GT70 Dominator potential owner questions/help

Hi I am looking to order myself GT70 Dominator laptop and just have a couple of questions I'm hoping someone can answer.

With regards to the battery life, how long could I expect it to last without being plugged in just for web browsing or using word/excel?

As for the fan noise I'm expecting it to be loud during high gaming but again just for non gaming activities how quiet/loud can I expect it to be?

Same questions but for watching TV/movies whilst hooked up to the TV via hdmi?

I would be very grateful for any help.

 

Not many have the new Dominator laptops yet, but I had a GT60 20C (previous 15.6 version of the GT70) and I was getting about 3-4 hours or so at work. That's mainly web browsing and running RDP the whole time as well as outputing to a 27" monitor via HDMI (which I believe requires the dedicated video to be active). I never noticed the fan spin up at anytime other than when I was playing games and even then it wasn't that bad. (My HP dv6 was much louder)

Im supposed to get my new GT60 Dominator today so I'll post back information on it after today.

 

Haswell CPU's have helped battery life a lot, the 3-4hrs on basic use as rolla94 mentioned is what we normally see.
I've done a couple video reviews on GT70 Dominators and the fan is really quiet while idle, if it means anything to you our dB meter averaged 40 while idle.

 

Ok that's great, thank you both for answering my questions. 3-4 hours is what I was hoping for whilst not plugged into the mains.

My other questions I have before pulling the trigger is just how reliable are MSI gaming laptops compared to the Asus/Alienware equivalent? And am I correct in saying that the GPU's on the latest MSI laptops with the GTX 870m can in theory be upgraded with new cards in the future?

Do you think the GTX 870m is likely to be able to handle the big games in the future like Witcher 3 at high levels of detail?

 

You're usually looking at about 3± hours.

Not very. The Asus ROG is acclaimed with being the quietest among gaming laptops, but MSI's GT series isn't bad. They tend to rank in between Clevo and Asus as far as fan noise goes.

Battery life on a single charge will not last quite as long while driving a monitor, especially at a high resolution. But the difference won't be astronomical. The fans may rev here and there, but won't be bad. Of course, temps are also subject to ambient room temperature, your compound, mods, and how you treat it.

 

Well i have a friend who has an asus and i can confirm that they are very quiet, barely makes a sound.

But on the MSI higher fan noise means higher temperatures right? I saw in the review hutsady did that the temperatures reached 93 on cpu and 88 on gpu during the benchmark test, it might be smart to get a cooler pad in order to help those temperatures down, something like a Cooler Master Notepal U3 Plus. With that one you can adjust the fans to be right under the cpu and gpu.

This should help the laptop last longer i think, without being an expert

 

Raising up the back will give you all the benefit of a pad, a good re paste and using 0.5mm pads can help take even more off.

 

Just checking back in.. been running benchmarks (3dmark and 3dmark 11) for about an hour now and temps are at 78c on cpu and 72c on GPU max during the testing on my GT60 Dominator 424 with the fan turned on.

 

Looks of fire strike extreme or vantage extreme are good for stress testing.

 

checking in again on battery on the GT60 Dominator 424.. I got 2 hours 50 minutes this morning at work while streaming spotify the whole time, running a couple browser, outputting to a monitor via hdmi, but mostly working in an RDP window. I also had dropbox and google drive in the background syncing down all my data since this is a new laptop (about 30gb so far of around 100gb), had the brightness at 100% and charged my iphone in there as well.

 

Outputting from the hdmi forces the dedicated gpu on so yes the results will be low.