Gaming laptops are all the rage. If you’re not familiar with them, here’s the lowdown. These are purpose built laptops that are designed to maximize the gaming experience in every way. They often sacrifice battery life and weight to do so, but those who buy these type of laptops don’t care about either of those.
Case in point is the MSI GT73VR 6RF Titan Pro which to properly show it to you, I took a video of it:
Here’s what I got when I opened the box and powered it up:
- 64GB DDR4 RAM
- 2.7 GHz Intel Core i7-6820HK processor
- Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 8GB GDDR5X graphics chipset
- 17.3″ built-in 4K LCD with 3840 X 2160 resolution and 100% Adobe RGB (optional)
- Windows 10 Home
- A 1TB SSD drive and a 1TB 7200 RPM drive
- Thunderbolt 3
- Killer Gigabit LAN and Killer 802.11ac WiFi
- Exclusive ESS SABRE HiFi DAC for lossless, high-quality audio
- Nahimic 2 Sound Technology delivering a 360⁰ immersive audio experience
- Sound by Dynaudio system
- Full sized keyboard with dynamic lighting
- VR Capable
- Lithium Ion battery
- Weighs 4.14 kg
Now let me get to the stuff that everyone cares about. How does this laptop perform? I was able to run Team Fortress 2 at 3840 X 2160 with everything maxed out with no issues. It was smooth and fluid with no lag. Quite frankly, it’s the fastest laptop I have used in years. Gamers who plunk down their cash for this MSI laptop will find little to complain. Here’s why this laptop is this fast:
- For starters, the Intel Core i7-6820HK processor is a quad-cored CPU includes HyperThreading, and has a maximum Turbo speed of 3.6GHz. You can use some MSI supplied software to overclock that CPU if for whatever reason that isn’t fast enough for you.
- The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 adds to this by being able to crank out an insane 120 frames per seconds in Team Fortress 2 at 3840 X 2160. You can use some MSI supplied software to overclock the Nvidia card if for whatever reason that isn’t fast enough for you.
- Killer supplies the WiFi and Ethernet hardware which when paired with networking gear such as the Linksys WRT32X router guarantees low latency, low lag, high performance gaming.
- The combination of a SSD and a 7200 hard drive in a RAID 0 storage configuration keeps things speedy. Everything from Windows 10 to games load quickly. The SSD sits on a PCI-E Gen 3.0 x4 bus utilizing NVMe technology.
On top of all the above, it has a keyboard that has LED lights you can customize the color and how the colors change. The keyboard also feels great for touch typists like me. Connectivity options include five USB 3.0 slots, one HiFi audio headphone out/mic in combo one line-in/out combo, one HDMI 1.4 out, one mini-DP out, a single RJ45 port, one Thunderbolt 3.0 port, and an SD card reader. After I tweak the onboard 3W speakers using the Nahimic soundboard app, they were “acceptable” for movies, but probably wouldn’t be your first choice for longer gaming or music listening sessions due to their lacking bass response. The screen is one of the most bright and vivid screens that I’ve ever used and I can say it beats the Retina Display from Apple by a wide margin. The only area where this laptop falls down is in battery life where I was only able to get about 90 minutes to two hours depending on what I was doing. Gaming was towards the 90 minutes end of the spectrum. Browsing the web was closer to two hours. That may disappoint some, but chances are that the core audience of this laptop will not care.
And now for the price. Expect all this speed and power to cost you just under $5000 CDN. Not cheap by any standard. But let’s be clear. This laptop is for a gamer who wants the ultimate in performance to pwn the competition, and is perfectly fine with what it costs. People who are buying this to run Microsoft Office need not apply. I was impressed by it and I believe that any hardcore gamer who sees this laptop will be impressed too.