MSI GE72 6QF Apache Pro review – Skylake powered gaming

Battery and storage

In our battery benchmark, the GE72 lasted 2 hours 40 minutes – about average for a gaming laptop under light use. Keep in mind battery life will be a fraction of this when gaming, so you’ll definitely want to be plugged in for anything other than web browsing.

A 128GB SSD and 1TB hard disk are included as standard, and while there are configurations that allow for up to four PCI-E SSDs, they become eye-wateringly expensive. The SSD boot drive could have been bigger; with Windows 10, a few games and our benchmarks installed, warnings about remaining space began to appear.

Connections

You get the usual array of ports, including two USB3 ports and a single USB port. The new inclusion is a USB 3.1 Type-C port, which brings the GE72 more up-to-date and will be useful if you have a newer device that uses the connection, saving you dealing with adaptors. There’s Gigabit Ethernet to go with the 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.1. You can output to a separate display through HDMI or mini DisplayPort, and audio is handled through a microphone and headphone jack that also doubles as an optical S/PDIF for up to 7.1 audio. A convenient SD card reader is included and there’s even room for an optical DVD-RW drive, too. 

Conclusion

There’s a lot to like about the GE72 6QF. It’s unsurprisingly powerful considering its high specification, there are plenty of connections and some of the gaming-centric extras will be useful. The only real negatives are its design, which is beginning to feel a little basic, and the frugal SSD storage. Compared to some of its rivals, such as the Gigabyte P37W and Asus G751JT, it’s otherwise better specified and good value. It will be interesting to see what MSI’s competitors can do with their Skylake refreshes but for now, the GE72 sets an impressive yard stick.

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