MSI notebook order thread: post your orders here

Interesting, I was debating on this myself.

 

According to FedEx, my system is now just two states west of where I live, still on track for Tuesday delivery. Not that I'm obsessing or anything.

 

@Phoenix, I seem to recall at one time you offered to assist me in tuning when I get my machine. Does that still hold true, and if so, how may I best contact you?

 

My laptop is finished
It will be shipped Monday.
I'm so excited!

 

Great news. Mine is in production. Hopefully will be shipped soon. I can almost see your excitement.

Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk

 

You betcha, you are about to be blown away by the magic I will show you.

I'll PM you now

 

The beast is now about 200 km from me. I have a hunch it might actually arrive a day early, which would not hurt my feelings at all.

 

you will like the magic in the BIOS that I will show you

 

I spoke with Donald, who seems to be a straight-to-the-point type, today. He answered a few lingering questions I had, and helped set up my build. I appreciate that Donald doesn't sell products to you based on dollars, but is genuinely concerned that you are buying what you will use and not much else.

For my build, I went with:

120hz 1080p TN panel calibrated;
Silicon lottery binned, Delidded, OCed i7-7700k;
16GB (2x8) Dual channel 2400MHz memory;
RAID 0 with 2x128GB M.2 SATA SSD;
1TB 7200 rpm HDD;
Intel's 8265 network card.

I'm really excited about my build, and, for the money, I really don't think this kit can be topped.

I actually turned to HIDevolution thanks to this forum and @Phoenix in particular. Originally I was looking at Clevo, which is a solid product, but the moment I ran across the 16L-G I knew I found what I have been looking for. Thanks for the help Donald and for the information @Phoenix in leading me to make this decision. Now it's time to play the waiting game.

 

Excellent choice man and nice config. you will love that FHD 120hz panel

If you need help tweaking your system once you get it, just tag me so I can show you how to tweak Windows 10 and eliminate all privacy invasion stuff and make it look a bit more like Windows 7.

I'll also show you some magic in the BIOS

 

Thanks Phoenix! I will take you up on that offer. How long have you been dealing with HIDevolution now? As I mentioned, I gave them a chance based on comments that you had made in several threads here.

 

about 2 years........ was pleased with every one of my previous 3 orders.....

please see:

HIDevolution - The Best Company I ever dealt with

HIDevolution's Warranty!

 

Thanks. I actually used the information from those links to make my decision. HIDevolution owes a thanks to you in swaying my purchase to their company. I didn't even considered them until I saw information that you posted regarding them. Donald asked me to tag you in my post. He said you would be a great asset in helping me get the most out of my machine. I knew that was true based on some of your posts I have read. For example, I really liked your post about disabling Windows defender. I'd appreciate all the advice you'd be willing to offer when I get my EVOC.

 

I assure you will be shocked at the amounts of tweaks I will do to tame Windows 10 and make it tolerable

 

I'm sure. I haven't messed with tweaking Windows much in the past. I programmed a bit and am working on a degree in Computer Engineering so I definitely have interest. It's great that you are willing to help.

 

Mine just got shipped! I'm so excited to get it... I just can't wait anymore.

 

Say a prayer that it doesn't get delayed by the big snow storm coming in.

 

Yeah, I just saw the Fedex warning about snowstorm delays. Hopefully, it won't be that bad by the time the laptop arrives. Currently, it's 2015miles away from my house.

 

Snowstorm Hope you get your laptop on time.

Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk

 

Can you run firestrike basic on it when you get the laptop and updated the drivers. I'd like to see how the gtx1080 fairs against 1070 sli.

 

@quietfan Sure

I just got a notification from Fedex:
Shipment exception ANAHEIM, CA
Barcode label unreadable and replaced

They kept the package on hold for a while. I wonder how did the barcode become unreadable.

 

Hey guys,

Long time lurker here that is forced to become active for the sake of no one else having asked this question on this forum?

So I am browsing for a new laptop. Either portable + desktop rig for up to 4k USD total price or a superportable that will satisfy my needs. I find the GS63VR form factor appealing. With the option to connect it to a screen + eGPU at home to mainly reduce temps and slightly increase performance.

Now i find out that HIDevolution provides the barebone version in a CLEAN design. I am extremely interested but I wonder if anyone has actually tried this one out?

I sent an e-mail to HIDevolution with some questions. The Donald was as helpful as many users on this forum has stated. But after having read though the GS63VR owners thread im wondering if any users here on this forum has it? Or has had a hands on?

Link: http://www.hidevolution.com/new-laptops/business-home-student-laptops/evoc-msi

 

Dual 1070's in SLi will usually outperform a single 1080 by just a bit.

 

Unless the specific game doesn't work fully with SLI. Part of the reason why I went with a single GTX1080.

 

Ah, those five magic words in my email inbox today: "On FedEx vehicle for delivery"!

 

It's here!

The machine arrived just a few minutes before I had to present a report at a long customer-facing meeting. I had time to unbox and power it up, create my Windows user account, and shut down. After the meeting, the fun begins!

Everything I ordered was in the box, and it was very nicely packaged. I'll post more comments, and eventually a review from the perspective of an engineer's daily-driver workstation, after I have had more time to configure and test.

 

Aaaaannnnd...I'm typing this from the new machine!

Impressions so far (both good and bad):

• Build quality: Excellent exterior; have not yet opened machine to comment on interior. The brushed aluminum exterior parts are very nice. They do attract fingerprints, but I think it's worth it.
• Aesthetics: Some hard-core gamers may be disappointed, but I was looking for a businesslike aesthetic, and this model delivers. I can take this to a corporate site without drawing negative attention.
  
• Keyboard: Won't compete against a desktop-sized mechanical, but quite acceptable to me (and I'm picky). I'm still getting used to the layout of some non-alphanumeric keys (such as DEL), but for normal text keys I'm already typing at nearly my full rate, with very few errors.
  
• Sound: Built-in speakers have good volume and decent (but not outstanding) fidelity. With headphones, too early to say as I haven't tested against a high-enough quality audio source.
  
• 4K screen: Clarity of fonts and other objects excellent, brightness excellent but with slight bloom at top end. I'm finding it very comfortable in a brightly-lit room at about 75% setting. Colors seem fairly true (I paid for calibration), but I have not examined this closely with known photographic media. Glare is very low on this matte screen; I am using it right now with the sun at my back (indirect, but still a challenging lighting situation), and I have no issues.
  
  EDIT: I downloaded some of my photos, and the colors seem pretty darned good. It's weird, when you're really looking for something like that, how much ambient lighting makes a difference. The colors seem a lot more true under balanced ambient light than they were earlier, under fluorescent -- which of course makes perfect sense! TL;DR: So far, I'm very happy with this screen for my applications.​
• Fan noise: Almost silent when machine is at idle, default power settings. Louder under load, but not unexpectedly so.
• Trackpad: As others have said...decent but not outstanding. I rarely use it, and knew this wasn't the machine's strong point, but didn't (and don't) care.
• Weight: The machine feels lighter than its specs suggested it should. I don't have a mechanical HDD installed, so that probably cut the weight a bit from its published spec, but still, it was a pleasant surprise. The 330W power brick is really a brick, but I also have a 230W PSU for when I travel and don't plan to push the machine hard.
• Performance: No testing yet.

 

Some quick power consumption tests, measured with a digital wattmeter at the plug (upstream of the PSU):

• Machine at idle, 4K screen at about 75% brightness: 30W
• Playing a 4K video at 4K: 60W to 105W, varies depending on video content

I've been dying to run some wattage tests on this system, so there will be more to come. The low idle power is a pleasant surprise, because that will be typical of what I'll see when I'm using command lines for my sysadmin work (very little load on the local machine).

I should also note that the fans did not spin up noticeably during the 4K video playback. They may have spun up a little, but I couldn't hear them over the speakers.

 

Have you enabled Equalization?
.

 

No, I haven't tuned much of anything yet. I expect to be able to make a lot of differences using things like that.

EDIT: Please remember, I'm not normally a Windows user, so part of this is that I don't yet know where to find things in the o.s.

Right now, I'm just testing out basic functionality and getting some software onboard so I can exercise the machine with something meaningful.

I'm also going to install Fire Strike and run a stock benchmark as a baseline, knowing perfectly well that it's going to be much lower than I will ultimately achieve. I have an appointment with @Phoenix who has kindly agreed to help me overclock this beast.

 

I am eager to hear how it goes after your visit with @Phoenix
.

 

Uhhhh..... Yes, that made, ummmm...... rather a LARGE difference in sound quality.

My only other Windows system is a tower with an S/PDIF connection to a 5.1 surround system, tuned in the amp and not the PC, so it didn't occur to me to even look for this setting. Thanks for the tip!

 

@Donald@HIDevolution How do I get the BIOS screen on this system? Right now it's set for no pause or prompt during boot, so I'm not sure what key to hit.

 

On the sign in screen, Hold shift while clicking on restart.
Go to troubleshoot - Advanced - UEFI Firmware settings.

 

Just got off a long remote session with @Phoenix. That dude knows his stuff, and I've got a lot to digest.

Short summary: Looks like we bumped my clock by about 100 MHz from what HIDevolution had set, with temps still below 90C under stress test. Phoenix gave me the knowledge tools to take it forward from here, though I'm going to be more cautious than most on this forum because this is my work machine.

Awesome day. The cooling, btw, on this machine is incredibly good from what I've seen so far.

 

just hit DEL while rebooting bro

 

Congrats @syscrusher Nothing beat socket hardware

 

Work around if the window is too small.

 

Fire Strike Standard, default settings, 17285 (graphics 21141, physics 14308, combined 8408)
Fire Strike Ultra, default settings, 4908

By comparison, when I briefly had a 2016 Razer Blade Pro, it got just over 14000 on Fire Strike Standard.

 

Cooling: In a word, fantastic.

I ran Fire Strike repeatedly, pushing the system for over half an hour, with fans turned to max by the button on the keyboard panel.

Of course, warm air (but not excessively hot) comes out the back vents. No surprise there.

The keyboard was barely warm to the touch, and I mean "barely" warm. If you weren't trying to feel the heat, you wouldn't notice. The entire top surface, same thing -- lukewarm.

My wife made a joke about the bottom of the machine probably being hot, so I checked. It was cooler than the top. Seriously -- no detectable warming.

I forgot to run HWINFO during all this, so I don't know the temps. When @Phoenix was helping me tune, we had CPU temps in the upper 80s Celsius, so I'm assuming it was in that range.

My conclusion is that this machine pushes enough air through itself to keep the output temps and enclosure temps quite reasonable. Color me impressed!

 

Crystal Disk Mark on my Samsung 960 Pro 2 TB NVMe:
Sequential read, about 3400 MB/sec; sequential write, about 1900 MB/sec. Quite respectable!

I have just started the batch job to encrypt my system drive, so I won't be running additional benchmarks tonight.

 

@RalfTech..whats the progress on your shipment?
The wait seems like never ending process on my side.

Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk

 

For the performance of GTX 1080 you can also refer to MSI GT73 VR owner's lounge thread. My personal preference is to get a single powerful card instead of two in sli.

Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk

 

I will begin my day today by reinstalling Windows. Thankfully I bought the clean install media from HIDevolution.

I installed third-party disk encryption last night. The installation went fine, then Windows decided to "repair" that mean old nasty program that didn't come from its own labs, and by "repair" I mean, "Windows ate itself."

Back to square one. No fault on HIDevolution here -- this was all Windows being Windows. I guess I'll stick to the Party-approved BitLocker, even though I don't fully trust it, for the full disk encryption, and I'll use my third-party software only for container images.

 

Windoze is reinstalled, and I'm back online. This time, BitLocker for disk encryption. I installed my backup software and ran a backup right away, but I think this one will be a solid install.

The machine itself has remained (knock on plastic....) rock solid so far. I'm so very glad I sprang for the reinstallation media!

 

Things are going much better this time.

Among other things, Skyrim Special Edition at 4K on ultra graphics settings is lovely. I...uhhhh....loaded that as a test. (Actually, I did, but none of you are going to believe that!)

MS Office 2016 is installed, as are HWINFO, XTU, Firefox, Chrome, and Unity.

System stability is excellent so far, other than last night's Windows problem which was software and not hardware.

 

With a little tuning, I've got my Fire Strike (default settings) score up to about 16,300. That's up 1,000 points from where I was earlier today. @Phoenix had me over 17K last night, so I'm not feeling too bad about this one. I'll fool around with it more later. Max CPU temp was 86C, and max GPU temp was 76C -- well within my notion of acceptable limits. No thermal throttling. I used the manual fan toggle to put them at max, which I would normally do for things like my Unity lightmap bake jobs.

I still have found nothing that makes the system uncomfortably warm to touch; that's really good news for comfort during long use under high load. Even after GPU+CPU benchmarks, the keyboard is still barely lukewarm. Also, this thing is really quiet when under light load.

I've decided I really like this screen; fonts are nice and crisp for my CAD apps. The keyboard is proving to be quite comfortable as well; I answered some emails and did some sysadmin for work, and I'm typing happily along with very few errors.

 

Over 17K on Fire Strike now, still no temps over 89C.

 

Spiffy new result, much thanks to @Phoenix et al.

Fire Strike Score: 18147 (default graphic settings)
Settings:
CPU 70 mV undervolt
Clock by cores:
1: 4.9 GHz
2: 4.9 GHz
3: 4.8 GHz
4. 4.8 GHz

GPU +150 MHz core clock, +300 MHz memory clock

Temps: CPU package 79C, highest core 82C; GPU 71C

Fans: Set on max by override button

@Mattsin was right about the undervolt; I had stability issues but they seem better now that I moved the voltage up slightly.

At this point, I'm 100% satisfied with performance. I was shooting for a Fire Strike score of 18K, and I've made it. I'm going to leave things alone for now, and establish some "time in grade" to assure stability. If I have issues, I'll go to 65 mV or 60 mV undervolt on the CPU and recheck temps.

Many thanks to all who've posted here and in the Owner's Lounge thread, and most especially to @Phoenix for a ton of personal assistance here and on Skype.

 

I had a system crash with almost no load. Hypothesis: I was still too aggressive on undervolt. I bumped that to 60 mV, no other changes. I'll see how that runs for a while.