MSI-GT70-2OC Personal thoughts on this laptop

I own a MSI-GT70-2OC-096US
First off overall i love this laptop sofar .
I've had it about 2 or 3 months i bought it while i was in the hospital.

Battery life is good and you can game on it on battery if only short term.

It deals with heat well when overclocked if you have fans set to the max or turbo function.

With a 64gb ssd in cache mode in intel srt it has considerably sped up everything load time related i recommend this to anyone who doesn't want to spend either more money on a dedicated larger ssd for os purposes. or to anyone who wants a large general drive with better speeds and the cache mode works really well my boot times are extremely good very comparable to my dedicated ssd on my desktop,

The screen is nice has good viewing angles and picture quality aswell.

I like they keyboard its been quite good to me in gaming aswell and the backlighting is nice for night time use.

The speakers are quite possibly the best laptop speakers I've ever used or heard not saying its like some high powered home theater sound but better than other laptops.

The audio out is nice as well nice amplified sound to my headphones. and the mic in is nice and clear.

Cam and mic built into monitor is also nice quality.

So far gaming performance has been great I've been using this laptop when visiting my parents and staying at their home time to time. i have a 27inch monitor a kbd and mouse gaming setup there. and it plays all games I've tried quite well and at quite decent quality as well which was surprising at this point it can double as a desktop replacement when in that config.

I've managed to overclock this laptop using nvidia inspector its the only way I've found to manage the voltage which i had to slightly bump in order to hit the 135+mhz core speed maximum stably.

Also hitting +700 mhz memory overclock.

This required a +131.3mv increase to hit 0.9620v to stabilize the core overclock but is easily cooled with the laptops fan performance option.

All in all bringing the 770m gpu up to nearly 1000mhz turbo core speed (986 or something mhz turbo) and 1354(5416 mhz) or so mhz memory clock speed. in gpuz.

This is quite an amazing feat for a mobile gpu all said and wrings more fps and overall max performance out of it pushing that value bar much higher up vs the much more expensive 780m version its still slower but not by nearly as much..

Moving on i will mention some things i absolutely hate.

I hate the touch pad on this laptop with a passion its probably the worst I've used half the time my fingers don't track well or my double clicks and i have played with all the settings and adjustments even at most sensitive its still lacking and a chore to use i find myself also doing accidental drops ect when it looses track of where my finger is its a real pita.

The power brick is huge and bulky and the laptop is heavy but that's forgiven considering the power i'm getting and the desktop replacement type function that i'm getting out of it its not a absolute hate i guess just not quite as light as desired.

The bios functions leave alot to be desired considering this is a gaming notebook i expected a bios with more options and ability to make changes to fan controls ect I would really love to use a unlocked bios on this laptop but the information out there has been sketchy regarding how to do that.

any help there would be great btw.

I think it would have been also ideal to have a dual channel memory configuration from factory for performance reasons instead of a 8gb single stick inside. im debating buying a second stick to get the dual channel function and bandwidth that i feel it should have come with from factory. 8gb of memory is plenty for me and alot of people going with a single stick in this day and age seems silly to me giving up alot of memory bandwidth doing that.

**ADDED**Noticing the HDD they chose to use in this laptop is a little slow at large file transfers slower than the wd - Scorpio black i have in my other older laptop "replaced it last year".
The caching "of the ssd" helps with reads and booting ect, but the drive itself could have been a higher performing HDD I may have to eventually also replace it like I did on my old laptop probably with a 1tb wd Scorpio black or what ever is fast on the market in a laptop drive at the time. for now its serving its purpose but for unrawring games ect its a little slow.

if anyone can help me get a unlocked bios for this i would be grateful i would like to setup at least a fan profile to be slightly more aggressive so i don't have to run it on the turbo function when gaming while overclocked.

This laptop can be bought in Canada anywhere from $1299.99 to $1340.00 with a $50-60 64GB SSD cache drive i find this laptop pretty darn hard to beat performance wise and value wise.

And that sums up my thoughts on this laptop, any questions or comments post below thanks!

 

That's the nice thing about having a cooler designed for a 100w 780m on the 75w 770m

 

The laptop does have 2 hdd bays ?

 

did someone pay you to run around and slander it? because ive never seen this thing go over even 60*C with the turbo fan function on even with my gpu overclocks going.

the only way i could see it overheating when stock clocked is if you were either blocking the intake areas or overvolting the cpu for no reason by alot.

i notice if you run it overtop of a bed or something it will block airflow to a decent extent. as it needs that gap under it to keep airflowing well.

that or the tester smokes or has cats and has clogged up airflow in the laptops cooling system.

 

here is a prime 95 64bit shot of about 10 min of small FFT's this is probably the absolute maximum your going to see this laptop run heat wise as games ect wont even come close to the same thermal load as small FFT prime95-64bit runs

as you can see 100% use on all cores with HT enabled. and on stock volts no undervolting at all.

so while the max i saw prior to installing prime 95/64bit was 60*C it would seem the absolute max is around 74*C As said before this is in a currently 19.5*C room temperature area and i dont expect to ever see any games going up that high in temps.

 

I feel good about the GT70 series. I sold one yesterday, one today, and I played with one we have in the shop. Top likes (besides hardware): nice keyboard/trackpad is more solid than a good many models I've tested out (Steel Series keyboard is nice), it feels very solid and not flimsy (I despise that even if it does make a unit lighter) but doesn't feel/look clunky or boxy and also the speakers are nice. One of my silly old-man-pet-peeves is how much companies skimp on Laptop speakers now (I get why they do, but still) and the GT70 ones are way better than a lot I've tried.

 

yes it is nice to watch a movie on it and be able to hear everything that is going on nicely even if say the furnace kicks in or something.

hated that on my old laptop only time i could hear it properly was if everything else was dead quiet.

Its a real nice change.
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At work we sell - asus - acer - toshiba - hp - and now MSI. and having been around all of them and a few of the gaming series laptops they offer "ferarri lol" i'm quite confident in this laptop.

I did like the cooling option on the asus but to be honest i'm not even sure it work's any better when it comes down to it,id like to think the rear intake exhaust is less prone to being blocked i guess though if done right but the pricing on them "asus" right now just puts them soo far out of the race in my opinion.

I owned "gave it away" a Asus ROG "stealth" laptop prior to upgrading to this one and i liked it fine but when i bought that laptop pricing was alot more competitive for asus.

And all in all id say i'm liking this MSI laptop more than I did the ASUS ROG laptop when it was in its prime.

Ofc there wasn't things like caching in those versions at that time either and the mobiel gpu's/cpu's of the time weren't quite the hot rods these ones are as far as playing games of the year at such nice fps and quality.

Mobile gpu's have come a long darn way in the last few years its amazing being able to basically play every game i want on this at acceptable fps and quality. perhaps not ultra quality but often high and with post processing on ect.

I would imagine with the 780m or the 8970m with this cpu or better yet the i7-4800HQ -4960HQ cpu's can run most regular games maxed out at atleast 60fps perhaps not crisis or BF4 but most games.

good time for gaming laptops. soon i wont even need a desktop for gaming at home.

 

Oh even the 4700mq will have a lot of life in it, especially with the +200nhz.

 

If i could get a line on a unlocked bios or something of that sort that would be nice.

could probably bump the bclock a bit and get some more raw mhz out of it.

maybe see if the memory timings will tighten up.

 

well you can either give a bit of cash to svet over on the msi forums, or you can head over to the tech inferno forums and make 5 constructive posts.

 

Man techInferno forums are dead as a door nail making 5 posts that they moderate is really a challenge wonder if they realize how much of a chore their forum is to use and contribute in which is probably why i see 1000s of users with their 5 or 10 posts and then never to use the forum again lol.

definitely not a booming growing forum i can tell you that.