MSI GE72VR Owners Lounge

So guess I'll start the thread for the exclusive club. Originally not high on peoples list because of its price compared to the GT version which offered a few more perks to the power users, this GE version got quite the sale for cyber monday when I snagged it. I was looking for a desktop replacement, I had a high end i7 with a 970gtx but found that these days my gaming hours are shorter and the list of games that interest me coming up quite small so I wanted to shrink my desktop space. Especially since I plan to move and it will probably be to a smaller place.

Not going to list everything you see in the many unboxing videos, but rather just go over some of the experiences encountered while fitting this into my stuff. First, some opinions and comparison of the screen and audio to my older laptop. I have an asus q550lf, $1000 several years ago and is an i7 ULV coupled with a 745m. Enough to kick out a game if you wanted, but cost and power saving is clearly the higher priority. Aside from the great battery life from the ULV cpu, the q550lf had an amazing looking 1080p screen and a unique sound footprint.



MSI on the left and the Asus on the right. The asus seems to be stronger when it comes to Blues and Red which look just a little washed out on the MSI, but the MSI bounces back on an amazing yellow and a strong green. The Asus does seem to offer the better contrast while the MSI is a little brighter. I lowered the brightness to see if the contrast would match but it didn't help so I left it maxed out. So even if the MSI had a higher brightness, it didn't make the contrast differences any more or less noticable. Overall I think my asus still edges out the MSI in the screen department. Still I simply think my Asus has an amazing screen and the MSI is great overall. Maybe a little too average on the contrast ratio, but I wouldn't be disappointed with my games on it. I didn't notice any uneven light bleeding on the msi, but it was letting through more light overall then the Asus.

Sound wise it isn't nearly as much of a close game. The MSI features a sound design by DynAudio with 4 bottom front firing speakers and a sub in the cavity, while the Asus used a setup by Bang & Olufsen which consisted of 4 bottom front firing speakers and an external sub speaker (not powered, hooks up via mini headphone jack to a special port) that is the size of a mug. The MSI is clearly a step above the normal laptops, but no matter how much I tried tweaking its sound with the Nahimic program it simply doesn't compete with the Asus. For one the MSI front firing speakers seem to direct the sound in a way that favors even a small lift off the desk. You can recover a large chunk of high range the higher you fire the front speakers. And while the cavity sub on the MSI is noticeable and welcomed, it was simply no contest to the external sub of the Asus. I can't say I was surprised, but with no experience with other built in subs that other high end laptops have tried in the past year I was hopeful. Again the MSI solution works better then no sub at all, and I could say that it was still enjoyable, but the asus is still the better media player.

So after having removed my tower and inserted my MSI, my experience has been mostly positive but a little rough. The windows installation out of the box seemed to be a mess. I was encountering unresponsiveness even during the windows personalization setup, and it looked very much like the windows 10 superfetch SSD bug where drive access was %100 but there was no data rate, and windows didn't lock up but programs would not respond and new ones wouldn't start. I downloaded all the software from msi and did a clean windows 10 install from scratch, something I am quite good at doing now. Since then I haven't had any such issues. I even installed all of MSI's apps like dragon center, I figured it would give me the best cooling profiles and better power profiles for the times I am on battery power.

Other then that it has been mainly a lot of adventures with optimus on a whole nother level. My asus laptop has optimus for its 745m, but I run a half dozen games on it and never use the hdmi out, and so for that I never ran into issues. Now that I am asking for desktop level performance, some of optimus's bad traits have made themselves known. My first issue was adaptive synch and fast sync. I had been enjoying fast sync as a free upgrade from old vsync for my plain old gaming monitor. I decided to forgo the Gsync laptops for the power saving optimus hoping that I could live with fast sync. The joke is on me, fast sync and adaptive sync are not supported when a laptop is using optimus. Even if you're directly connected to the dGPU through vsync. It will also most likely be the same issue with thunderbolt 3 connections. Anyways... vsync is still exceptable.

One thing that made me real happy as I didn't have to buy a usb dongle, the laptop supports an optical link through the headphone jack for SPDIF, so I was able to plug the laptop into my existing speaker setup the same way I did my desktop. This is how I'll hear the laptop at home so the built in speaker issues weren't any kind of a deal breaker.

I've spent all evening putting the laptop through its paces and it has been doing well. Had no problem with a few hours of WoW (slight bug where if I tab out, the frame rate gets locked to 30fps. resetting video modes fixes this). Chrome does have a major issue with using HDMI out though. HTML 5 video from many web sites will NOT appear if full screened. You have to turn the hardware acceleration off inside chrome to get it to work. There was also a strange lag in scrolling pages which was also fixed by turning off the hardware accel. Didn't notice any cpu or heat issues when doing this so losing hardware acceleration doesn't seem a big deal.

One last thing I need to do is I have my mechanical keyboard and gaming mouse plugged in and they are hogging all the good 3.0 ports, so I put in an order for a usb hub. Also while I had no issues with the intel WIFI card, it is a 1x1 which means file transfers are a joke so down the line I will probably upgrade that. For now though it is using the ethernet my desktop was on.

Addendum: So, don't do what I did and set the shift mode to comfort to preemptively keep fan noise down. Comfort mode keeps turbo on for the cpu but turns it off for the gpu. Big mistake.. the performance hit is HUGE. 3dmarks time spy score is 3029 with turbo off and 3639 with turbo on. The fire strike score was 7933 with turbo off and 9321 with turbo on. And I really didn't notice a difference in fan profile noise.

 

I'm thinking of picking up the 15'' version of your system. How has the fan noise been? In the stores it seemed pretty reasonable even on turbo boost (you could hear them but it wasn't too bad) but its hard to judge from a showroom floor with lots of ambient noise.

 

Alot of the video reviews of the ge62vr said cooling noise was very acceptable under load and that lead me to feeling the 72vr was a safe bet, if not better at cooling. I've been happy with it, it has never ever ramped up to a full blast (I haven't touched the button that puts them to %100 yet). I'm actually at a disadvantage too, I am using the hdmi out so the nvidia chip never gets a chance to shut down when a game closes. This leads the fan to hover at higher speeds for a longer time. Also when browsing videos like you tube will cause the gpu side fan to startup. Had I been using the internal display then the gpu side fan would only need to be active during games.

Edit: Hahaha..so I just hit the max speed button, a very graceful command as it slowly ramps the fans up. It brings the cpu fan to 6k RPMs and the GPU fan to 5.5k rpms and are quite loud. During normal game use I don't see the fans go above 4k so they are no where near this loud. You might see this speeds if you were gaming in 90-100 degree temps and so your cooling air was hot to begin with.

 

Has anyone tried to to use professional color calibration tools or profiles yet? Since I do a lot of photo editing I went ahead and tried a pretty good profile I found online here: http://www.notebookcheck.net/MSI-GE72-7RE-Apache-Pro-Notebook-Review.189684.0.html. I did notice an improvement after setting notebookcheck's profile.

 

I might be picking the GE62 7RE with the 7700HQ, 1050Ti 4GB, 16GB DDR4 2400Mhz, 1TB HDD + 256GB SSD for around 1200Euros. It will be my main daily driver (Mostly work, programming and some editing), and It'll also run games mostly during weekends.

Is the IPS panel good enough for content creation?
I'm refusing the lower end MSI GP62MVR (7700HQ, 1060 3GB, 8GB DDR4, 1TB+256SSD, same price), mainly because of the horrible screen. They claim it's IPS, but the colors and brightness are awful, even my 6YO Acer TN panel looks better.

By looking at the GE62 reviews on Youtube, the panel does look great, and definitely way better than the GP62MVR I've found in a retail shop nearby. Hopefully the compromise in GPU horsepower turns favorable to my daily work!

Sent from my SM-N900 using Tapatalk

 

I bought the GE72VR 7RF-296CA today.
i7-7700HQ
GTX 1060 6GB
16Gb Ram
256GB SSD
1TB HDD
120hz

Everything is very smooth so far expect for the GPU fans.
When looking in dragon center it says it's running @ 5,600 RPM max but it doesn't blow any air.
Also when i click on the Turbo boost physical button it slowly ramps up to max speed instead of going fast instantly like my other model did.

I'ma have to reach MSI support today.

 

hi there, as an ge72vr 7rf owner, can you use the laptop without battery attached? i mean the power straight from the adaptor, just like the oldies laptop