today i'm going to be unboxing something pretty exciting from MSI it comes from
well a pretty plain brown box initially
but i'm sure we will find a more suitable
retail oriented box inside this is just
a shipping carton so this is the gt 7adr014us
so this is part of their gt 780r line so
notebooks using that particular shell and is the 014 model and what is really
cool about this one is that lots of notebooks say they are for gamers or for
gaming and they have really high spec and all that good stuff but you often
don't see a whole lot of consideration
for what gamers actually need so this one
takes a bit of a well what i think is a big step forward for notebooks and it
uses a gaming keyboard so we've seen backlit keyboards on notebooks before
but what we haven't seen is one designed by steel series so steel series is
obviously very well known throughout the world for their gaming peripherals and
apparently this keyboard is good enough that they're willing to put their name
on it and considering the fact that there are only about four keyboards on
the market right now from steelseries that they consider good enough for their
name i have very high expectations of
this one so let's see what else MSI has to say for themselves on the box here up
to 16 gigs of memory are supported sound is by dying audio now that might sound
like kind of a gimmick sort of thing but on my gx660 it makes a dramatic
difference it's just a higher quality overall setup than i see on most
notebooks exclusive four ddr3 dimms okay
so for up to 16 gigs we saw that before full color backlight keyboard for
friendly gamers usage
for friendly gamers users apparently that's an option so i'm not sure if this
one supports that or not interesting dual SATA hard drives with raid 0 to
double the sorry about that guys my memory card was full okay so dual hard
drives uh up to raids okay raid zero to double the transmission speed what i'd
really recommend doing here is throwing an SSD in there and using a hard drive
as storage so that's a really cool feature it's got an hd webcam usb 3.0
thx another audio oriented thing and apparently MSI is celebrating their 25th
anniversary good for them all right what else we got here oh three coupons inside
just cause two mafia two and a starcraft ii trial
all right neat okay so let's break the seal here and open this bad boy up now
this is a big notebook the thing about gaming notebooks is that yeah
they tend to suffer a little bit in terms of um
the weight and battery life compared to an ultra portable or even a standard
notebook but think of it this way
it's good exercise when you're carrying it around right
yeah that's that's why you get a gaming notebook so that you can exercise all
right so we've got a power brick here that really looks to be about the size
of a brick so i'll pull out the old iphone 4 for comparison so you can see
it is quite quite large quite large indeed
there's the size from the back okay so there's the power brick
then there's the battery also quite large heavy
okay smaller than the power brick though surprisingly
there you go all right put that there for now here's
those coupons special offers from NVIDIA
all right what else we got here we got some discs some manuals
uh driver utilities uh hotkey recovery options ce compliant
booklet okay then we've got finally a power cable to plug into the power brick
and that's pretty much it so it's a fairly bare package in terms of
of accessories but really this notebook is about
performance and i shouldn't say a bear package that's not fair at all i mean it
comes with two free games which you can't really complain about right
okay and the notebook itself
here we go so yeah as i was sort of saying before
it's quite large
there we go what's this here got questions or
problems feel free to contact MSI
support okay good good uh we've got a
dust proof cover here all right
so there's the notebook itself let's take off the protector it is using a
matte screen kudos MSI
for using a matte screen on this high-end model give me two seconds i'm
gonna plug it in all right so i've plugged it in i'm
gonna start peeling off the plastic so we can
see it in all of its hd
glory mind you i'm only gonna upload this video in 720p because
i'm not convinced it makes a difference on youtube
here's the protector behind the keyboard there we are
it seems like a lot of work to like make this doesn't it
okay all right we've got a few different options for languages we can go with
french spanish or english you cannot change
your language later that's fine country or region is not the united states
canada
all right there we are and this will be uh tech
tips next
all right so the setup is fairly straightforward we're just going through the standard microsoft ubi
so let's take a little time and have a look at the physical attributes of this
notebook here okay
so first of all screen okay so as i
mentioned before we've got a matte screen this is a
17.6 inch screen as i recall oh hold on
give me a sec guys sorry my bad that's a 17.3 inch screen
this is a 1920x1080 full hd screen it
comes pre-configured with two 500 gig drives so that is one terabyte of
storage in raid 0. it also has
16 gigs of RAM and an Intel core i7 2630
qm quad-core processor okay it uses a 1.5 gig NVIDIA GeForce
gtx 560 mobile and it has just a really
slick look to it can you see the the brushed finish on the back of the
notebook as well as the shiny MSI logo here so let's look at what we've got in
terms of io we'll start at the back so we have an HDMI out as well as a vga out
i actually really like seeing vga out on notebooks because so often you go
somewhere where you're not familiar with and like you know let's say you have to
use a projector in a restaurant or something a lot of the time they're using older
projectors that support vga so that's really handy to have we've got esata as
well as lan and a kensington lock we've got a huge exhaust vent here on
the back can you see through there to the uh to
the aluminum fins and the one on the other side seems to be covered up
although maybe that's for like i don't know i don't know what that
could possibly be for on the bottom we find i have not installed the battery
yet and we have some plastic here
you know what why don't we show the battery installation procedure since we have it flipped over anyway it should be
fairly straightforward put the thing in the thing and then
lower it into the other thing there we go lock it down in place all right so
from here you can see some heat pipes you can see some RAM you can see some
more heat pipes you can see uh that this whole panel comes off making upgrades
quite simple now this is an experience i've had with MSI notebooks in the past
is that you can take the whole thing off you can replace
and upgrade the RAM and hard drives very very easily now please note though that
the warranty is void if the sticker is
tampered with although if you have a technician at an
approved facility such as ncix do the upgrade for you then they can register
that serial number with MSI and your warranty will not be voided all right
let's have a look at the side so here we have our two usb 3.0 ports we have an sd
card reader a usb 2.0 port and dedicated
5.1 audio port so that's really handy to see as well
in case you wanted to plug in surround sound to your notebook you have all the
ports that you need okay moving around to the final side
here we have two more usb 2.0 ports and a
uh and an optical drive now this does not have a button on it which initially
i thought was a terrible idea but actually now looks okay because it looks
like i just have to use that button
well maybe when we're finished booting up it'll do that okay here we go so
let's have a look at the buttons up here okay you know what give me a sec i'll be
back this is kind of neat now this notebook
does come with some bloatware but it actually gives you the option for
whether you want to install it or not so i'm just going to unselect everything i
don't need
never mind no i can't there's only magic's uh music maker can i actually
uncheck so i guess i'll just
yeah the all these magics ones i can i can uncheck there okay
okay so here we are we're back everything is pretty much installed
nuance pdf reader i don't know why you remind me in seven days for that
um let's finish going over the physical aspects of the notebook so first thing
here i did want to oh wow okay so it's very quick now that the driver is loaded
okay so uh there is a hole on the side
so you can use a a paper clip or whatever if you actually
have to manually open it but otherwise this software button seems to be fairly
responsive so i wouldn't worry too much about that we can turn on and off the bluetooth
there is bluetooth included on this particular model we can turn the wireless network on and off oh that's
kind of neat check this out watch the screen though
okay so we turned the wireless on and now we turned it off see
that's neat okay uh bluetooth i guess does the same thing it's on now let's
see what this button does i apparently turned my screen off maybe
if i press it again oh oh neat okay that's actually kind of
cool so it doesn't turn it back on it only turns it off so it's like okay i'm
stepping away from my computer boom screen off
and then if you want to turn it back on you just move the mouse that would actually be convenient that is the kind
of thing i would actually use uh here we go we can adjust brightness
no i don't know what that's for okay well this one i know what it does this
turns the fans way up high so when you're gaming
you can be sure that your CPU and GPU are going to run as cool as possible
the fan noise should be fairly noticeable in a moment here don't move the camera because otherwise they can't
compare
now that actually doesn't get as loud as uh as the gx660 let's see what this does
cinema pro okay so it launches Windows media player
apparently all right
so basically it's just a media player launching button okay turn off turn on
oh wait hold on is it adjusting
something about oh it's adjusting the color of the screen okay so it's like for a movie
watching mode and then this last one over here is a programmable button
so it's set to uh turn turbo on right now apparently okay
sure wish i knew what this one did if anyone knows what this button does let
me know okay we also have some more traditional hotkeys built in so with the
function keys you can switch from internal to external monitor you can
turn off the touchpad we also have a dedicated touchpad off button here
that's handy because if you are gaming on this particular notebook wasd is
going to put your palm right on the touchpad if you have a dedicated gaming
mouse you're going to want to be using that not a touchpad obviously so you go
ahead turn it off boom you're ready for gaming turn it back on now you can use
your touchpad again we've got a webcam eco mode wireless
bluetooth sleep and we do have a built-in number pad on
this particular notebook here so here's function keys for brightness down
and brightness up
okay guys we're back so i want to show you guys what that button does
we're having a little bit of difficulty with this feature right now but i do have to finish the unboxing so i can go
home and maybe watch the rest of the hockey game but it's for nothing already
so i might not bother basically it launches in theory the keyboard led
manager so this gives you a bunch of different options for how to manage the
keyboard you can control it by different zones so here in standing okay so in
gaming mode you only light up this part of the keyboard that seems fairly
straightforward in normal mode you can light up as many different parts as many
different colors as you want so you could have like a rainbow keyboard if
you wanted to you can do dual color where it will pulsate two different
colors so you can go okay i'm going to have this one yellow and then it's going
to go from yellow to purple and it shows you a simulation of what it's going to
look like you can do a breathing effect where it'll go darken and then
turn up you can do a wave effect
pretty neat and that's pretty much it so you can choose what you want the keyboard to do
in idle mode and what you want it to do in standard mode as well so here let me
just go ahead and let's say we want it to well like i said we haven't had much
success with it yet but pressing this button at least closes the app if
nothing else the keyboard overall i quite like the
responsiveness of the keys is excellent there's still a bit of a bit of flex to
the keyboard itself that is to be pretty much expected on notebooks although what
i did notice is that this part of the keyboard where you're going to be using it for gaming is a little bit stronger
than over here on the number pad where it looks like not quite as much
attention has been paid because it is a gaming keyboard so that is not that
unexpected our stereo speakers are up here and that pretty much covers
everything i wanted to say about the MSI gt 780r don't forget to subscribe to
Linus tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos
so i got the backlit keyboard working before i finished up basically what had
happened was during shipping uh the cable on the underside
under the panel here that powers the backlit keyboard came loose in shipping
so that was uh that was what was causing my frustration with the backlit keyboard
so you can see now that it has the three
separate zones of backlighting this button right here once the app is loaded
so we'll have to give it a minute to load the app will allow us to switch between all the
different completely customizable modes
on this notebook so here let's see if it works already yep there we go so that's
gaming mode so it only lights up the one side okay so i'm going to press it again
and that's evidently some other mode press it again
that's the whole thing oh i had another mode going before okay
give me a sec i'll get the app open i'll show you guys in a minute so i'm going to show you guys the
different modes now so there is dual color mode where it will alternate
between two different colors so you can go ahead and you can set maybe we want
it to alternate between green and purple so it's going to show a
green background and then a purple background it will alternate between
them you can do wave where it'll light up one side of
the keyboard then the middle then the other side and you can set each zone
according to whatever color you want it to be so i'm maybe i'll set them all
green like this and now it'll do a green wave across the
keyboard very cool okay there's also
breathing mode which will just uh it allows only one color to be set oh no it
doesn't you can set different colors if you want so it's like completely user
customizable let's set this side to blue so what that does is it has a slowly
pulsating light effect uh across the whole keyboard let's go like that give
you a little bit more shade this is more like what it'll look like in the dark it actually looks really cool
and then finally there is gaming mode which will light up only the far left of
the keyboard and this one actually has a wider variety of color settings so you
can set more vibrant colors or you can set more pale colors so here i'm showing
kind of pinks and oranges and blues and purples and lots and lots of
different colors that you can set you can do white as well and then finally
normal mode so you can set it to whatever you want your normal mode to
look like so i've got it set to a white green and orange right now and that is
what it looks like so it's a very cool feature thank you for checking out my
unboxing of the gt680r don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for more
unboxings reviews and other computer videos