MSI GT70 review

Gaming laptops often have excessive specifications, and MSI’s latest is no different. The GT70 has some of the fastest components we’ve ever seen crammed into a notebook chassis, including Nvidia’s new GTX 680M mobile graphics chip, but it also costs an eye-watering £2,300.

Naturally for a 17in gaming laptop, the GT70 is something of a giant. At 3.9kg, it’ll only leave the house when you’re on the way to a LAN party. The chassis is built from an awful lot of plastic considering how much the system costs, with only the lid and wrist rest made of brushed metal. The glowing MSI logo etched into the lid is a nice touch, and the chassis is generally quite restrained for a gaming laptop, even if some of its materials feel a little cheap.

As you would expect from the laptop’s huge size, there are plenty of ports around the edges. Five USB ports, three of which are USB3, three 3.5mm audio jacks for 5.1 surround sound, a multi-format card reader, eSATA, HDMI and VGA outputs mean this laptop can rival some desktop PCs for connectivity. Even the network card has been designed for gaming – it’s a Killer NIC model, which can prioritise gaming traffic over voice communication or internet video.

When spending over £2000, you should expect some seriously powerful kit, and thankfully the GT70 doesn’t disappoint. The laptop is powered by a quad-core Intel i7-3610QM processor running at 2.3GHz and has a massive 16GB of RAM, so will be able to handle anything you could think to throw at it. MSI clearly didn’t think one 128GB SSD was fast enough, so it has installed two in a RAID 0 configuration for blistering file transfer speeds. There’s also room for a 750GB mechanical hard disk for less speed-sensitive storage.

Our multimedia benchmarks proved no obstacle for the system, and it scored a desktop-matching 100 overall – putting it among the fastest laptops we’ve ever tested. The processor can use Turbo Boost to reach speeds up to 3GHz where the thermal envelope allows, and Hyper-threading to process eight separate threads at once, which made short work of our multi-threaded video encoding tests.

This alone is impressive, but the dedicated graphics card takes the GT70 to another level of performance. The GTX 680M is the fastest laptop GPU Nvidia has ever produced, coming equipped with 1,366 CUDA cores and 4GB of dedicated video memory. It didn’t even break a sweat in our 1,280 x 720 Dirt 3 test, where it managed an incredible 130.5fps. Even at our standard desktop settings of 1,920×1,080 with 4x anti-aliasing and Ultra detail, it still managed a silky smooth 70.3fps. Our ultra-demanding Crysis 2 test proved no match either, as the average frame rate of 36.5 at 1080p and Ultra detail shows. You’ll have no trouble running even brand-new titles at the laptop’s native resolution.

This power doesn’t come at the expense of battery life, as the GT70 managed an impressive four hours in our light-use battery test. This is hardly Ultrabook territory, but considering the laptop could loop our Crysis 2 benchmark for almost an hour and a half on battery power alone, you should be able to squeeze in some gaming when away from the mains.

Performance aside, the GT70 impresses in other areas. MSI has teamed up with peripheral manufacturer Steelseries to create one of the best laptop keyboards we’ve ever used, thanks to its superb response and springy action, with just the right amount of travel. The keyboard is a Chiclet-style design, with a separate numeric keypad, but all the keys are full-size and there’s absolutely no sign of flex in the keyboard tray. It’s also backlit with RGB LEDs, and the laptop comes with an application to change the colour, intensity and pattern of the lights.

The compact touchpad is a little disappointing given the size of the screen, and it’s not big enough to span the entire desktop in a single swipe. The buttons below it are more responsive, and there’s a button to disable the touchpad completely when you plug in a mouse.

The 17.3in screen is another highlight. Its matte finish helps it cope with overhead reflections, and, unlike many matte displays, the MSI’s screen still displays vibrant colours. The 1,920×1,080 resolution makes games look fantastic, and lets you enjoy high-definition films from the built-in Blu-ray drive at their proper resolution. The screen has plenty of contrast to help pick out details and enemies hiding in the shadows in games. There’s a huge amount of screen tilt, but you’ll need the adjustment as the screen only has mediocre viewing angles.

Right now, the GTX 680M is the fastest mobile GPU available, and MSI is the first manufacturer to launch a laptop with this graphics processor – in this respect the GT70 is currently the ultimate gaming laptop. It costs a fortune, though. Although the GT70 is incredibly fast, it’s only marginally faster than other, less expensive systems from the likes of Dell. The Alienware M17x scores the same in our multimedia benchmarks and is only around 10% slower in games, and is a huge £450 cheaper than MSI’s laptop.