The Next Generation Laptop.
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
1,993 words · ~9 min read
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the outward appearance of the MSI gs75
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is surprisingly professional giving its gamer roots
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but don't let it fool you this five pound laptop is packing hardware that
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would make most desktops blush with a GeForce rtx 2080 max q a six core Intel
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core i7 8750h 32 gigs of RAM and one
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terabyte of raid 0 m.2 SSD storage
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every single component of this machine
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is balls to the wall which should mean balls to the wall
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performance but can you possibly hope to cool all of
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that stuff in a chassis this thin
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are rtx cards even worth the extra cost
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in a laptop can Linus go for just one video without
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interrupting the flow of the content for a sponsor message
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the marlin screwdriver set from ifixit features five specialty precision
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screwdrivers check it out today at ifixit.com forward slash Linus
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so here's the thing see the performance of a laptop with one of NVIDIA's shiny
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new rtx laptop gpus will vary significantly
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depending on the cooling and the power available so you'll always get the same
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number of cuda and rtx cores but for the
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2080 max-q in particular the base and
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the boost clocks can be all over the place
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laptop manufacturers can actually configure this particular card's power
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target to anything from 80 watts all the
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way up to over 150 watts that means and remember this
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is according to NVIDIA's spec that you could end up with a base clock of just
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735 megahertz while a properly cooled
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one would be capable of boosting to over double that
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so what that means is that independent reviews of this generation of laptops
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are going to be even more important than ever before because you cannot compare
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between models based on the spec sheet alone
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so how did MSI then fare taming the beast
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fine i guess so under a stress test the CPU
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immediately jumped up to 100 degrees and was forced to throttle down until its
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turbo boost ran out and it settled in around 2.8 gigahertz sustained on all
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cores which might not sound amazing and it's
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not as good as it could be but it still kicks out a right impressive 1205 score
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in cinebench so mobile professionals take note but also
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stay tuned because we're going to go further in depth with that in a future
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video today's focus is mostly gaming since this is our first look at mobile
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rtx so let's change gears to 3dmark's
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new port royal test treating our eyeballs to some of the first real-time
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traced rays to come out of a laptop and this also gave us a moment to really
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appreciate the 17-inch 1080p display that MSI crammed into what it would have
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traditionally been a 15.6 inch laptop
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chassis and i gotta say their ips type panel
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delivers some damn good visuals at 144 hertz
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of course with the horsepower to back it up really only g-sync and factory
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calibration are notable missing features here i gotta say like just overall the
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industry i i love the move to these super slim bezel 17-inch displays the
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difference in immersion versus a 15.6 inch is palpable
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now back to the benchmark we got a score of about 4 000 which at face value
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meant basically nothing to me since this test hasn't been around for very long
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but then upon further investigation it turns out that it's roughly a third
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slower than a desktop rtx 2080 with a
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similar CPU and that lines up pretty nicely with the reduction in clock speed
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with the g75 landing around 1200 megahertz versus 1850 on the desktop
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card now i could show you guys a bunch more
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benchmarks of a desktop graphics card expectedly crushing a thin laptop
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but we figured it would be a lot more interesting to compare it to other thin
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and light gaming laptops which is why the gf75 is going to be taking on the
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gauntlet of zephyrus's zephyr zephyri
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for anyway with the max q versions of the
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gtx 1070 1080 and rtx 2080 all
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represented back in the port royal test the two rtx
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cards completely destroyed their gtx equivalents well partly because the test
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won't run on those cards but more interestingly the zephyrus gx701 pulled
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out a convincing lead in both the score
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and core clock achieved likely thanks to its superior cooling stay tuned for our
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full review of that little beast even more interestingly though in 3dmark's
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time spy benchmark the rtx cards absolutely wiped the floor with their
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last gen competitors churning out a result that is 30 faster than what we've
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ever seen in a thin laptop before and this kept up past the synthetics as well
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which is just great news for gamers the mobile rtx
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2080 is a freaking beast max q design or
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no now the gs75 again wasn't quite able to
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keep up with the zephyrus gx701 but generally just by a couple to maybe
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about 5 FPS so MSI is leaving some performance on
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the table here perhaps this was in order to maintain a more conventional keyboard and trackpad
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layout or perhaps it was that they tuned it this way for acoustic reasons now the
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gs75 isn't silent but per NVIDIA's max q
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guidance it's quiet enough that it's not going to bother you while gaming and
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it's easily overpowered by its decent onboard speakers
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so overall the gs75 games really freaking well
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but what about the whole portability thing it is a laptop
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well as much as we're kind of tired of saying it but MSI just keeps making us repeat
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ourselves here the build quality here just isn't good enough for a machine
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that costs thousand dollars i can easily click the
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track pad by pushing the palm rest area and you can feel the machine flexing
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when you're picking it up like honestly the word we settled on here was
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flaccid um they do claw back some points with one
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of the best assortments of io that i've seen in quite some time with Thunderbolt
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3 full-sized HDMI and Ethernet being the
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stars of the show although if you want to be a star you'll probably need a
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standalone camera as uh this one here isn't going to get to too many
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compliments on twitch but i look like 10 years younger which
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is nice look at that smoothing maybe our biggest gripe about the gs75
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though is the trackpad it is glass topped which is good but the flex of the
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chassis removes any chance of it having a solid clicky feel and although i like
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where MSI was going with the size using up almost all of the available vertical
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space and giving it this extra horizontal width they somehow went too
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far making it really hard to type without ending up with a palm resting on
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the track pad causing accidental activations
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and when i brought up these issues at ces MSI's reply was well the track pad
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turns off when you plug in a mouse and although i do expect the average
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user of the gs75 to regularly have a mouse plugged in it's kind of like
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dropping your dog off with a friend when you go on vacation and saying
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well oliver won't [ __ ] in your house at all
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as long as you've got him outside when he needs to so i just i never thought i'd say this
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but until MSI can get their palm rejection way better they should stick
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to smaller track tabs now as mentioned above the worst part of
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the keyboard is actually still the track pad but once that is disabled it's
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actually pretty good the keys have a nice long stroke with decent feel
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overall and my only real gripes here are about the layout and they're pretty
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small ones i just think that these keys up here could have been better used as
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dedicated home and end or media control keys with that said they can be remapped
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so yeah removing the bottom of the device we're
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greeted by an impressive 82 watt hour battery which given the power in here is
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not gonna be letting you work cordless all day but if you treat it nicely and
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you're not running games or heavy software it gets you a pretty darn solid
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five hours of work time then past the battery we've got access to three m.2
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SSD slots making for very easy storage expansion and
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RAM that is well it's technically upgradable but if
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you're like oh gee where are the dim slots ah it's the same thing we were
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wondering so our unit has both of the sodium slots filled already and if we
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did want to change them out we'd actually have to remove everything to
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get to the other side of the motherboard bring us to the bottom line should you
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buy one of these now you will be getting one of the
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fastest gaming laptops on the market faster than anything that was released
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in 2018 by a fair margin and compared to
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the zephyrus you get more RAM for three hundred dollars less on an otherwise
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identically spec'd system but the zephyrus in the real world is
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faster and it has g-sync and factory
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panel calibration along with noticeably higher build quality
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also maybe i'm off base here but in my mind
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by the time you're spending three thousand dollars i feel like it's not
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that much of a stretch to go a little bit further to 3300
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which is why i am not recommending that you buy this laptop but instead
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recommending that you buy this laptop except for 2 300
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to make that happen you do need to drop the specs a bit but there should be more
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than enough cooling for an rtx 2070 in here 16 gigs of RAM fits the needs of
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most people and at that price i am much
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more willing to let slide some of my gripes about the build quality in
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exchange for the overall usability and the great battery capacity that MSI has
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