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I have had my GT60-2OD for about a week now. And it's been awesome. The keyboard is a pleasure to type on, the backlight and effects are very nice as well, and also as I read somewhere they did add a matte screen bezel for this generation so no distracting reflections while using your new laptop!
I have it set on a coolermaster pad made for 17" laptops, given that the screen bezel is pretty wide. Also, the laptop fits nicely inside the pad when transporting it or for storage. The cooling pad is mostly for elevation, but it does help ease the airflow around the system. Without it the temps are a little higher due to the fan intake/exhaust vents recycling some of the hot air that bounces of the wooden table which is very insulating and gets quite hot. Perhaps glass or metal tables are easier on the temps. I haven't been using the cooling pad fans, as I don't really think they would make much of a difference as the laptop is ventilated by the sides and not bottom, but I'm sure they could improve the temps by a few degrees.
I did have some modifications done to the laptop. The thermal paste replaced with IC Diamond 24 by Gentech PC and I also had 3 mSSDs installed and set to RAID 0 to get a bigger SSD C: Drive. Also, as a bonus I got my RAM upgraded to 24 gigs.
With the turbo fan on (from the touch bar controls) and ambient temps around 24 C neither the CPU nor the GPU ever go much above 80 C with heavy gaming for hours at ultra settings on the ARMA 3 Alpha which runs at around 45 FPS with default ULTRA settings. A little reduction on draw distances and reduction of MSAA to 4x instead of 8x brought it up to 50 FPS. This with no overclocking or any kind of fiddling or any other settings changed. I'm sure that both the CPU and GPU are capable of a little more, but I haven't been there yet. The only that I did was to use the new feature MSI put in place, which uses some of the battery power to complement the supply when the 180W from the AC adapter aren't enough. It's called hybrid power and to use it you just need to open the program and press OK.
But if you keep your factory thermal paste job, you might get higher temps than I did and maybe slightly slower FPS because of the system protecting itself from overheating. Some users on forums reported that some of the paste jobs were sloppy and that MSI used too much pasted and that some systems were overheating. So you may want to look into that, specially if you think your system is running too hot.
Switching between GPU's is quite easy, to force Windows to use the Intel integrated GPU isntead of the 780m all the time you have to go to Nvidia Control panel/3d Settings/ and change your global settings to the integrated GPU and then restart the PC. This way your GPU light will remain white. Then, manually choose games and other programs that you want using the Nvidia GPU from that same menu. Light code: White=Intel HD4600 Orange=NVIDIA 780m
I haven't done thorough battery tests, but as with any laptop I'm sure it greatly depends on the use. Maybe a little over an hour of gaming and perhaps 10 hours with devices turned off, minimum brightness and just light browsing and some video watching using the integrated GPU only. These numbers are invented and not any real representation. I will try to get some accurate numbers after I do some testing.
There are some annoying quirks. Whenever I plug my G700 mouse (haven't tried any other mice) the computer auto disables the touchpad. And I have to go FN+F3 to enable again. The touchpad is really nice when typing and you need to do something with the cursor quickly, not so much if it's disabled. Apparently some of the Synaptics software does this and is somewhat complicated to fix as there is no toggle setting available natively. Maybe new drivers will have that feature, but with the ones you get out of the box your touchpad will be automatically disabled when another mouse input is connected. After searching on some forums someone pointed out to me this fix
"Disable internal pointing device when external USB pointing device is attached" option in the synaptics control panel, open regedit and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Synaptics\SynTPEnh, right click and select New > DWORD (32-bit) Value and name it "DisableIntPDFeature". "Modify it's value to 33 in hexadecimal, or 51 in decimal to enable it to be default on." I haven't tried it yet myself. But I might try to do it soon.
I was unlucky enough to get a noisy fan when it is idling, it sound like toy car gears or perhaps a bad bearing. But a quick e-mail to my reseller and a few arrangements with MSI got me a new one coming in the mail. Which I will change myself. Since my warranty sticker had already been broken it's not an issue. Yet, you should contact MSI and ask about implications of breaking your warranty sticker. The consensus is that as long as you don't actually damage anything there shouldn't be a problem, yet I recommend contacting MSI yourself. You need to break it to upgrade your RAM with the 2 slots that are available upon opening the laptop (the other 2 are under the keyboard)
I have been thinking about doing two things to improve the aesthetics of the notebook. And that is
1)Removing the stickers, or at least just the Specs and MSI gaming series and maybe even the Sound Blaster one. The Intel and Nvidia one are fine. Since the handrest is made of aluminum, I would think that any glue residue would be easily removed with alcohol, lighter fluid or some other light solvent. This may decrease the resale value of the laptop later on, so it's a very personal call.
2)Coming from the MSI GX60, I always hated the shiny screen bezel, yet I loved the chrome MSI logo. In the GT60 I love the matte bezel but the painted MSI logo on the bezel looks very cheap and detracts from the High-end look of the notebook. I ordered a pair or metal stickers from China that I found on eaby. They will get here in about 20 days, so we'll see about that. I know that I might have to modify things a little bit. The foremost reason I think MSI chose to do this is since the bezel is matte, the stickers wouldn't play so nice with that surface. Let's see what happens. I got a 2 pack, so I have a little slack there.
As a footnote, I have been looking for good cases to keep and carry the laptop around. I haven't yet found a neoprene skin that would fit the laptop, it is bigger than a standard 15.6 incher and also thicker, but not as big as a 17 incher. I haven't yet found one but I'll keep looking. As for the case, after a lot of research I found a nice case that I think looks amazing, has a good price and offers good protection. The Condor 3-Way laptop case available here on Amazon seems to fit this laptop nicely. It seems to have a large enough pocket for the Power supply brick and has good padding and restraint all the way around. I'll post an update once I get it to see how well it fits.
To wrap it up, I read on the owners forum for this laptop over at notebookreview that to get the warranty from MSI you have to complete the online form and then print and mail something back to them (through snail mail) to get the full warranty. I haven't done it yet and I suggest you look up some information. I will try to keep this review updated with any new developments.
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Received mine earlier today and have been install, browsing and gaming for six hours.Initial impression:
Unboxing the laptop, the overall weight of the unit and power adapter is fairly substantial. This makes a good desktop replacement, but I could not see myself carrying this daily. Overall, the construction is fairly good, but there are some short comings. The hotkeys near the top creak and are not sturdy towards the center, the laptop screen has a decent amount of flex and the same for the bottom half. The unit just does not feel as solid as the HP Elitebooks that I've owned in the past for example.
I also am not a fan of the trackpad buttons. They take a considerable amount of force to click and really force you to use the outer edges. For some reason, the buttons are a single piece which adds to the frustration. The keyboard is decent and the variable color back lighting is a nice touch.
Turning the laptop on, it greats you with the typical Windows 8 setup. There is not a lot of pre-installed applications, though I did end up removing a handful. Fortunately, the Norton software was straight forward to remove along with the other software. From there, it was easy to get online and start installing my common applications like Chrome, Steam, Avast and so on.
Gaming:
Since this is a laptop built around the fastest single mobile graphics card (780m) that was my next stop. The first game I fired up was Skyrim along with the HD texture pack and a few other visual upgrades. Due to Optimus, the installers recommends very low settings, but I set them to Ultra to start. The majority of indoor zones and towns play without a hitch at Ultra. However, out in the open world there was a considerable amount of stuttering at various times. It will take some more tweaking to find the optimal settings as well as trying other games like Crysis 3 and so on.
Summary:
While I've only had a short time with the laptop, I'm happy with the value. This makes a good portable gaming pc gaming system, but I will keep my ultrabook for mobile computing.
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Sadly I bought this from a popular website starting with an N and ending in G which I will never use again. I purchased there only because Amazon themselves don't have this in stock yet. BIG MISTAKE as getting an RMA has been a nightmare.The laptop has great hardware for gaming, great sound, a good screen, fantastic keyboard. Scored 7700 on 3Dmark 11 P out of the box.
Mine has a bad issue with the fan, it sounds like a locust is stuck inside my comp. The thing rattles at idle and whines at load, like a bad bearing or similar to coil whine. The disc drive also only works sometimes. My ssd drive changes its free space available after every restart despite setting a fixed mem allocation. It will go from anywhere between 68gb and 76gb. HEAT is bad, the CPU idles at about 65C and load up to 100C unless I turn on turbo fan. The GPU goes up to 91C at load.
If I could get a refund I would but I'm stuck as they won't give one to me without paying 15% restocking. It was like pulling teeth to get a return label and my replacement isn't even guaranteed. If you buy this get it here. I hope Someday Amazon will put these places with terrible customer arrive out of business.
Honest reviews on MSI G Series GT60 2OD-026US 15.6-Inch Laptop (Black)
Having a blast with this notebook. It loads Windows almost instantaneously, runs games with the best resolution possible while still maintaining good fps and has more disk space than I can handle. What else could I ever want in a computer?Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for MSI G Series GT60 2OD-026US 15.6-Inch Laptop (Black)
This laptop is amazing, ssd and a monster gpu let alone the haswell which makes it last longer with battery.Actually i'd like to have a desktop for gaming but i travel to study in america then i travel back every vocation thats 1 month or longer
Battery life maybe is not very important for this type of laptops but here u go:
If im playing heavy games it takes 1h30m-2h but if you are doing other things 5 hours is an easy achievement. As long as it doesnt use the monsterous gpu
It is still better to use the charger while playing to get the best performance out of the gpu, i see a slight drop in frames rate without it.
you might find more about this laptop in tech websites reviews or youtube videos.
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