The Official MSI GE40-2OC Owner's Lounge

Kicking off this thread to split it from the big new models release announcement thread.

Hi all,

Received my GE40 bright and early Saturday morning, but due to a family visit didn't get a chance to really play until yesterday!

Heres the lowdown:-

Build quality:- Overall very good - only the wrist rest and lid top are aluminium, the rest is black plastic. The gloss screen bezel is a bit distracting, but not the end of the world.

Keyboard:- Firm base and nice springy chicklet keys - felt good on my hand while gaming and typing. Slight annoyance that the far right of the keyboard has Home, End, PGup/Down etc - the Home key specifically is very annoying, as I regularly hit it while aiming for backspace. Other than that, no issues. No backlighting as reported.

Screen:-
PRO's: Resolution is perfect for this size of laptop. Anything higher and your going to struggle to make out text and icons at a reasonable sitting distance (and I have very good eyesight). Matte screen does a good job of reducing reflections, and response times on games are excellent, with no dicernable ghosting or input lag.

CON's: Matte effect is quite grainy at first. I strongly suggest a wipe over with a damp microfibre cloth followed by drying off with a soft dry one - this greatly reduced the out of the box "grainy" effect on my panel without impacting its anti-reflection properties. Viewing angles not great - There is certainly a sweet spot to be had between brightness and colour, but only for one person sitting directly in front of it (fine with me, but others may feel otherwise).

Temps/Cooling:-
Under gaming stress (not furmark) - the GPU ranged from 72C (Skyrim extended play) up to 80C (MechWarrior Online). CPU went as high as 88C.The CPU is located roughly in the middle of the keyboard, but the GPU sits underneath the wrist rest, making it warm when your hand is sitting there. In contrast, the right hand side of the machine remains at room temperature... why gaming laptop vendors cant locate their GPU's and CPU's on the off-side of the laptop away from your WASD hand I shall never know.

The laptop is cooled by a single fan that draws in from underneath near the GPU and exhausts to the left hand side of the laptop. This area exhausts a constant stream of hot air. While the fan does get going when gaming, its not so loud as to be a problem if your wearing a headset, and certainly isn't going to be an issue for anything at a LAN party for instance. Be careful not to block the intake, or your gonna have a bad time...

I haven't had a look at the thermal paste etc yet - but I don't imagine changing it would be an issue, as the whole heatpipe arrangement seems to screw off in one go from under the (warranty sticker protected... sigh) backplate.

Performance:-

DISK: The unit shipped with a Sandisk 128gb mSATA SSD. A quick crystal disk mark sat Sequential 1MB's at 480 / 290 - not world beating but nippy. 4k + QD32 was similarly fast in write speed, which was nice.The mSATA drives do indeed live in a ODD slot caddy - I haven't yet worked out how to open this, and didn't want to just yank it out, so I haven't fitted my extra 256gb drive yet! The 2.5" is easily accessible internally though.

CPU: See any other 4702MQ review for details - CPU-z showed that the cooling solution could cope well, and that it wasn't capping the turbo during gaming. Not much more to say there.

GPU: The GTX 760m is a real star - Bear in mind that the best drivers I could get that fully supported it where the 311.70's OEM's from MSI's site (via a link on laptopvideo2go) - there don't appear to be formal 320 series drivers that support the mobile GTX7xx series yet. The laptop shipped with 311.42 or something preinstalled. The chip clocked up to its peak turbo of 812mhz constantly during gaming, even for extended runs in Skyrim, Borderlands2 and MWO that I tried and didn't throttle. Seems like a perfect match for the 1600x900 and 4702MQ they've put in this 14" laptop.

Non-gaming: Many of you seem interested in this - I clocked 4.3 hours before the 6% critical battery warning messing about on the web on Wifi at full screen brightness using the Intel GPU. The unit doesn't feel like a gaming laptop in this mode - its pretty damn quiet (low fan noise), very cool to the touch, and performs great. I could definitely live with carrying this around if I still took classes - not as quiet or light as an ultrabook perhaps, but you can actually do some proper gaming on it as well... which brings us nicely on to -


Gaming FPS: The interesting bit. I use a registered version of fraps to monitor how games were running.

Skyrim:- Native res, High defaults, AA and AF to 0, FXAA disabled: 60-80fps, no discernible slowdown, GPU capped at 72C during extended playtime. Game is butter smooth even in heavy combat/particle effects. Got some 60FPS microstuttering when enabling AA and AF (as per the Geforce control tool recommendation) - could be a driver issue as only happened when I panned the mouse about. Disabling AA/AF fixed this.

MechWarrior Onling:- Native res, Medium defaults, Post processing off. 35-50 FPS, no discernible slowdown, GPU capped at 80C during extended playtime. Game runs great, and is known for being poorly optimised atm. Nothing else to report.

Borderlands 2:- Native res, High everything except PhysX (Low), AA off, framerate uncapped. Average of 50-80 FPS depending on what was going on - didn't dip below 40 at any point - great fun and much more fluid and playable than at 1920x1080 on the GTX 660M in my old laptop.

Company of Heroes 2 Open Beta:- Native res, everything High, AA off. Average 65 FPS, dropped a bit to high 30's during big artillery fights - otherwise fantastic.

Overall gaming rating:- Frickin' awesome. Took everything I flung at it and performed better than I'd been expecting. I'm surprised that there is no sign of thermal or power throttling during my tests for a unit so small and light. Highly recommended.

Other Stuff:-
Bundled with a massive pile of bloatware pish that took 15 minutes to clear out. Highlights included Norton internet security, winzip etc. Also ships with a restore partition (on the hard disk rather than the SSD thankfully) and a tool to burn a restore disk (not sure if this works to a USB pen drive or just a CD...). The MSI software stack has some nice features - plugging in an external mouse automatically disables the trackpad for instance, and the FN+hotkeys are all sensibly placed and what you would expect. Webcam is a run of the mill unit that will be fine for Skype.

Audio is a Realtek HD audio chip, not the soundblaster I was expecting from the spec - the machine comes with some sort of SoundBlaster booster software however. A bit naughty to advertise it as SoundBlaster (implying creative) audio though imo.

Network is Realtek + some weird Wifi card. No issues.

BIOS settings - practically non-existent. Disk settings (AHCI, RAID, SATA) but nothing for the CPU, devices, memory etc etc. Will need a modified BIOS before we can try anything interesting on it really.

Next steps - I'm going to open her up, take a look at the thermal paste to make sure its up to scratch, add my faster 256gb mSATA SSD and do a clean Windows 7 install on there (drivers permitting - failing that I'll do a clean Windows 8).

I'll definitely be picking up a small laptop riser/cooler for extended play - both the bring the small machine up to a more friendly eye level and to help keep it nice and ventilated. Some kind of USB gaming keypad might also be in order, as while the heat around the WASD area (where the heatsink and fan are) is certainly better than my last alienware, it still annoys me a bit!

Hope this brief handson writeup helps some of you!

#Wonderdog

 

Well this is interesting!

Got it open (7 screws). My first guess that the mSATA drives were in the DVD caddy was wrong. It turns out the 2.5" drive lives in the ODD slot (which I still can't get open - I suspect it might just pop out with some encouragement), and there is a daughter board which holds 2 mSATA drives where the 2.5" drive would be on the ODD model!

The daughter board comes with the 128gb sandisk installed as earlier identified, and I had no problem adding my 256gb drive as well - which showed up in the BIOS straight away.

I haven't done any thermal paste changes yet, just added the extra drive. Its also definately 1 x 8gb dimm with space for another. I'm going to do a clean windows 7 install, so I can run some proper systhetic performance benchmarks and measure the before/after temps and scores after doing the repaste.

Pics below - S/N's blacked out by me.

View attachment 97727 View attachment 97728 View attachment 97729

 

My GE40 2OC-009US was ordered from GentechPC on Monday. I have ordered an extra 8GB of RAM together with an the IC Diamond 24 Carat Thermal Compound on both CPU and GPU. It should ship tomorrow.

I fly into the US on June 29, so will pick it up then. Sooooo exciting

I will post my impressions once I put it through its paces - I am enjoying FarCry 3 at the moment.

I am flying across the US (from Reno to Orlando) on 2 July, so will also give a view on how it handles the journey...

 

I had the opportunity to test the GE40 under Company of Heroes 2 BETA.

To get 60 fps, did you activate PhysicX? I did not remember to get so high fps with high settings and no AA...

 

I bought mine from Fry's a few days ago and so far I like it. The speakers suck! I've tried to overclock the gpu with no luck or at least it doesn't budge 2011 3dmark. You said 1 stick of ram? Doesn't this cpu run in dual channel? Im having a hardtime finding another 128gb sandisk drive thats the exact same model.

 

I've picked up a tube of Antec Formula 7 - I'll be repasting my GPU + CPU this evening and seeing how it behaves.

I've got Windows 7 x64 on mine now - runs great - are you still running the default W8 build? Its loaded with bloat - I suggest a clean rebuild, all the drivers and on the MSI page anyway.

Regards the RAM, yes, its Dual channel capable (minor performance boost at best in most realworld cases though), but I guess 1 x 8gb was cheaper for MSI to bundle. If I where to upgrade I'd got for a pair of matched 8's.

I didn't bother with matching the Sandisk for raid purposes, I just bought a single 256gb that was twice as fast as the Sandisk anyway for boot and software and I'm using the 128gb as another drive for even more game installs when that fills up!

 

Make sure your playing on a map with no snow - the blizzard effect totally hammer the frame rate, its really badly optimised.

 

Hey wonderdog, just wondering how much does the cpu and gpu throttle on battery? And while watching full 1080p youtube videos, how long will the battery last?

 

I haven't done a proper measured gaming battery burn, but the desktop time (which would probably cover youtube on the intel GPU) is about 4hours 20 mins on windows 8 balanced power profile.

I've now downgraded (upgraded?) to windows 7 and havent run it down again yet.

 

That's good to know, do share the battery life of windows 7 after you've tested it out.
I'm planning to get the GE 60 2OE, as it comes with the 6 cell battery, battery life will probably be the same as what you're getting on your GE 40 since it uses a 6 cell battery too.
Also if you are able to monitor the cpu/gpu clock rates on battery mode, mind sharing how much they throttle?
Thanks mate

 

Is it possible to install SSD where the ODD is or you need to switch so that the HD will be where an ODD is and the SSD will be where the HD is?

 

Good news - Did some stress tests BEFORE going in to change the thermal paste to get baseline, and got some surprisingly positive result!

I ran Furmark alone to stress the GPU, then added int a Prime95 max CPU+Power+Heat test to really give the machine, PSU and cooling solution a workout.

My findings are thus:-

With just the GPU maxed out by furmark (clocks up 720mhz core) the GPU temp rises to 80°C max. It can run like this all day as it plateaus here, with the cooler able to keep this going no problem.

Adding in the CPU via a Prime95 burn run is where it gets especially interested - the machine runs all 4 cores at 2.4ghz - after a while the CPU core temps get up to about 95°C - at which point the shared heat pipe is transferring some heat away to the GPU as well, which rises to 89°C max. As the cpu starts to nudge above 95°C speedstep kicks in and the CPU bounces between 2,2ghz and 2.3ghz - but I left this running for an hour and the temps were 100% stable. At no point was the GPU forced to clock down from 720mhz or the GPU dip below 1.9ghz (with all 4 cores maxed). This also shows that the 90W PSU can cope with max load for an extended period as well.

Basically - the stock cooling solution in the GE40 has been really, really well thought out, and the components (4702MQ and 760m) have been perfectly matched to the real world capacity of the cooling solution. I have a feeling that a GTX 765m or 47W TDP CPU would generate too much heat for the paired heatpipe + fan solution to cope with, and we'd see the CPU and or GPU throttle harder (the CPU never drops below a 1.9-2.0ghz base clock!).

The other good news (for Kepller) is that the system does NOT throttle at all on battery. I did 15 minutes of my 1 hour test on battery only (pulled the power cable out) in order to test - and it continued exactly as above. I can't say how long the battery will last under those conditions though!

On inspection, the heatpipe also covers the GPU memory and some other voltage components on the motherboard, using self adhesive thermal pads. Due to me not having any of these lying around, and the fact that the machine (without any fan assisted cooling stand or removing the base or anything) can cope with a stress test without any GPU throttling and without throttling the CPU below a useful clock, I'm not going to bother for now.

Very impressed with MSI right now - after reading a review of the same-specced Acer Aspire V3-772 on Review Acer Aspire V3-772G-747A321 Notebook - NotebookCheck.net Reviews which talked about heavy on-off throttling I was worried - but the shared heatpipe design on the GE40 seems to work very well at dumping heat out of the CPU, and the 760m leaves enough thermal headroom to absorb some of this and let the fan still do its job.

 

So its kind of lame that MSI doesn't let you open the laptop without voiding the warranty, but the sticker seems to just be regular paper with no watermark? Anyways, I suppose I will keep from upgrading anything internally until I find a need for it as who knows about reliability.

 

No - its one of those horrible security stickers that disintegrates when you try and peel it.

In the EU, its up to a manufacturer to prove that your actions caused a failure in order to deny a repair under warranty, not the other way around, so if they laptop where to die due to a manufacturing defect and you'd only opened it to add more ram or to add a hard disk you'd still be covered.

Either way you'd be able to make a claim to your card company if you bought it that way anyway.

 

Yeah, thats true, pretty sure cc company would have my back. Its pretty petty of msi to do that, I checked the stack of laptops at work, and not one had a warranty sticker

 

That is why I got my reseller to crack my one open. The extra RAM was only $49 (cheaper than I could buy it myself), with the added bonus that they will break the seal for me

 

I emailed MSI and they said it was OK to open it up and the rest of it would be under warranty. The only problem would be if I broke it while it was open. I'd email them yourself just to be safe and of course, your mileage may vary.

 

Laptopmag.com have posted a review - MSI GE40 2OC-009US Review | Notebook Reviews

Pros: Lightweight design; Good gaming performance; Impressive battery life

Cons: Runs hot during gameplay; Plastic bottom feels chintzy; Keyboard not backlit

The Verdict: The MSI GE40 packs very powerful specs and long battery life into a lightweight 14-inch laptop, but it runs hot when gaming.

Interestingly the model that was reviewed contained the Intel Core i7-4700MQ processor (with a TPD of 47W), whereas I thought the current models had the lower clocked Intel Core i7-4702MQ processor (with a TPD of 37W).

Anyway, the review indicated that the Core i7-4700MQ got quite hot. Hopefully the i7-4702MQ won't have quite the same heat issues.

On the battery front, they indicated that using their laptop battery test( continuous Web surfing over Wi-Fi on 40 percent brightness), they got a staggering 8 hours and 20 minutes...

 

Sounds about right - I was blasting fullscreen looped youtube on at 100% brightness for 4hrs 20 mins. Haswell really is a very efficient chip.

As noted in my last comment - under super-mega stress load on both GPU and CPU the 37W 4702MQ is near its heat limit - it doesnt surprise me that at 47W 4700 would hit the red line. I'd 100% go for the 4702MQ every time.

 

Impressive, would you say the new MSI GE 60 & 70 would be able to get these kind of battery life since their slightly similar with a bigger screen?

 

Im getting about 4 hours of battery life just surfing the internet with brightness at 40%

 

That is more what I would have expected - over 8 hours seems insane!

 

Positive Rep to Wonderdog for that good solid review

Btw, been playing with the MSI GE40 and there are some pros and cons I observed.


The Good
- Very portable and light for having high performance components like gtx 760m and i7-4702 37watts quadcore Haswell
- Scored 18,900 on 3dmark06 and 3,550 on 3dmark11 which is about the same or a few points higher than notebookcheck's benchmark of the gtx 760m
- I had the MSI x460dx before and it has that same power light feature where it turns orange light when the GeForce dedicated card is running and turns blue light when intel graphics is running (cool feature)
- Nice lid with the Dragon Eyes that glows red light
- Solid wireless connection with no disconnects
- Solid audio quality




The Bad
- My former MSI X460DX which is about 90% identical to GE40 didn't have keyboard ghosting, somehow some 3 key combinations on the GE40 had ghosting issue like the W+E+Spacebar
Microsoft Applied Sciences Group - you can try out keyboard ghosting for yourself w/ this link

- The touchpad is good but it is a lil on the small side and the chrome glossy 1 piece touch button is prone to smudges
- The screen although has good colors and good HD+ resolution is slightly grainy and the blacks looks a lil greyish
- There is some kind of defect or bug when using the FN+ key with any combination that resets your keyboard settings. For example if you set your keyboard setting to your liking, when you use the FN+ with any key combination, the keyboard setting goes back to default which is annoying an I had this problem too with the MSI X460dx so it is probably related with the wiring inside.
- The GE40 has some kind of CPU or GPU whine like a hitch pitch buzzing sound where if you scroll up and down or you hover your cursor, you can hear the hitch pitch whine and it becomes louder when you plug in a USB device.
- After firing up Diablo 3 and CS:Go and within 7 minutes, the cpu temps went as high as 98c and gpu at 82c, I know that 105c is the threshold for the i7-4702 but it was uncomfortably hot on the left hand side of the laptop around the TAB/CAPSLOCK/WASD area and the left palm rest.




Might be a PRO or CON to some people
- Windows 8

 

There is a review here that shows the internals. https://forum.lowyat.net/topic/2849748/all

I'm thinking about getting this notebook maybe.

So the 8 hours battery life isn't correct? You sure you weren't on the 760m that gave you the 4 hours?

 

I double checked it and it was using the initel graphics.

I've overclocked the graphics card using msi afterburner and the best I can get in 2011 3dmark is 3700

 

Is it possible to overclock the GPU so it will be like the 765m?

 

Does your power button turns orange when you get on Steam, even when not playing any games? Everytime I log into Steam my power button turns orange, however Hardware Monitor shows that my 760m is inactive. And if I log off Steam, my power button reverts back to blue.

 

I was quite set on buying this after reading the review on laptopmag about the battery life, but it seems that in real life, it only manages over 4 hours of battery life on web browsing. That's a little too weak for me.

 

Ignore this post. My apologies

 

I am really liking this laptop, but the only potential issue is it overheating after a few hours of gaming. Some mixed reviews out there on temps, so basically my question is would I be able to play a graphically intense game for 3+ hours straight without it overheating or causing any damage?

EDIT: I have a dual-fan cooling pad

 

I'm not sure but all I could tell you is that it did not throttle when playing diablo 3 straight for 2 hours and cs go for an hour. Only thing is the temps were so high and the left side of the keyboard and palm area got uncomfortably hot.

 

So did you return the machine because of the temps ?.

 

Been contemplating between this, razer blade and clevo w230st. Does anyone know if I can change the wifi card to a bigfoot killer? I heard that the maingear pulse 14 is a barebones of this model and it has more options, is this customizable as well?

I'm planning to set the msatas as raid and have another hdd for storage.

 

Yes, the wifi card is replaceable. A number of vendors, including gentecpc are able to sell and install the bigfoot card.

 

HA! GE60 used to be my top choice utill I went over to the 2013 GE60 owner thread. They are getting 1 hour 59 min Battery life surfing the web and 30 min battery life while gaming. What a joke! They made it worst than before.

 

Does anyone here have the GE40 2OC-009US variant here?

The one which comes default with a 128GB mSATA as well as a 750GB SATA.

I want to know if the mSATA slot in that variant is the same type which allows the installation of two mSATAs.

If yes, does this need to be in a RAID configuration or can they be used as two separate drives?

 

Added another 8 gig stick of ram to make it dual channel windows score jumped from the 5-8 and 3d mark 2011 went up a little. I have another Sandick 128gb m sata showing up today to do raid o will update my numbers

 

Yes, two mSATAs can be installed. You can choose through the bios whether to use them separately or put them in a RAID configuration.

 

There is now a review out for the MSI GE40 here - http://www.purepc.pl/notebooki/test_msi_ge40_notebook_dla_gracza_z_intel_haswell_i_gtx_760m

It is in Polish, but all is not lost - you can use Google Translate (embedded in the page) to get an idea as to what they are saying. On the battery front (page 7), things are interesting. Battery life varies between:
58 minutes running a loop of Crysis: Warhead (Wi-Fi on / Brightness 100% / High Performance),
268 minutes running their internet test (Wi-Fi on / Brightness 50% / Sustainable),
276 minutes on their video test using an mp4 file with a resolution of 1280x720 encoded with the x264 code (Wi-Fi off / Brightness 100% / Power Saving)
590 minutes on their 'no load test' (Wi-Fi on / Brightness 50% / Sustainable)

I am guessing that 5 or 6 hours could be possible if your settings are right. :thumbsup:

 

Another review claiming 7 hours !!! This kind of battery life is exceptional ! Battery Life, Power Consumption & Portability Index : MSI GE40 2OC Dragon Eyes - Affordable, Svelte & Powerful - HardwareZone.com.sg

For me the only disappointment is backlit keys . any suggestions how to circumvent this problem ??
Also would it be useful to get the IC diamonds Thermal compound ?

Also is the best offer Gentechpc with free IC thermal compound and 16Gb memory for a total of $1348 ?
Are there any better deals?

 

That is the best deal I could find, which is precisely why I took it

 

Can it output 1440p via HDMI? Can anyone test this please if you have a 1440p monitor?

 

Sure can, if you have a hdmi v1.4 compatible cable and monitor.

 

If I were to get the GE40 from XOTIC with the diamond thermal compound and copper cooling, how much heat would it put out? Do those upgrades really affect how well heat is being dissipated? This thing has practically everything I want, but the high heat is perturbing me. Will this level of heat damage the internals?

 

So I'm one of those suckers who got a GE60 with the the bad battery life. I hear the GE40 has much much better battery life and notably, a higher capacity but still 6 cell battery than the new GE60. I'm wondering if it would be possible to use the GE40 battery in the GE60. Would anyone with a GE40 be willing to pull out their battery and take some pictures of it next to a ruler? Also, what are the voltages it provides according to CPUID HWMonitor.

 

I don't have a GE40 but here is a pic I found:

http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2848/8974515087_2caa7893b5_o.jpg

 

Thanks for the picture, doesn't look like it'll fit. After reading up on this, I pulled the battery to get the actual information. Here's what I got:

Rating: 11.1 V 4400 mAh, 49 Wh BTY-S14

That's in comparison to last year's GE60 which was 5200 mAh and this year's GE40 which is 6000 mAh. So what it looks like is the nimrods at MSI said to themselves "what the customers really want is a battery that holds less capacity and weighs the same amount." I can honestly think of no reason why they would think that to be a good decision other than pure cost cutting, or they're just a gigantic bunch of idiots.

That said, has anyone had any experience with extended battery products, such as these ones which should supposedly fit this computer?
MSI BTY-S14 batteries - Replacement MSI BTY-S14 Laptop Battery

These look a little too good to be true but it would be wonderful if they were.

In case anyone cares, here's a picture of the battery:
http://i.imgur.com/UwQV2XE.jpg

 

I have used an extended battery product for my old MSI Wind u100 - worked well and definitely increased the battery life!

 

Do you know if this is for the model with the ODD or without?

 

The SKU GE40 2OC-009US with mSATA SSD does not comes with ODD, the Optical bay was replaced with a Hard Drive caddy. only the SKU GE40 2OC-008US without mSATA SSD has optical drive but no mSATA slot.