Official MSI GE60 2013 Owners Lounge

I'm interested in knowing about the RAM it comes with. It's CAS timing and speed. I'll add another 8GB stick to get dual channel.

 

It's one 8 gb stick of A-Data MIF4D1D167HZ1J running at 799.2 mhz (800 mhz):

CL: 11
tRCD:11
tRP:11
tRAS:28

 

I didn't know DDR3 ran as low as 800mhz

 

DDR stands for double data rate, so 800mhz = 1600mhz

 

MSI only uses 800mhz (1600 DDR) CL11 modules in all their machines.

 

Would I need to look at the chipset or the CPU to know if I can use RAM faster thatn 1600mhz?

 

Just dropped in a new intel 525 SSD into my GE60. Honestly, it's a massive improvement. I did a clean wipe and blew away the EFI boot loader and now it runs like a dream. The default image on these devices is garbage.

I can't find the appropriate screw size though, does anyone know what the SSD takes? I salvaged a screw from under the battery cover, but now I'm missing one there.

 

In this case either would work, though assuming you already googled both. The HM87 chipset only currently supports CPUs with 1600MHz max. It's possible that there may be future upgrades which support higher frequencies and there will be BIOS updates to allow it. The current specs of all HM87 chipsets list DDR3/L 1600MHz as the max supported. That is not to say that overclocking your RAM isn't possible.

 

Results from repasting with IC Diamond. (Ignore the min values). The max temp was achieved by looping 3dmark11. The CPU maxes in the upper 70s when gaming.

ambient temp = 23.3C


Why are the stock temps so bad?
From what I found, it is clear that there is something wrong in assembly.



How much paste I used:

 

That stock paste job is outright horrifying. Just a note to anyone who hasn't ordered yet: almost all resellers are now aware of this and offering free repastes on this whole line of MSIs. So my point is: Once you know, you DON'T newegg.

 

I just got my barebone GE60, installing windows now. Before I waste 30 minutes, is there any update on whether nvidia drivers above 311 are supported?

 

I've found no new driver/fixes for it.

 

I am really, REALLY happy with this system. I am pleased to report that the barebone model benefits a lot from having a plastic, rather than aluminum palmrest. Still gets warm, but by no means untouchable. I ordered mine from HIDevolution and their paste job is getting temps right in line with the most successful user repaste jobs I've seen here. The black non-glossy lid is also very nice. Has a very nice understated look compared to the almost obnoxiously flashy graphic on the GE60.

I haven't had any luck with newer nvidia drivers either, still working on it. Probably we'll just have to wait for a hotfix or even the next full release. I also tried installing the Windows 8.1 preview to see if the 326 preview drivers would work. Lemme save you some trouble- NO DICE. Same problems in the exact same sequence as 320.

 

If I order this laptop and it comes preinstalled with windows 8 home, will MSI uphold the standard warranty if I downgrade it to Windows 7 home? Also, how is the screen on this laptop and has battery life been fixed yet? Thanks to anyone who can answer these questions

 

On the subject of battery life, it depends on what you mean by fixed. It's 2.5-3 hours depending on how heavy you use it. I got 2 hours 25 minutes at 40% brightness on the Peacekeeper battery test. It's a good benchmark for 'active' web browsing and most web browsing includes periods where you aren't rendering pages, watching videos, doing html5 stuff, etc... So you can expect 2 hours and 45 minutes to 3 hours out of it. I like to run music from youtube videos in the background so that will bring it back down again.

Personally, I thought the screen was fine, crisp clear and bright. Reviews seem to disagree but qualitatively it's perfectly fine.

That said, mine is on the way back. I think I'm getting out of gaming notebooks all together, they're just compromise upon compromise. I'm going to give desktop/laptop combo a try and see if I can get the best of both worlds.

 

About the VGA driver, the guys over at the asus g750 forum are also complaining about the lack of updated drivers. They posted a link to nvidia where we can beach and moan in the hopes of getting an official driver out for us.

 

Been reading a lot here and I do need some help with my decision!

I am going to study game developing for the next 3 years in my country, so I need a good and reliable computer, with good specs. I will work in heavy programs such as Maya, 3ds Max, Photoshop, Sony Vegas...you name it! Everything seems perfect with this computer, except the heat that I see many of you complain about. How bad is it, really? It's not that I will stress test it for many hours, but I do want some good temps when working in these programs and playing games on "pretty high" settings. I don't want it to be uncomfortable hot or that it will make a lot of sound due to this, since I will work with this one for many hours!

So, do you recommend this computer for someone in my situation?

Thanks in advance!

 

I really wouldn't. With the temps I got on my computer, I would not feel comfortable rendering many things with 3ds Max. That said, there have been some success stories with undervolting and repasting the processor. If you're comfortable doing that then this computer could work for you. The fan is undoubtedly loud at load, though. At the same time, why not just got for a Clevo W350ST which is better in many ways (battery life, cooling) though it does have the problem of being loud too.

 

I agree, the GE60 is more of a portable mid-ranged gaming laptop. There are better choices for heavy duty stuff. The GE60 is spec'd wrong for that kind work.

Regarding the battery life, I think people are reporting it wrong. They are reporting estimations on an un-cycled battery. I've cycled my battery twice (now doing a 3rd cycle) and I'm getting 3hrs easy (100% brightness, steam dling games in the background at ~1MB/s, browsing). You have to cycle Li-Ion batteries to calibrate them well.

 

Just wondering, can the barebone GE60-equivalent output to 2 external monitors simultaneously?

 

Hey Guys, new to the forum
Just got this laptop and am wondering about the Windows 8 that comes pre installed, I find it is a bit cluttered in terms of Apps ( it seems that it might be eating up the bandwidth ?? ) Is it really worth downgrading to Windows 7 and how can I go about doing that, I'm not really tech literate. But other than those problems the laptop is great

Keyboard is quite flawless for gaming, but it has the key to turn on the backlit keyboard but all it does is open internet explorer lol.

Also the CD drive is a bit loose and touchpad takes a little getting used to.

 

Windows 8 live apps barely consume anything when not in use, if at all (and surely not your internet bandwidth, unless it's the skydrive app after adding stuff to your skydrive folder), so no, wherever your bandwidth is going it's surely not there. Uninstalling them is easy and painless as well if you don't use them, so I don't see what problems can you possibly have due to them.

 

What I did was get an MSDN (clean) copy of windows 8 and reinstalled it on a mSATA drive. The performance benefits of windows 8 are great (faster startup/shudown/sleep, under the hood improvements). Additionally, I bought "startisback", which basically alters the windows 8 GUI to work exactly like windows 7. Pic related:
Right click -> view image.

 

I must say windows 7 downgrade is worth it.. as i have downgraded my msi ge60 and the only problem is scm which i have fixed somewhat by using s-bar with scm so i can enable/disable wifi/bluetooth. everything is working fine with my system apart from high temperatures which i intend to fix sooner by repasting cpu/gpu

 

How is it worth it? Windows 8 performs better. Just buy Startisback ($3, well worth it) to get the windows 7 GUI back.

 

Undervolting test
3dmark11 cpu test looped for 20 min each test.
ambient temp = 24.4C

Undervolting by 100mV caused 3dmark to crash after a few minutes.

 

Sorry it took me a bit, very busy and not just with my new toy Yes, absolutely. It has the exact same internal parts as the non-barebones, it only lacks the decal on the lid and the aluminum plate on the palmrest. Also any other stuff you decide not to include as it is of course a "barebone."

 

Hey again, I'm just having a couple of problems, laptop is running great, it's a tiny bit slower than my PC i3 with SSD, but I just think my i3 having a SSD is making it load everything faster , but other than that everything is sweet.

But my problem is that I play Quake Live, I usually get 125 fps on both my other machines (asus ROG and pc intel i3) but with this laptop I am capped at 60 fps, this is what happens

I log into quake live, i start playing, fps is at 125 for about 5 seconds before it drops to a capped 60fps , I have no idea whats doing this, I've gone into NVIDIA control panel and disabled VSYNC and I have done so in the game, I can't think of any reason it is doing this other than, when I load up quakelive, one GPU is activated, but then switches over to the integrated one after 5 seconds or the other way around.

Does anyone else have this problem with a game that is quite old and can run at 125fps, it is weird, because it affects my ping as well, even in bot mode I ping 15 on this laptop, but on my other pc in bot mode I ping 2

 

Well it doesn't really matter if you run at 125 fps, as I'm sure this panel is only 60hz, so you are only going to see 60 fps anyways. Ping must be a different issue, I cant see fps having anything to do with your connection.

 

I have a similar issue when playing source games. Fps will start at 100+, then drop down to 30fps. Turning vsync on raised it to 60fps. I'm just gonna wait until msi gets off their butts and releases an updated driver.

 

The most recent Nvidia driver will install on the GE60.

 

sort of disappointed Nvidia didn't release new drivers for their midrange cards this week

 

Wait, what!? Which one? The windows 8.1 preview driver? Because I tried that one and had the same issues as the last one.

EDIT: OH wow, nevermind, I was wrong. Don't know what I did wrong the first time, but I just updated no problems. Maybe it was that I completely removed the old ones before and just updated this time. People seem to be having troubles with these beta drivers on the nvidia forums, hope they're decent.

 

Cool, they did just release a beta driver: 326.19. Previous version was 320.49.


Ran a quick benchmark of the new drivers. Graphics score on 3dmark11 up about 1.3% (basically negligible). I also noticed some occasional stutters.

 

You don't have to uninstall the old version. Just extract the driver and use "Update Driver" from Device Manager.

 

where can i donwload the wlan driver for win 7?
sorry for my bad english

 

I tried updating (I have a GE70) and it doesn't work for me at all. It still says "This graphics driver could not find compatible graphics hardware." And, when I try doing it via Device Manager, it says that the driver is up to date. Help!


EDIT: Oops. Looks like the driver I downloaded was for desktops. Link to laptop driver: http://www.nvidia.com/object/notebook-win8-win7-64bit-326.19-beta-driver.html

 

To be clear, the first time I tried to update, I was also trying out the Windows 8.1 preview. So I formatted and then tried to do a clean install and it crashed while installing. This could easily be related to any of the other random issues people have had with the 8.1 preview and nVidia cards though.

So far the preview drivers are working well for me. I had a couple of momentary hangs in video playback, but I was also seeding the file, so hard to tell if it was the drivers or somebody grabbing that chunk of the file at that moment.

 

Please help me...
i installed win 7 but now i need the wirelless drivers because the msi cd drivers dont work.

 

I had the same problem fixed it via googling a bit.. just google the drivers for win 7 you will get them.

 

I'm really curious as to why people install windows 7 instead of just paying 3 bucks for startisback.

 

Well i did not know about startisback as i have never used 8. anyways i am very happy running windows 7 on the machine. only thing i miss is a physical function to turn off the screen manually.

 

Anyone got one of those extended batteries yet?

 

Actually in QuakeLive for some reason, FPS is relative to ping, it is not my connection because in practice mode with bots I get 60 fps and 15 ping, when I should be getting 125 fps with 2 ping.

Believe me getting 125 fps makes a world of difference in QuakeLive compared to just capped at 60fps.

I need to be able to get 125fps, but this laptop can't even deliver that to a game that runs on an engine that is almost 15 years old.

I'm starting to get real angry at this laptop, every other game runs fine, but yet the game I want to play most is capped. This laptop should technically be more than enough to push for 125 fps, I talked to a few people in game, and they think it's switching back to the Integrated Intel GPU, but I cannot figure out how to turn off VSYNC on that, let alone stop the switching, I have tried everything yet no one can help me, even if the smartest tech people are stumped.

 

Why are you blaming the laptop when the issue lies with nvidia? Does the power LED turn orange while playing quake?

 

Sorry if you've already tried this or someone already suggested. I browsed back a bit to check. You should be able to force the dedicated graphics by going into the nvidia control panel and setting it to high performance. I haven't played, but I believe QuakeLive is browser based, so that would involve setting Chrome to performance if you are using chrome, or Flash player itself if you are using a non-flash integrated browser. Hope that helps.

Optimus will generally use the integrated if it is capable of running your app at 60fps. For example, when I booted up Dear Esther, it defaulted to the Intel because at normal high settings, it handled it just fine. Since I wanted to use my source mods and get above 60fps, I had to force it to use the dedicated.

 

Because the laptop, well in your case nvidia and intel GPU have so limited options that I can't seem to stop it from switching back to integrated graphics, In the Nvidia section I can select chrome, but the option to use Nvidia Performance GPU is not possible as the drop menu is grey and set to Integrated Graphics only.

And the power LED is always orange, never changes.

 

Anyone else experiencing a significant amount static when they use the headphone port and have the volume low? The static constant for me, so if I raise my music volume, I don't hear it anymore, but if I lower my music, I will hear the static.

 

Did you install the intel vga driver?

Btw, I don't know if anyone else noticed, but msi recently updated some drivers on the product page: MSI Global GE60 2OE
The new trackpad drivers somehow made the trackpad work better, not that they were bad before, particularly when scrolling using two fingers.

 

The power LED being always orange means something is using the dGPU.

As for the subject of blaming the laptop not nVidia, imagine I bought a car with a transmission that doesn't always switch to the correct gear. Sure I can blame the place they sourced the transmission from but it's also the car makers fault for putting something they know doesn't work in their car.