MSI GT685-818US Core i5 GTX 580M 15.6" Gaming Notebook Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
1,400 words · ~7 min read
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today I have a very unique skew to unbox and I use terms like uh like skew with
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you guys but I know you don't necessarily know what that means so skew
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stands for stock keeping unit and that means that it is a particular
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configuration of notebook that has a unique identifier like a part number um
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whereas the shell that is what the
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notebook looks like could have any number of SKS associated with it if you
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had different configurations like different CPUs amounts of memory
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graphics cards or whatever else so this skew is unique this is using MSI's uh GT
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685 shell so it is a 15.6 in Notebook it has
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their Dine Audio uh in my testing
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significantly better than average speaker system it has their LED lighting
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strips it is uh it's got a decent
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keyboard on it it's not the best it's not the worst it's got their built-in
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overclocking I'm just opening this up as quickly as I can here because the most
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interesting about thing about this notebook is actually nothing to do with
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the shell but actually the configuration inside so we're going to grab the
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battery cuz we will need that uh for later so it comes with a battery comes
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with a copy of dirt three as well as your utilities quick start guide manual
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all that good stuff it comes with an enormous power brick look at that thing
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we're going to do the old iPhone comparison oh actually the iPhone
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comparison might not necessarily be valid if I have it in a case so that's
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how big it is you can go ahead and get a better angle of that from the side maybe
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to show them the thickness while I'm sorting out other things over here so
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yes it's an enormous power brick
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um and the reason for that is that while this is a core i5 notebook that's
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actually fairly high price this is a $1,700 notebook at retail what's cool
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about it is the fact that it has a GTX
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580m inside a 58m so why would you have
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a GTX 58m with a core i5 dual core CPU
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and the answer to that is because I thought it was a good idea so I asked
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MSI based on my request to create this
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skew what they've done is compared to other similar models
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they have downgraded the CPU from a quad core to a
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dual core that is from an i72 an i5 they
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have downgraded the memory because normally uh a system of this caliber
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that is about a $1,700 system would come with about 16 gigs of RAM these days
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they have downgraded the hard drive so instead of going with dual hard drives
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in raid zero which they are upt to do
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with uh with this particular shell because it can hold two drives which is
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a very very cool feature and uh so now you've got one
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empty Drive which you can throw an SSD in once you uh once you receive the
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notebook and then they've used all of that extra budget that we saved on all
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those other things and upgraded the GPU
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to a 580m so what does this mean for the
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usage model of this notebook well for one thing don't buy this notebook if
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you're a video encoder if you're or a video editor or if you're planning on
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doing any serious uh 3D modeling work or anything like that because the dual core
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is going to really slow you down even though it does have hyperthreading
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however if you are a gamer this system
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is going to be delightful
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because most all of the downgrades that have been made to the system are not
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going to really affect game too much so yes we've gone to a dual core CPU but
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it's clocked higher and most games are still uh preferring to use fewer cores
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at higher frequencies so there's that um
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the 8 gigs of RAM is still uh more than adequate for pretty much any game that's
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out there right now although you can upgrade it if you want and the
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additional graphics card Firepower is what's really going to deliver that
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buttery smooth performance so what else do we have here that I'm missing so so
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it has a matte screen which is great so many gaming shells come with glossy
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screens these days because they are cheaper in order to achieve the contrast
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that the manufacturers are going for it is an LED backlit panel has you know
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Wireless end it's got your Eco button Bluetooth Wi-Fi all those oh I just
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turned on the Wi-Fi fascinating all those interesting features you can actually change I don't know if it's
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going to work now when we're not booted up into the OS but you can actually
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change the lighting effects so you can turn on and off the ones that are on the
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sides the ones that are on the front and then the MSI logo I think is lit all the
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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
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thick although this is probably about as small and thin of a shell that you're
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going to find a GTX 580 in uh at any point in time here's a cool thing going
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along with their Dine Audio better audio for notebooks theme you've actually got
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dedicated 5.1 out ports which is very cool we've got USB you got a DVD drive
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on the back you find your power your gigabit Ethernet your VGA your eSATA
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your HDMI this is the perfect combination I think because you still do
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run into needs for VGA from time to time but HDMI is smaller and more compact
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than DVI so very convenient you've got huge exhaust vents here and here and you
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will need them the GTX 580 is a beast
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we've also got USB 3 ports two of those
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an SD card reader another USB 2.0 port and then on the front we just find some
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vents that uh they're not actually actually vents they just have lights behind them so they glow orange when you
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set it to do so upgrading this notebook is a piece of cake I've actually done it
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on my channel I think with this particular shell not this skew um but
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yeah you can see one of your drives there so you just take off this whole panel and you can access your memory
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upgrades as well as your hard drive and you can have a look at that expensive
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fancy GPU that you just spent a lot of money on because a GTX 58m is not cheap
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so thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at I never even
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told you the skew this is the GT 685
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818 us oh he wants me to hold this up
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okay sure and it has an HD webcam which I didn't mention yet and that's pretty
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much it so this is this is as close to a
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custom Linus Edition skew as it gets because this skew was created based on
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my request for a more balanced configuration so I downgraded everything
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we didn't need and I wanted to beef up the GPU as much as possible to deliver
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the best possible Gam experience on a notebook within a sub $2,000 budget and
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it's actually a few hundred less than that so we're actually going to be testing it against another Notebook on
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my ncixcom channel so you're going to want to make sure you're subscribed not only to lonus Tech tips for more
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unboxings and videos like this but also ncixcom so you can see the showdown
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between this one and the similarly expensive ASUS model with a GTX are 560
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and a quad core and lots of RAM and all that all the other bells and whistles