today I have a very unique skew to unbox and I use terms like uh 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 um
whereas the shell that is what the
notebook looks like could have any number of SKS associated with it if you
had different configurations like different CPUs amounts of memory
graphics cards or whatever else so this skew is unique this is using MSI's uh GT
685 shell so it is a 15.6 in Notebook it has
their Dine Audio uh in my testing
significantly better than average speaker system it has their LED lighting
strips it is uh 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 going to grab the
battery cuz we will need that uh for later so it comes with a battery comes
with a copy of dirt three as well as your utilities quick start guide manual
all that good stuff it comes with an enormous power brick look at that thing
we're going to 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
um and the reason for that is that while this is a core i5 notebook that's
actually fairly high price this is a $1,700 notebook at retail what's cool
about it is the fact that it has a GTX
580m inside a 58m so why would you have
a GTX 58m 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
skew 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 i72 an i5 they
have downgraded the memory because normally uh a system of this caliber
that is about a $1,700 system would come with about 16 gigs of RAM these days
they have downgraded the hard drive so instead of going with dual hard drives
in raid zero which they are upt to do
with uh with this particular shell because it can hold two drives which is
a very very cool feature and uh so now you've got one
empty Drive which you can throw an SSD in once you uh 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 580m 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 or a video editor or if you're planning on
doing any serious uh 3D modeling work or anything like that because the dual core
is going to really slow you down even though it does have hyperthreading
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 game too much so yes we've gone to a dual core CPU but
it's clocked higher and most games are still uh preferring to use fewer cores
at higher frequencies so there's that um
the 8 gigs of RAM is still uh more than adequate for pretty much any game that's
out there right now although you can upgrade it if you want and 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 so
it has a matte 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 has you know
Wireless end it's got your Eco button Bluetooth Wi-Fi all those oh I just
turned on the Wi-Fi fascinating all those interesting features you can actually change I don't know if it's
going to 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 going to 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
going to find a GTX 580 in uh at any point in time here's a cool thing going
along with their Dine Audio 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
than DVI so very convenient you've got huge exhaust vents here and here and you
will need them the GTX 580 is a beast
we've also got USB 3 ports two of those
an SD card reader another USB 2.0 port and then on the front we just find some
vents that uh they're not actually 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 with this particular shell not this skew um 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 58m is not cheap
so thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at I never even
told you the skew this is the GT 685
818 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 Linus Edition skew as it gets because this skew 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 Gam experience on a notebook within a sub $2,000 budget and
it's actually a few hundred less than that so we're actually going to be testing it against another Notebook on
my ncixcom channel so you're going to want to make sure you're subscribed not only to lonus Tech tips for more
unboxings and videos like this but also ncixcom so you can see the showdown
between this one and the similarly expensive ASUS model with a GTX are 560
and a quad core and lots of RAM and all that all the other bells and whistles