MSI GS60 Ghost Pro - Broadwell - Subjective Analysis

So I've been in the market for a gaming notebook for quite sometime now and I've had the opportunity to play with various notebooks ranging from Alienware's 2015 line to the ASUS RoG G751 and MSI's GT/GS/GE line. Unfortunately, bad luck follows me which lead me to returning a handful of them. So I waited for months for a potential refresh.

It was then that the MSI GS60 Ghost Pro with the i7-5700HQ + GTX 970M had drawn me in with my wallet and NCIX gift cards in hand that I decided to purchase the elegant notebook. The notebook I purchased has the following configuration:

15.6'' EDP IPS Display @ 1920 x 1080 Resolution
i7-5700HQ @ 2.7 GHz / 3.5 GHz Turbo Boost
16 GB DDR3L 1600Mhz RAM
NVidia GeForce GTX 970M 3 GB GDDR3
128 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD
Windows 8.1

Price: $1900 CDN. ( With coupons, gift cards applied ). Original price is $2199.99 from NCIX.com

Unboxing/First Impressions:

All that aside, the MSI GS60 came to my doorstep in your generic brown box with MSI's logo printed. Opening up the box greeted me with copious amounts of styrofoam that tightly seals the black and red accented box. In that same box is a zippered carrying sleeve that is of a soft-touch material with the MSI GAMING dragon logo knitted on.

Unpacking and cutting open the red/black box, we're introduced to the notebook that's contained within a thin sleeve with a place-mat in between the screen and keyboard. Underneath the notebook is a slew of different manuals, power cable and AC adapter. I'd say MSI did a fantastic job in packaging the goods and everything definitely looked well-padded throughout its transit to my house.

Build Quality:

The notebook is built from a magnesium-alloy material; it definitely gives off that feeling of structural rigidity throughout the entire machine. The only weak-points I've noticed is the bezel around the display, which is of a very thin plastic material. There is no give on the display itself, if you're pressing from the outside, so its still a reassuring feeling knowing that you're opening up a premium device. The hinges feel strong and hold up to rage-typing and gaming sessions, so no wobbling there.

The keyboard deck continues the metallic consistency with no flex unless you're wanting to rage all over the device or focus 20 lbs of pressure down the center, normal usage saw none of this. The bottom of the machine indicates that there's no maintenance hatch. So if you're bent on upgrading the machine, you will need to be prepared to remove the abundance of screws and gently pry off the bottom. Even if you do, you're only shown the 2.5'' drive bay as the easily accessible component of the bunch. For the rest, you will need to disassemble and flip the motherboard upside down, so if you're looking to purchase this notebook, purchase everything from the get-go. Or have a vendor like XoticPC/GenTechPC perform the upgrades for you.

Screen:

The notebook's screen is simply amazing. It's a 1080P EDP IPS display with bright, accurate colors and no ghosting, so it is well suited for gaming. The screen also has several different pre-calibrated profiles via its True Color application that can change the color gamut and coverage according to usage. Otherwise, content consumption has been amazing with this screen!

Keyboard/Touchpad:

MSI have utilized a unique steelseries multi-color backlit keyboard that's exclusive to the GS60/70 series. It's different than that of the steelseries keyboard in the GT60/70 and GE60/70 series. The keyboard has a good tactile feedback, it's somewhat squishier than the GT/GE keyboards, but it still feels excellent to type and game on. The notebook comes bundled with their Engine software so that you can change the backlighting color and program macros on individual keys ( excluding the F1-F12 buttons ).

The touchpad is... somewhat of a different story, it uses an ELAN touchpad and... it's a touchpad. I personally like it for its basic functions when my mouse isn't available and I have the notebook on my lap, but the software makes this touchpad's multi-gestures behave other than its intended function.

Software:

No notebook is complete without "software" and MSI should feel guilty for packing it on! When you power on the machine and configure all the initial settings, you will be presented with the branded MSI wallpaper and.. a slew of unwanted software. Some of it is good, but here is everything that comes bundled.

- Norton A/V
- Norton Backup
- Steelseries Engine
- Nahimic Audio Engine
- MSI Recovery Boot
- MSI Boot Up ( How Windows 8.1 should boot up. Present start menu or desktop )
- Battery Calibration/Super Charger
- MSI Remind Manager
- MSI Social Media
- MSI Gaming Link

Granted a lot of this is easily cleaned up, it's a TON right out of initial bootup.

Audio:

Previous iterations of the GS60/70 saw the speakers by Dynaudio. It's the same story for the broadwell models except now the software is powered by Nahimic rather than the Creative Sound Blaster suite. I really can't compare either suites, but the Nahimic software setup seems to improve the quality of the already decent sounding speakers. The speakers themselves are alright and they do get loud enough to fill a small room. Definitely not cinematic quality and you will want a pair of headphones for those gaming sessions. The mids and highs are quite nice, but the bass is lacking out of the box. That's where Nahimic comes in.

Gaming Performance/Temperatures:

Alright, I'm going to try and summarize this: it games like a champ and it looks awesome doing so. Here are some frame-rates and temperatures I've captured over the last week of playing:

BattleField 4: Ultra Settings/1080p - TDM on Parcel Storm
Avg: 66 FPS/ Lowest FPS: 54 / Highest FPS: 122

Titanfall: All Insane Settings/1080p/no shadows and VSYNC - Attrition on Outpost 207
Avg: 91 FPS / Lowest FPS: 70 ( During Titan drop ) / Highest FPS: 91

Arkham Knight: Attempted with no results ( Well, this is awkward )

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2: All maxed out/1080p/No VSYNC - Domination on Nuketown 2025
Avg: 134 / Lowest FPS: 59 / Highest FPS: 188

BattleField Hardline: Ultra Settings/1080p - Hotwire on Dust Bowl
Avg: 63 FPS / Lowest FPS: 49 / Highest FPS: 126

3DMark Score: 6666

The following temperatures were recorded individually after a 2 hour session of Prime95 on the CPU and a single session of 3DMark for both GPU and CPU. The ambient temperature of the room was 21 degrees C.

CPU ( Idling ) - 44 deg C
CPU ( 100% Load/Prime95 ): Peaked 81 Degrees C for the package. Lowest temp was 79 degs C on one Core.
GPU ( 100% Load/3DMark ): Peaked 78 Degs C.

Very impressive temperatures for a notebook that's under an inch thin. The i7-5700HQ and GTX 970M Maxwell were definitely meant to be paired together.

Storage:

MSI has outfitted this notebook with an SSD + HDD combo. The SSD is provided by Toshiba and it has solid read/write speeds.

Read: 475 MB/s Seq
Write: 354 MB/s Seq

On the mechanical side, HGST has provided a full-fledged 7200 RPM HDD with 1 TB of storage. I haven't benchmarked this drive. But I don't expect anything extravagant and it does feel snappy for a mechanical solution.

Battery Life:

So here's where the praise for the notebook goes from AWESOME to " Oh.. " -- With hardware like this paired with a small capacity battery of 54whr, I wouldn't have expected too much battery life out of this notebook and that definitely holds true:

Normal usage ( Brightness at 30%, Low keyboard backlighting, WIFI, Surfing Notebookreview ):
3 hr/15 minutes

Video consumption ( Same brightness level and Backlighting, WIFI on, Youtube )
2 hr/45 minutes

Gaming ( Everything tuned to the max, Battery Boost disabled )
35 minutes

Gaming ( Everything tuned up, Battery Boost enabled with 30 FPS targeted for Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes on high/ultra high mixed settings, no VSYNC )
45 minutes

Fortunately for me, my travelling expectations do not have me away from an AC outlet for more than 2 - 3 hours tops which leaves me with enough juice to continue using the notebook once I plug it in. It's unfortunate that MSI couldn't stuff a larger battery pack into this notebook as the Razer Blade 2015 managed to pull it off at somewhat thinner dimensions. From what I've read anyways.

Conclusions:

It's powerful, it's cool and it's expensive. Is it worth the asking price? I'd say so. The notebook's updated hardware definitely keeps the form factor nice and cool under intense usage when compared to the Early 2014 version of the GS60 with the GTX870M. Controlled temperatures and massive performance boosts thanks to the new hardware allows you to prolong your gaming sessions. One thing I would highly suggest against is gaming with this thing on your lap.

It really does hurt.

 

Thanks for this review man.
I really want this laptop, but I'm waiting for a Gold or Red version to come out in the US.
I may just give the color up and get a black one though. The wait is killing me.