Official MSI GE60 2013 Owners Lounge

Sadly, my electric scale can only be 'activated' when my feet is on top of it. So what I did was I measured my weight and then subtract the total weight of me holding the computer to get the computer weight. I did this couple times to make sure there was no errors, but it's still around 5.8lbs with the ssd. I found out about this because I felt it was heavier than my old computer that was 5.5lbs.

Since I bought some modification for this computer, I'd need to pay a steep restocking fee if I were to return it ... gah...more sad face.

 

The smaller Battery ( 4400 mAh as oppose to 5900 mAh in the GE40)
The incorrect Weight ( 6 lbs )
The high temperature

All those suggust that MSI has really messed up and made the new GE60 worse than before.
It's sad that my most anticpated laptop turn out to be a pile of poo.
Maybe they will make a revised version in the future.
I suggust you guys return yours if you still can.

 

How accurate is your bathroom scale? Most bathroom scales I know are pretty much +/- .5 lbs though when comparing it should be accurate. I have a kitchen scale at home that should be able to measure it but unfortunately I'm on vacation until Saturday. I'd love to see someone put this computer on a 10 lb postage scale or something and take a picture. I also happen to have a 5.3 lb laptop nearby (Toshiba Satellite E205) so I'm thinking of balancing them on some sort of balance contraption and calculating the torques to find the weight.

On the subject of BIOS/Firmware update, it looks like a really long and obnoxious process. I have a flash drive but it's a cheap non name brand one and I'm not sure if I trust the computer's safety to it.

Finally, I emailed the support of a couple aftermarket battery sellers asking if the BTY-S14 they sell would fit the GE60-2OE. What it looks like to me is that the 6600 mAh model is bigger and fatter than the current battery but would still probably fit in the compartment but might prop up the back of the computer (maybe a good thing, a kickstand!). I also asked if they knew if last year's GE60 battery (5200 mAh) would fit and it appears to be exactly the same size as this battery, which would be really nice as it would be a 18% increase. The 6600 would be a full 50% increase which would be amazing though I'm a bit worried about how big it looks.

Genxi, I'm pretty much stuck with the computer like you are, so at this point I'm just thinking about the good things about it (of which there are many). We tend to complain a lot on this forum but let's not forget the fact that the 765M can play pretty much any game you throw at it and the processor is more powerful than my desktop (i7 920), the trackpad is really nicely sized and has a great surface, the sound quality is excellent, and MSI managed to avoid the classic trap of making the screen bezel glossy (it's matte). Also, we do have a nice keyboard backlight and aluminium handrest and a 7200 RPM hard drive, unlike last year's model.

I just can't understand why the boneheads at MSI made the battery smaller.

Edit: Weight confirmed in this review, 2.6 kg=5.73 lbs, not 5.28 as claimed.
http://www.digitalversus.com/laptop/msi-ge60-2oe-p16519/test.html

 

I have to agree that the pros outweighs the cons, but I am just kinda bum that I did not get what I expected from the specs sheet. Hopefully newer drivers will fix the battery issue

 

I couldn't agree more, I'm just as bummed, especially on the weight and battery because those were two of the reasons I picked this over the y510p. I wouldn't expect a magic bullet with the drivers though. Another thing to remember is that the P151SM1 and Y510p both have the very same issues with heat. I'm hoping to hear back from some of these battery companies and find out whether the 5200 mAh battery will fit.

 

How can they get away with straight up lying about the weight of a product?

 

I'm going to wait for some more confirmation of the weight (I emailed the reviewer) before I send an angry letter to MSI and Newegg. Funny thing is, though, the computer, while not as good as the Clevo W350ST still has a few things on it like the sound quality and (some) aluminium construction. It still might be the best computer for the weight. I think if I had the chance, I would definitely think about a laptop/desktop combination instead of a gaming laptop as it seems gaming laptops arejust an exercise in compromise.

 

Yeah, you should send an angry email to MSI and get back to me if they will do something about it -wink wink, nudge nudge-

 

That is the problem.

With the Weight and Battery life into consideration, there are way better choice out there than the GE60.
For example the, Clevo W350ST which has the exact same spec as the GE60, exact same weight as GE60 (now that we found out they're both 6 lbs), But WAY better battery life (4 hours surfing, 5 hours idle, 2 hours gaming), not to mention cheaper too($970) seems to be a better choice.

MSI if you're listening, you need to get your sh*ts together.

Review Schenker XMG A523 (Clevo W350ST) Notebook - NotebookCheck.net Reviews

 

The 2012 GE60's battery is 4200mAh, not 5200.. They didn't make the battery smaller, they just didn't touch it despite the higher power GPU (which is still a stupid decision of course).

Spoiler

Also I believe the 5.28 lbs corresponds to the 2012 version as well and maybe they just didn't update the official information for the new model.

 

You're right, I just checked the review for last year's model from Notebook Check. My reason for thinking it was 5200 was when I googled "MSI GE60 replacement battery" and the first one that popped up was 5200. The new GPU does draw more power but how come it matters when the iGPU is on?

 

Does anyone have problems with the elan multi touchpad? I was messing around with the touchpad and found out that the computer could not recognize my multi touch gestures even though it is on on the elan settings... this is true even after I downloaded the new driver. Any suggestions?

 

One of reasons I did not go with Clevo models was its design. I've had a clevo laptop before and the design kept on bothering me. It's really dull.

 

So far I've been really pleased with the touchpad, it has recognized my gestures just fine. I even made a custom one for 3 finger tap to show the desktop. The only problem I've had so far is the left edge triggers program switch which I find supremely annoying because I like how the right edge triggers the charm bar and you can only disable edge gestures completely instead of just disabling that one. Have you checked on the touchpad in device manager, uninstalled the driver and reinstalled it, etc...?

I'd suggest contacting MSI support but that requires you to register the computer and I suspect that would lower your chances of returning it to your resellar if you decide you have to return.

 

I just got my laptop, installed my 2 msata drives, put them in raid but now when I go to install windows it doesnt show that I have any drives to install to. If I try to install in AHCI mode it shows I have drives, but shows my 2 ssds as seperate drives. It shows I have a raid 0 volume set up properly in the Bios, so I dont know what to do. Im basically stuck without being able to put windows on this thing.

Edit: Fixed it, needed the raid driver from the GE70 downloads section, since the GE60 raid driver doesnt download for some reason. Ill have some benchmarks and overclocking results sometime today to share with everyone.

Edit: When I install the killer lan driver it forces the computer to bluescreen over and over and I cant do anything except reinstall windows. The error is video_dxgkrnl fatal error or something like that. Anyone know whats up?

 

I've decided to return this laptop. I have had it for two days and I would be returning it in a day or two. In terms of bang for bucks, this could have been the best gaming laptop right now if not for the sucky battery life!

Pros: Awesome screen, speakers, looks, customization options, less bulky (when compared to GT series)
Cons: Battery life, build quality, placement of home and end keys.

I am only an occasional gamer and battery life is important to me.

Edit: regarding the build quality, it isn't very bad but I found the optical drive to be shaky.

 

I just got Asus G750 today. I find screen of GE60 to be better slightly, but man O man, G750 has no heat issues at all and this thing is solid.

And believe or not, it seems to have a better battery life than GE60, lolz.

 

Wow this is such a bummer to read. I was so close to getting the Ge60 for college, awesome specs, pretty light and slim for its internals and supposedly had good battery life. Now to hear how terrible it is ... I do know a few possibilities were proposed as to why the battery life sucked and how driver updates could fix this, but is this really something I should bank on? Any other suggestions to similarly priced and speced laptops? Besides the dam sager/clevos. I like to think I am logical and prefer internals over looks, but they are really god dam ugly.

 

The Sagers (or the ASUSes for that matter) are much thicker and heavier. If they can manage significantly better battery life with not-so-significantly better batteries then it's obvious that this is a software issue, so if you can wait a bit I would suggest waiting to see if MSI releases a fix to the issue in the coming weeks or if this is how they intended the GE60 to be.

 

Ok after messing around with the laptop a bit today I have a few things to contribute. First off I had to reinstall windows twice, I was getting some strange error that just wouldnt let me boot, some video kernel fatal error crap. Installed the newest intel VGA driver from the website instead of the junk from the disc and I havent gotten the error yet, so fingers crossed that fixed it.

Heat is not an issue. Stock I was getting 90-95C running 3dmark 11, which is frankly unacceptable. I downloaded intel extreme tuner utility, undervolted my CPU a fair bit and now im only getting about 80C, which is much more reasonable. It passed 15 minutes of the utilities stability test, but who knows how stable this actually is so stay tuned.

I have 2 128gig plextor msatas in raid0 benchmark http://i.imgur.com/nMrHvWg.jpg The amount of storage in this laptop is impressive, along with those I have the 750 gig that came with it and a 500 gig in the ODD.

Quick and dirty overclock 135 core, 300 memory or something like that NVIDIA GeForce GTX 765M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-4700MQ,Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. MS-16GC

After a bit more tweaking im going to do a battery life test. Im convinced I can squeeze 3 hours out of this thing.

So other than that strange error that made me reinstall twice (and I hope I dont get it again) the only bad thing is I have one stuck pixel. Bright blue, trying to fix it with one of those dumb youtube videos, hope it works. Also tried rubbing it with no success. But I'm hopeful, if anyone knows any other tricks for stuck pixels let me know!

 

Exactly.
I would buy this laptop in a heartbeat if the battery last 3+ hours.
I have no idea why MSI decide to put a smaller battery in when they have the GE40's much better battery in their part bin.
They should offer a battery upgrade.

Also is their build quality that bad? Why did you list that as a con?

 

The screen is nice. I can say that for sure as well.

I don't think the build quality was bad, but the keyboard was so so. I am no audio geek, so I have no idea about the sound.

 

The build quality wasn't very bad but I found the optical drive shaky. That's why I put it under cons. If MSI offers a battery upgrade or if a software fix could solve the battery life issue, it would be great. But somehow I'm not optimistic about that. :-/

 

http://i.imgur.com/S7Qx1x4.jpg heres its initial prediction for battery life after some fiddling with settings

 

That's nice. What settings did you change? Let us know if the prediction matches with reality.

 

My predictions for the GE60 battery life always were around 3h with light usage, according to 2012's battery life and hardware changes since then.

Backlit keyboard and moving from a 50W TDP GPU to a 75W TDP one both bring new dents to battery life. Haswell should balance it out with idle consumption savings, but don't expect miracles with a 49Wh battery.


Also, comparing the GE60 with the Asus G750 is misleading. Not only it is slightly more expensive but a completely different beast when it comes to portability. I can easily fit a GE60 (and almost any 15.6'' laptop) into a school backpack, and that isn't happening with the G750 for sure. Also it weighs around 2kg more, forget about carrying that around all day unless you've got some giant muscular body type (or a wheel bag?).

I've fiddled with a G750 in a store and it had horrible keyboard flex (which is probably fixable, but still), I can't say much about overall solidness but my first quick impression wasn't all that great. If I had one at home I would teste it better, but I don't so...

 

51% battery remains after about an hour and a half of browsing, a couple youtube videos and a short period idle, so 3 hours of real world use looks about right.

 

Can you try underclocking the graphic card to see if it improves battery life? Can't try myself. I have already shipped it for return!

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 4 Beta

 

2 hours with 34% left. Just web browsing and a few youtube videos, maybe 20 min idle, trying to replicate how I would use it at school. CPU and integrated graphics are undervolted 0.1v. I tried underclocking the integrated graphics in extreme tuner but it didnt seem to want to take for some reason. So it looks like we can get 3 hours of normal use, ill test how long it lasts on pure video playback tomorrow.

 

These last couple of replies have got me confused. Were the earlier posters' laptops faulty or something? A discrepancy of a battery life of 1-2 hrs max while web browsing/youtubing compared to 2-3 hours is a pretty significant difference and could make or break the purchase of this laptop for me. Also, have other people noticed the heating issue near the palm rest, and overheating?
Also I was wondering how long the GPU in this model will be able to keep up with games. Im considering either this laptop or the Sager NP8230/Clevo P151SM1, and the newer GPU might be worth the bump up in price depending on how long the GTX765m can last.

Thanks

 

Ive found when stressing the CPU only I can keep temps to the low 80s, but in a game it goes up to 90C with the GPU around 75C. The palm rest can get somewhat warm under max load which is a bit of a shame, but I havent found it to be supremely uncomfortable. I changed every setting I could to maximize battery life, everything in power options and in the intel graphics options, along with undervolting the CPU and my OS is running off a couple of SSDs so neither of my HDDs are spinning up. I have a feeling people just get the laptop out of the box, dont bother to change any settings and then complain about the battery life. If you know how to tweak a few things and are just using the laptop at school for notetaking or web browsing during boring classes with some youtube thrown in you should get about 3 hours battery life. Still not amazing battery life, but a few pages back someone posted a link to extended batteries for this laptop. I believe there was a 6600 mAh battery there, if someone got their hands on that they could push 4.5 hours.

 

I also put 2 mSata in RAID 0. I just used TrueImage to clone off the original HDD and it has been working great.

 

By the way anybody using a normal 2.5" sata SSD instead of msata SSDs? From my research, mSata SSDs are much more power hungry than the standard 2.5" SSDs and possibly HDD as well. Perhaps with no mSata SSDs involve with this machine, we could see a boost in battery life?

 

It depends which Clevo/Sager, the models equivalent to the ge60/ge70 with I7-4700 and 765m are W350ST and W370ST, they weight the same as their Msi counterparts (since Msi appears to have lied about the weight) they also have 5h battery life, no heating issues and they are quite a bit less expensive... they do not have a backlit keyboard though, and are missing an msata slot compared to the Msi's, but they do have 2 HDD bays on the 15" and 17", their speakers are also not as nice, that seems to be the main differences .

Review Schenker XMG A523 (Clevo W350ST) Notebook - NotebookCheck.net Reviews

 

well I got 3 hours running my OS off 2 msata ssds in raid0. I dont think hard drive config is going to have a large impact on battery life to be honest.

Has anyone tried repasting this thing and if so with what and did you get better temps?

 

I've heard reports in the owners lounge of the Sager P151SM1 of having the same heating problems as this computer so it may just be these components run really hot. The W350T throttles very aggressively.

On the heating situation on this computer, it's a pity that the GPU is right underneath where you put your hand to use the WASD keys. It is also unfortunate that the entire left side gets kinda warm. I wouldn't say it's uncomfortable at all, though. It's noticeable but fine. Like was mentioned before, the part that gets the hottest is right underneath the space bar and directly above the trackpad. It is only really hot if you stick your finger there and hold it. This is after about 30 minutes of Mirrors Edge. It's understandable though because I think having the fan vent on the left makes sense for anyone who wishes to use a mouse on the right.

Also, I think a lot of the noise is coming not from the fan but from the hard drive, at least on mine. That's a price I'm willing to pay for a 7200 RPM hard drive. What sort of noise are you experiencing if you used mSATA, John?

In other news, has anyone tried out the webcam? It doesn't work for me in the Win8 Camera app.


In response to the changes in battery life from the 1.5 hours max on the first page to almost expecting 3 here and now, I can see a few breakthroughs we've made in the last few days:

• We've found out actual battery capacity, and re-examined our expectations
• The first night I got 1 hour 20 mins battery life, I had just installed Steam which forces the dGPU on even if no games are running
• We now know the light on the power button displays blue for iGPU and orange for dGPU so we can tell if Optimus is running
• Finally, we're going hard for power reduction to get the 3 hours+ - it's a low brightness, processor undervolted, etc... though I don't think the processor undervolting should make much difference in the grand scheme

On the subject of the 6600 mAh battery, it looks like it will stick out the bottom of the computer (it is 9 cells so physically bigger). That would prop up the back and be kind of annoying. The 5200 mAh looks like the best capacity we can get while still remaining 6 cells and will fit the same way as the current battery. It's also the same capacity as the W350ST which got 4 hours at 60% brightness and surfing (I'm curious why this computer is getting proportionally less). That's a 20% increase so if we were getting ~3 hours and a few minutes from it before, that should bring it up to 3 hours 45 minutes which is directly on par with the P151SM1.

I'm still really bugged by the loose DVD drive and the flexy keyboard.

Question about Optimus:

Does it power down the entire dGPU or does it just throttle it a lot?

 

It seems to totally power down, because the fan is barely even on when optimus is on and im just doing light tasks, so it obviously doesnt need to deal with heat from the gpu. And I was at about 50% brightness when I got 3 hours battery

 

There is no "total power down" for these GPUs. Their power usage is heavily throttled, but never completely powered down.

 

This.
The fan doesn't spin up because 1) it shares the CPU heatsink, so the fan will be cooling the GPU as well 2) it is throttled heavily and probably the passive heat dissipation of the heatsink alone could keep it cool with that clock and voltage.

 

I PM'd you then realized this would probably be useful for everyone: How did you manage to undervolt the CPU? I was under the impression that Core i series chips couldn't be undervolted.

 

Hello all,

I just received this laptop.

Regarding the battery, I did originally get estimates of 2.5 hours of basic usage. I noticed there was an MSI battery calibration utility which I let it run over night. The estimate then improved to about 5.5 hours.

Hope this helps.

 

I ran mine a few nights ago and I'm not getting anything like 5.5 hours - that's crazy! Have you tried letting it go for like 10%'s in the battery meter? Did you have WLAN on? I am doing better than I was before, easily in the 3 hour range with 50% brightness. Maybe the battery just needed a breaking in or something.

Edit: Answer to my question about the underclocking is that the program is Intel Extreme Tuning Utility which, according to GPU-Z, actually works for lowering the voltage. Did I miss some big development in underclocking or is the fact that we're underclocking a core i processor very interesting in and of its self.

 

they are also a bit thicker and won't fit in a normal laptop compartment. You would need a 17" bag to fit these 15" laptops from Sager.
The MSI GE60 doesn't have this issue however so that's a point for MSI there.

 

Well the heat issue was really bugging me so I undervolted, underclocked (2.8ghz on 4 cores instead of 3.2) and repasted with arctic mx-2 and now my temps are now what I feel to be acceptable. Temps are after playing SWTOR for about 20 mins. I wont miss the 400mhz and having temps under 80 is much better. http://i.imgur.com/QF9wUvr.jpg Palm rest still gets warm, but im going to skin my laptop when my carbon fiber ebay crap arrives, and when I do maybe ill put something over the keyboard area under the skin to try and dissipate the heat a bit more.

 

I just tried some undervolting (by .05, not too much) and saw a couple degrees shift in temps running P95. Cool, I didn't know this was possible. That said, I tried it out with Furmark at the same time and the processor got up to 99 before I shut down P95. In case anyone cares, the 4700MQ begins throttling at 96 degrees and quickly ramps up to 100% throttled (down to 800 mhz) when it hits 100 C. When I get home in a few days, I'll install Crysis 2 on it and log temps while I play. I suspect it will be fine, I was doing the maximum heat version of P95.

Another advantage this has over the Clevos is that we don't have to carry around a power brick that is literally the size of a brick. I don't know how MSI manages to find smaller ones than Clevo can source; maybe it's just cost cutting. Also, our trackpad is a lot bigger.

Mr Blue - A few questions: How low much impact did the re-paste have by its self without considering the undervolting? Also, how low did you get the voltage down to in the end?

 

Repaste seems to have helped by about 5C or so, Ive undervolted by 0.11v, I might be able to do 0.115 or 0.12, but 0.125v was unstable, going to take some time to zero in on the ideal voltage. When cleaning off the stock paste it was a big globby mess, they definitely applied too much.

 

Is there any guide to undervolt? too many parameter to adjust. Dynamic CPU Voltage Offset or Cache Voltage Offset? I'm lost...would be much grateful if i can lower the temp a bit. thanks

 

I lowered the Dynamic CPU Voltage Offset and haven't touched the cache offset. I'd need to read up on and experiment a little bit more but I can write up a guide in a little bit.

 

Ok first off saying the Clevo won't fit in a "normal 15" laptop compartment" is utter nonsense, of course it will fit, and for the power brick you are mistaken with last years brick, this year it has been slimmed down and I am going to quote notebookcheck, "the slim power supply (147 x 75 x 26 millimeters) that is much smaller and lighter than the one in the W350ET barebone (462 vs. 742 grams", further more throttling doesn't seem to be an issue here as it only throttled during Furmark, they even state that their stress test is an unrealistic scenario, there is no need for concern in practical use and that no benchmark indicated throttling ...

 

I'm comparing to the P151SM1, but I think you're right about the W350ST being honestly a better computer than the MSI. There are really no compelling reasons to get the MSI GE60-2OE-003US over it if you know what we know now other than looks and a backlit keyboard. With some modifications, the MSI can be made to be almost as good as the W350ST for those of us suckers who already are stuck with it but I would recommend anyone looking for a 765M based laptop seriously consider the W350ST unless they absolutely must have an aluminium palm rest, a backlit keyboard, and a really nice trackpad.