GS73VR 6RF rant after 4 years

I was thinking about writing this rant earlier but then I feel like I should wait a little longer in case other issues pop up. And I was absolutely right lol.

I bought my GS73VR 6RF 4K from Amazon (sold and shipped by Amazon not 3rd party seller). This is my first premium laptop so I was fairly excited when I got it. After all these years, here are my lists of issues:

1. The gap between the chassis is huge. I read ultrabookreview's review and specifically chose 4K version thinking the gap problem will be less noticeable. At first I didn't realize but when the touch pad side of the chassis getting crushed inwards due to the huge gap, chassis on both left and right popped out at the ports where it's the weakest. I asked them to fix it during warranty for screen hinges but they refused and quoted me 200 dollars for parts and labour. Honestly I should just replace with Amazon at first until I get a good one.

2. Screen hinges on both sides broke after 1.5 years. You can find many posts online about the same problem across the entire range of MSI laptops. They all share the same faulty design. Fixed it for free with warranty but it's guaranteed to happen again. Two layers of thin plastics glued together with a tiny piece of metal to hold the giant screen is the stupidest design.

3. The battery quality is absolutely the worst. After about two years of regular use, it lost 40% of the capacity. That's not the end though. It became swollen in the third year and lost all capacity. I just took out the battery and used it as a desktop instead. Replacing the battery doesn't worth it since it's gonna be the same quality anyways.

4. This laptop will not go into package C6 state at all no matter what I try. The idle power consumption is hovering at 2W while package C6 state only needs 0.5W. I think 7RF and later fixes this but I'm not entirely sure. Most likely it's some kind of BIOS issue but obviously MSI doesn't care.

5. Firmware support pretty much doesn't exist. There has been so many microcode and ME engine exploits and this laptop only gets 1 update for BIOS and 1 update for ME. To update microcode in BIOS, you need to mod the BIOS yourself which is not a easy thing. Updating the ME firmware is simpler with the help from win-raid forum.

6. The inverted motherboard design is so frustrating. Popping off the case only allows you to access HDD and WiFi card. RAM, SSD, CPU, GPU are all located on the other side. You need to carefully take out of all these fragile flexible cables and flip the motherboard to clean the dust/upgrade/repaste.

7. The CPU can only be cooled by a single fan. The two other fans for the GPU can't do any help for the CPU because the heat pipes are not connected together. So whenever you ran any CPU-intensive workload, prepare to get 6000rpm CPU fans while the other two GPU fans do nothing at all.

8. The sticker on the chassis highlights PCIe 3.0 SSD but then ships a SATA SSD. Apparently Europe and Asia got PCIe SSD but North America version got crap SATA ones.

9. nVIDIA's DCH driver will not install on my laptop. MSI's device ID is not included in it for unknown reasons. Hope one day they will realize this but most likely it's a no.

10. The Thunderbolt 3 port does not allow charging. I know it's limited at 100W but it's better than nothing. This one I will let MSI pass since other gaming laptops lack this too. I think ROG is the first one to implement this but newer ones generally has fixed this problem.

My next laptop will probably be something like a Lenovo X1E or XPS15 with ryzen. They have comparably better (although still many complaints online) build quality and support. Most of the components like RAM, SSD, WiFi are user replaceable and easy to access.I already got an eGPU so the laptop don't even need a dedicated GPU which means it's cool, light, and quiet.

IMO premium gaming laptops only focus on RGB and hardware specs but lose on building quality and design. The ROG Zephyrus G14 looks decent so maybe I will give a chance to its updated model if they give two SODIMM slots in newer models.

Thanks for reading all this rant. I will most likely avoid MSI laptops for now. MSI motherboards are pretty nice though.

 

i have to log in to say i understand your feelings and how crappy this machine is. A year ago i bought the MSI GS73VR 120hz, it hot as **** and when my brother open the machine he said exactly what you said about those fans, its not enough to cool the machine. But what make i avoid MSI was after 1 year , the hinges broke (i still keep the photos as a reminder) I come to them for repair and you know what they said? They said that it was my fault that the hinges broke, that i was "using the laptop in a wrong way", then they deleted my post on local MSI group and banned me from the group. After that day i swear to myself i will NEVER, EVER buy another MSI laptop again.

 

1 - Not really understanding what gap you are referencing.

2 - Known MSI defect in a couple chassis that where used and re-used for way too long, MSI support in the USA seems to be pretty crappy, you should have escalated things at the time.

3 - Your model didn't have battery charge limitation, so it always charged the battery up to 100%, so the battery lasting only 2/3 years is sadly expected, a new battery will last you another 2/3 years.

4 - Did you ever take a look over the hidden menus on the BIOS? Even my Haswell will go into C6 state, you might have some background program preventing that.

5 - Most laptop brands abandon their laptops after they are on the market, and since Windows can load micro-code updates during boot, I prefer it that way than way Dell, Asus and others have been doing, by forcing BIOS updates that disable undervolting.

6 - Thats a fact, and was known as soon as the first laptop reviews where out, frustrating, but its a thing of the past.

7- There is in fact a shared heatpipe going all over the whole heatsink, but it wont do much because its such a long heatpipe and it only connects the fin stacks, doesn't pass over the CPU die directly. You can always buy a thin flat heatpipe and some artic thermal epoxy and bridge them.
Also, repaste and undervolt should keep the CPU running cool enough to not thermal throttle.

8 - Again, thats model specific, the connection is there, but to meet price points not all laptops are sold with the same storage, RAM, or even same display everywhere.

9 - Honest question, any difference between regular and DCH drivers?

10 - Thunderbolt, like USB-C is a mess of a standard where the vendors get to pick what will or not work, since those where the early days of TB3, charging via it was not all that fleshed out, nor where all in one IC's capable of PD and signal muxing readily available like they are today.

You hate on the MSI and go to either Lenovo that shipped root certificates into their pre-installed OS images, or to Dell that will say to you that a 105ºC CPU is normal and that your XPS is not really overheating?..

 

1. I'm talking about the gap mentioned in this review. https://www.ultrabookreview.com/12167-msi-stealth-pro-gs73vr-review/

2. They already fixed it for free with warranty. What else should I ask to escalate?

3. Yes it doesn't have any battery limit function but so do lots of other laptops. The battery supplier is some small random company and no matter if it has battery limit function or not it's still low quality battery.

4. Yes I tried asking in the hidden BIOS option thread and the method to enable C6 on GS65/75 doesn't work on GS73/63 confirmed by me and other owners. I think they fixed it for GS73VR 7RF but didn't bother backport it to 6RF because 7RF has longer battery life with no major hardware difference.

5. I agree your point about microcode but for ME firmware the OS can't do anything about it. Intel never cease to surprise us with new scary bugs in ME. MSI also pushes BIOS update through windows update like how Dell Asus do.

9. Given that Microsoft is heavily pushing for DCH, one day they could just stop letting you to use regular drivers.

MSI also ships bunch of bloatware and crappy Dragon Center with the pre installed OS image. They also say 105ºC CPU is normal on their forum. All laptops OEM have these problems so why not pick the OEM with good building quality and longer driver/firmware support?

 

I got lucky because when I bought GS73VR 6RF, it had 1 year international warranty and 1 year local warranty plus extra 3 months by registration. Starting with 7RF they reduced it to 1 year local warranty. My hinge broke at the end of the warranty period lol.