MSI GE70 2PE Apache Pro review

MSI hasn’t compromised on the laptop’s large 17.3in Full HD screen either, and our colour calibrator showed it was displaying a huge 84.5 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut. This is excellent for a laptop, and the screen’s even colour coverage meant that all our subjective image tests looked fantastic. Reds, greens and blues were all bright and vibrant and uniformly lit across the screen, and the display’s low black levels of 0.30cd/m2 meant that blacks appeared dark and inky with no traces of grey whatsoever.

The screen’s contrast levels were even better, and we measured a huge contrast ratio of 1,262:1. This is one of the highest contrast ratios we’ve ever recorded and it meant that all our high contrast test photos showed plenty of fine shadow detail. This is easily one of the most detailed screens we’ve seen in recent months compared to other gaming laptops such as the Gigabyte P35K and the Chillblast Defiant Mini. Fans of first-person shooters (FPSs) will love it.

The GE70 2PE Apache Pro also has several gamer-specific features, including a dedicated cooler button above the keyboard that helps keep the laptop’s core temperature under control, and a Killer E2200 LAN chip. The Killer E2200 identifies and prioritises online gaming data so you get the fastest response times when playing online. There’s plenty of space to store your games, too, and our review sample had a 1TB mechanical hard disk and 256GB of mSATA SSD storage.

The GE70 has a good range of connection ports, including four USB ports, two of which are USB3. There are also VGA and HDMI video outputs for connecting the laptop to an external display, a multiformat card reader, a DVD optical drive and separate headphone and microphone jacks. The laptop’s matrix display function also lets you use both the VGA and HDMI ports to connect an additional two monitors, which means you can work on up to three displays including the laptop’s own screen.

Unsurprisingly, the GE70 2PE Apache Pro isn’t designed for portable use, and the laptop’s battery lasted just 4 hours and 12 minutes in our light use test with the screen set to half brightness. Playing games will drain the battery even faster, so we’d recommend keeping this plugged into the mains at all times.

CONCLUSION

The MSI GE70 2PE Apache Pro certainly isn’t cheap, but it’s immensely powerful. The GE70 may not be substantially more powerful than other gaming laptops with GTX 7-series graphics chips, but if you want a laptop that can play graphically challenging FPS games at playable frame rates with good quality graphics, there’s no competition.