MSI GT780R Gaming Notebook With Illuminated Keyboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
3,252 words · ~16 min read
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today i'm going to be unboxing something pretty exciting from MSI it comes from
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well a pretty plain brown box initially
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but i'm sure we will find a more suitable
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retail oriented box inside this is just
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a shipping carton so this is the gt 7adr014us
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so this is part of their gt 780r line so
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notebooks using that particular shell and is the 014 model and what is really
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cool about this one is that lots of notebooks say they are for gamers or for
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gaming and they have really high spec and all that good stuff but you often
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don't see a whole lot of consideration
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for what gamers actually need so this one
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takes a bit of a well what i think is a big step forward for notebooks and it
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uses a gaming keyboard so we've seen backlit keyboards on notebooks before
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but what we haven't seen is one designed by steel series so steel series is
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obviously very well known throughout the world for their gaming peripherals and
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apparently this keyboard is good enough that they're willing to put their name
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on it and considering the fact that there are only about four keyboards on
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the market right now from steelseries that they consider good enough for their
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name i have very high expectations of
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this one so let's see what else MSI has to say for themselves on the box here up
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to 16 gigs of memory are supported sound is by dying audio now that might sound
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like kind of a gimmick sort of thing but on my gx660 it makes a dramatic
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difference it's just a higher quality overall setup than i see on most
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notebooks exclusive four ddr3 dimms okay
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so for up to 16 gigs we saw that before full color backlight keyboard for
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friendly gamers usage
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for friendly gamers users apparently that's an option so i'm not sure if this
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one supports that or not interesting dual SATA hard drives with raid 0 to
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double the sorry about that guys my memory card was full okay so dual hard
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drives uh up to raids okay raid zero to double the transmission speed what i'd
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really recommend doing here is throwing an SSD in there and using a hard drive
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as storage so that's a really cool feature it's got an hd webcam usb 3.0
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thx another audio oriented thing and apparently MSI is celebrating their 25th
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anniversary good for them all right what else we got here oh three coupons inside
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just cause two mafia two and a starcraft ii trial
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all right neat okay so let's break the seal here and open this bad boy up now
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this is a big notebook the thing about gaming notebooks is that yeah
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they tend to suffer a little bit in terms of um
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the weight and battery life compared to an ultra portable or even a standard
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notebook but think of it this way
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it's good exercise when you're carrying it around right
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yeah that's that's why you get a gaming notebook so that you can exercise all
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right so we've got a power brick here that really looks to be about the size
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of a brick so i'll pull out the old iphone 4 for comparison so you can see
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it is quite quite large quite large indeed
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there's the size from the back okay so there's the power brick
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then there's the battery also quite large heavy
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okay smaller than the power brick though surprisingly
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there you go all right put that there for now here's
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those coupons special offers from NVIDIA
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all right what else we got here we got some discs some manuals
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uh driver utilities uh hotkey recovery options ce compliant
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booklet okay then we've got finally a power cable to plug into the power brick
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and that's pretty much it so it's a fairly bare package in terms of
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of accessories but really this notebook is about
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performance and i shouldn't say a bear package that's not fair at all i mean it
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comes with two free games which you can't really complain about right
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okay and the notebook itself
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here we go so yeah as i was sort of saying before
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it's quite large
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there we go what's this here got questions or
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problems feel free to contact MSI
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support okay good good uh we've got a
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dust proof cover here all right
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so there's the notebook itself let's take off the protector it is using a
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matte screen kudos MSI
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for using a matte screen on this high-end model give me two seconds i'm
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gonna plug it in all right so i've plugged it in i'm
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gonna start peeling off the plastic so we can
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see it in all of its hd
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glory mind you i'm only gonna upload this video in 720p because
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i'm not convinced it makes a difference on youtube
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here's the protector behind the keyboard there we are
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it seems like a lot of work to like make this doesn't it
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okay all right we've got a few different options for languages we can go with
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french spanish or english you cannot change
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your language later that's fine country or region is not the united states
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canada
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all right there we are and this will be uh tech
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tips next
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all right so the setup is fairly straightforward we're just going through the standard microsoft ubi
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so let's take a little time and have a look at the physical attributes of this
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notebook here okay
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so first of all screen okay so as i
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mentioned before we've got a matte screen this is a
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17.6 inch screen as i recall oh hold on
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give me a sec guys sorry my bad that's a 17.3 inch screen
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this is a 1920x1080 full hd screen it
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comes pre-configured with two 500 gig drives so that is one terabyte of
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storage in raid 0. it also has
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16 gigs of RAM and an Intel core i7 2630
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qm quad-core processor okay it uses a 1.5 gig NVIDIA GeForce
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gtx 560 mobile and it has just a really
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slick look to it can you see the the brushed finish on the back of the
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notebook as well as the shiny MSI logo here so let's look at what we've got in
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terms of io we'll start at the back so we have an HDMI out as well as a vga out
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i actually really like seeing vga out on notebooks because so often you go
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somewhere where you're not familiar with and like you know let's say you have to
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use a projector in a restaurant or something a lot of the time they're using older
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projectors that support vga so that's really handy to have we've got esata as
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well as lan and a kensington lock we've got a huge exhaust vent here on
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the back can you see through there to the uh to
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the aluminum fins and the one on the other side seems to be covered up
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although maybe that's for like i don't know i don't know what that
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could possibly be for on the bottom we find i have not installed the battery
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yet and we have some plastic here
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you know what why don't we show the battery installation procedure since we have it flipped over anyway it should be
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fairly straightforward put the thing in the thing and then
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lower it into the other thing there we go lock it down in place all right so
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from here you can see some heat pipes you can see some RAM you can see some
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more heat pipes you can see uh that this whole panel comes off making upgrades
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quite simple now this is an experience i've had with MSI notebooks in the past
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is that you can take the whole thing off you can replace
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and upgrade the RAM and hard drives very very easily now please note though that
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the warranty is void if the sticker is
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tampered with although if you have a technician at an
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approved facility such as ncix do the upgrade for you then they can register
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that serial number with MSI and your warranty will not be voided all right
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let's have a look at the side so here we have our two usb 3.0 ports we have an sd
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card reader a usb 2.0 port and dedicated
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5.1 audio port so that's really handy to see as well
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in case you wanted to plug in surround sound to your notebook you have all the
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ports that you need okay moving around to the final side
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here we have two more usb 2.0 ports and a
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uh and an optical drive now this does not have a button on it which initially
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i thought was a terrible idea but actually now looks okay because it looks
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like i just have to use that button
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well maybe when we're finished booting up it'll do that okay here we go so
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let's have a look at the buttons up here okay you know what give me a sec i'll be
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back this is kind of neat now this notebook
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does come with some bloatware but it actually gives you the option for
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whether you want to install it or not so i'm just going to unselect everything i
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don't need
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never mind no i can't there's only magic's uh music maker can i actually
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uncheck so i guess i'll just
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yeah the all these magics ones i can i can uncheck there okay
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okay so here we are we're back everything is pretty much installed
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nuance pdf reader i don't know why you remind me in seven days for that
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um let's finish going over the physical aspects of the notebook so first thing
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here i did want to oh wow okay so it's very quick now that the driver is loaded
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okay so uh there is a hole on the side
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so you can use a a paper clip or whatever if you actually
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have to manually open it but otherwise this software button seems to be fairly
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responsive so i wouldn't worry too much about that we can turn on and off the bluetooth
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there is bluetooth included on this particular model we can turn the wireless network on and off oh that's
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kind of neat check this out watch the screen though
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okay so we turned the wireless on and now we turned it off see
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that's neat okay uh bluetooth i guess does the same thing it's on now let's
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see what this button does i apparently turned my screen off maybe
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if i press it again oh oh neat okay that's actually kind of
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cool so it doesn't turn it back on it only turns it off so it's like okay i'm
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stepping away from my computer boom screen off
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and then if you want to turn it back on you just move the mouse that would actually be convenient that is the kind
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of thing i would actually use uh here we go we can adjust brightness
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no i don't know what that's for okay well this one i know what it does this
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turns the fans way up high so when you're gaming
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you can be sure that your CPU and GPU are going to run as cool as possible
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the fan noise should be fairly noticeable in a moment here don't move the camera because otherwise they can't
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compare
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now that actually doesn't get as loud as uh as the gx660 let's see what this does
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cinema pro okay so it launches Windows media player
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apparently all right
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so basically it's just a media player launching button okay turn off turn on
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oh wait hold on is it adjusting
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something about oh it's adjusting the color of the screen okay so it's like for a movie
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watching mode and then this last one over here is a programmable button
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so it's set to uh turn turbo on right now apparently okay
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sure wish i knew what this one did if anyone knows what this button does let
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me know okay we also have some more traditional hotkeys built in so with the
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function keys you can switch from internal to external monitor you can
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turn off the touchpad we also have a dedicated touchpad off button here
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that's handy because if you are gaming on this particular notebook wasd is
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going to put your palm right on the touchpad if you have a dedicated gaming
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mouse you're going to want to be using that not a touchpad obviously so you go
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ahead turn it off boom you're ready for gaming turn it back on now you can use
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your touchpad again we've got a webcam eco mode wireless
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bluetooth sleep and we do have a built-in number pad on
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this particular notebook here so here's function keys for brightness down
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and brightness up
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okay guys we're back so i want to show you guys what that button does
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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
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home and maybe watch the rest of the hockey game but it's for nothing already
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so i might not bother basically it launches in theory the keyboard led
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manager so this gives you a bunch of different options for how to manage the
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keyboard you can control it by different zones so here in standing okay so in
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gaming mode you only light up this part of the keyboard that seems fairly
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straightforward in normal mode you can light up as many different parts as many
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different colors as you want so you could have like a rainbow keyboard if
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you wanted to you can do dual color where it will pulsate two different
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colors so you can go okay i'm going to have this one yellow and then it's going
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to go from yellow to purple and it shows you a simulation of what it's going to
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look like you can do a breathing effect where it'll go darken and then
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turn up you can do a wave effect
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pretty neat and that's pretty much it so you can choose what you want the keyboard to do
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in idle mode and what you want it to do in standard mode as well so here let me
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just go ahead and let's say we want it to well like i said we haven't had much
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success with it yet but pressing this button at least closes the app if
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nothing else the keyboard overall i quite like the
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responsiveness of the keys is excellent there's still a bit of a bit of flex to
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the keyboard itself that is to be pretty much expected on notebooks although what
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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
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than over here on the number pad where it looks like not quite as much
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attention has been paid because it is a gaming keyboard so that is not that
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unexpected our stereo speakers are up here and that pretty much covers
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everything i wanted to say about the MSI gt 780r don't forget to subscribe to
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so i got the backlit keyboard working before i finished up basically what had
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happened was during shipping uh the cable on the underside
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under the panel here that powers the backlit keyboard came loose in shipping
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so that was uh that was what was causing my frustration with the backlit keyboard
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so you can see now that it has the three
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separate zones of backlighting this button right here once the app is loaded
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so we'll have to give it a minute to load the app will allow us to switch between all the
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different completely customizable modes
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on this notebook so here let's see if it works already yep there we go so that's
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gaming mode so it only lights up the one side okay so i'm going to press it again
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and that's evidently some other mode press it again
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that's the whole thing oh i had another mode going before okay
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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
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different modes now so there is dual color mode where it will alternate
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between two different colors so you can go ahead and you can set maybe we want
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it to alternate between green and purple so it's going to show a
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green background and then a purple background it will alternate between
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them you can do wave where it'll light up one side of
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the keyboard then the middle then the other side and you can set each zone
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according to whatever color you want it to be so i'm maybe i'll set them all
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green like this and now it'll do a green wave across the
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keyboard very cool okay there's also
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breathing mode which will just uh it allows only one color to be set oh no it
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doesn't you can set different colors if you want so it's like completely user
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customizable let's set this side to blue so what that does is it has a slowly
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pulsating light effect uh across the whole keyboard let's go like that give
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you a little bit more shade this is more like what it'll look like in the dark it actually looks really cool
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and then finally there is gaming mode which will light up only the far left of
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the keyboard and this one actually has a wider variety of color settings so you
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can set more vibrant colors or you can set more pale colors so here i'm showing
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kind of pinks and oranges and blues and purples and lots and lots of
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different colors that you can set you can do white as well and then finally
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normal mode so you can set it to whatever you want your normal mode to
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look like so i've got it set to a white green and orange right now and that is
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what it looks like so it's a very cool feature thank you for checking out my
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