor with respect to how power bricks can be innovated on physically the
laptop is absolutely stunning it's only
19.8 mm thick that makes it about 10%
thinner than gigabytes p34g and 10%
thicker than the razor blade 14 it weighs only 1.98 kg which makes it
marginally lighter than the razorblade 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 gx660 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 just going to drop that there okay so on
the left hand side we've got a ventilation Port as well as a Kensington lock power in two USB 3 ports microphone
and headphone Jacks at the front we have all the indicator LEDs with everything
from Drive activity to wireless to caps lock then on the right hand side we've
got a usb3 port SD card reader very nice
thank you MSI for including that I still use them HDMI out mini DisplayPort out
that hardwired 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 Grill 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 Dine Audio 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 uh aggressively
the keyboard and touchpad locations um both Luke and I noticed almost
immediately that something was a little bit different about the this layout um
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 had been moved down to
make room for the grill and lone 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 relocation of the start button is an unnecessary decision
ision on a notebook with a fully programmable keyboard more on that later
by the way uh shifted the space bar to the left quite a bit and I used 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 space bar rather than being closer to the middle
but aside from those niggles about the layout the tactile response of this
steel series 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 steel series 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 and
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 up imize 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 okay changing
years 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 draw 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 Play Time versus
45 minutes of play time um 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 inves ation 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 two times battery life that NVIDIA says the
technology is capable of delivering some other thoughts now both Razer with the
blade 14 and Gigabyte with the aurus 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 2-year local
warranty so let's find out what makes the gs60 so cool while keeping it within
reasonable noise levels first up it's obvious why MSI doesn't want end users
trying to upgrade this thing other than the 2 and 1 12 in hard drive and Wi-Fi
module nothing is accessible without removing the entire motherboard we can
and 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 exhaust it 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 M SATA the slot it's plugged into is
in fact m.2 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 m.2 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
crisis one 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 all right so who's the competition for this notebook obvious
ones are the Mac Pro 15in uh the razor blade 14 or maybe the aorus 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 super light 15.6 in gaming
grade 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 answer is that it's
targeted at the same sorts of folks as those other models that is to say on
the-go Gam but with a couple of features that really differentiate it its weight
to 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 be can be configured in software is 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 bloat
Weare 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 chiro is back with another deal for lonus Tech chips viewers their grip
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 its 1 amp
charging port is hooked up to a surprisingly large 5200 milliamp
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
highquality 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 999
value free of charge wait that can't be right wait that can't be right hold on
sorry no no it's not free of charge it's rechargeable and the grip 2 is the
flashlight for flashlight so fantastic
anyway um guys like and share this video
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