2014-cü il üçün oyun noutbuku – MSI GT60 2OD 3K IPS Edition

The 2,880×1,620 display is undoubtedly MSI’s headline act, but in order to push those 4.7-million pixels (more than double what’s on offer from a standard 1080p panel), the GT60 2OD requires some serious horsepower.

Review: MSI GT60 2OD 3K IPS Edition

A good chunk of the industry has turned its attention toward super-sexy Ultrabooks, but Taiwanese manufacturer MSI appears to be keeping true to its roots by maintaining a focus on gaming laptops that prioritise cutting-edge performance above all else.

It’s a strategy that appears to be working, as while others are using ultra-thin designs to keep up with the trend, MSI has become an increasingly popular choice with two particular audiences: PC gamers and content creation professionals.

Performance matters to anyone who falls into either of those brackets, and MSI has in recent years continued to back-up its credentials as a purveyor of gaming laptops with muscle through new releases that raise the bar in one way or another.

The latest evolution comes in the form of the GT60 2OD 3K IPS Edition. Priced at £2,000, this is a 15.6in laptop that, in addition to a quad-core processor, high-end graphics, 16GB of memory and a trio of SSDs, incorporates an eye-catching 2,880×1,620-pixel display.

Design

We’ve seen a fair few gaming laptops make an effort to lose weight, but that obviously isn’t the case here. MSI’s GT60 is a powerhouse that measures 55mm thick and weighs a substantial 3.5kg. Chunky is the only way to describe it, and you won’t find many 15.6in laptops quite as bulky as this.

How important is size and weight? Well, it depends entirely on your usage scenario and laptop preferences. Those who see their next laptop as a desktop replacement may actually prefer the GT60’s heft, but for me, personally, I’ve become accustomed to a Lenovo Ultrabook and I now struggle to get to grips with the sheer scale of MSI’s machine.

Sure, the GT60 is significantly more powerful and a spacious chassis is required to house such lofty components, but in relation to many of today’s computing devices, it feels old-fashioned in stature.

Readers who are familiar with MSI’s GT-series machines should, however, feel right at home. The overall chassis design hasn’t changed much in recent years, and as far as look and feel is concerned, it’s easy to draw parallels between the new GT60, last year’s GT70, and 2011’s GT780.

It’s a sea of black plastic topped with a brushed-aluminium lid, and it’s still highly susceptible to fingerprints, but MSI has made small refinements throughout. In our experience, the latest GT60 certainly feels more rigid than previous models. Despite being built primarily of plastic, there’s hardly any flex in the main chassis and the whole unit feels well put together.

Perhaps in the knowledge that the GT-series has proven popular with multimedia professionals, MSI has also continued to refrain from unnecessary gamer emblems. The backlit MSI logo on the lid looks neat, and the red highlights of yesteryear have been confined to just a small, thin line above the keyboard. The GT60 won’t be winning awards based on its exterior styling, but the design is inoffensive and the target market will no doubt agree: it’s what’s inside that counts.

MSI GT60 2OD-092UK Specification

Component Choices

The 2,880×1,620 display is undoubtedly MSI’s headline act, but in order to push those 4.7-million pixels (more than double what’s on offer from a standard 1080p panel), the GT60 2OD requires some serious horsepower.

In the UK, MSI’s £2,000 model comes equipped with a latest-generation Intel Core i7-4700MQ processor. The 22nm ‘Haswell’ chip feature a quad-core, hyper-threaded design that touts clock speeds of up to 3.4GHz, integrated Intel HD 4600 graphics, a 6MB cache and a 47W maximum TDP.

Said chip is partnered by 16GB (2x8GB) of DDR3-1600 memory and discrete graphics in the form of an Nvidia GeForce GTX 780M. The latter is Nvidia’s ultimate consumer notebook GPU and incorporates 1,536 processors clocked at 771MHz (+ Boost) and 4GB of GDDR5 memory hooked up via a 256-bit bus.

We’ll find out soon if that’s enough to drive games at the laptop’s native resolution, but as expected, the GT60 is able to use Nvidia Optimus on-the-fly graphics switching to help preserve battery life by ensuring that the discrete GPU remains disabled when the Intel IGP will suffice.

There’s plenty more. On the storage front, MSI is using three 128GB SanDisk X110 SSDs. The trio of mSATA drives are configured in a RAID 0 array for maximum performance and in our own AS SSD tests delivered blistering sequential read and write speeds of 1,196MB/s and 526MB/s, respectively. The 384GB primary storage setup would suffice for most, but MSI also opts to populate the 2.5in drive bay with a 750GB Hitachi Travelstar hard disk.

Peaking inside reveals that the GT60 2OD will be easily upgradeable in future. Two spare memory slots are available, and we see a total of five heatpipes connected to the exhaust fan. The CPU and GPU are served by two heatpipes apiece, and the fifth and final bar of copper is used to bridge the two – the theory, we suppose, is that if the GPU is idle, its heatsinks should still be used to cool the CPU.

Elsewhere, there’s a large, user-replaceable 87Wh battery, Killer Wireless-N networking with integrated Bluetooth, and a 64-bit install of Microsoft’s Windows 8.1 operating system.

In terms of I/O connectivity, the GT60 2OD sports a trio of USB 3.0 ports and an SD card reader on its left edge, while the right side is home to four audio jacks, a single USB 2.0 port and a Blu-ray writer. A trio of video outputs – two mini-DisplayPort and HDMI – are positioned around back alongside Gigabit Ethernet and a connector for the bundled power supply.

It’s worth noting that the GTX 780M is able to drive three external displays, further adding to the laptop’s workstation credentials and there’s more in store for professional users: MSI has a workstation-specific variant dubbed the GT60 20K that swaps out the GeForce GTX 780M in favour of a Quadro K3100M.

There’s clearly a significant amount of performance on offer, but what’s the GT60 2OD actually like to use? Let’s start by taking a closer look at that ‘3K’ display.

Gaming Laptop for 2014 – MSI GT60 2OD 3K IPS Edition

Earlier this year, I wrote an article on the best gaming laptops of 2013. Since writing this article, gaming laptops from Alienware, Asus and others have acquired Intel Haswell processors, new graphics cards, some HDDs have been replaced with SSDs or the optical drive has disappeared.Razer Blade and Razer Blade Pro gaming laptops, notable for their compactness with a powerful filling, appeared on sale. However, it seems to me that nothing fundamentally new has appeared. Update: The best laptops for work and play in 2020.

What’s in store for gaming laptops in 2014? In my opinion, you can get an idea of the trends by looking at the new MSI GT60 2OD 3K IPS Edition, which went on sale in early December and, judging by the Yandex market, is already available in Russia (the price, however, is about the same as that of the new Mac Pro in the minimum configuration – more than 100 thousand rubles).

4K resolution is coming

MSI GT60 20D 3K IPS Edition Gaming Laptop

Recently, one has to read more and more about 4K or UHD resolution – there are rumors that soon we will see something similar not only on TVs and monitors, but also on smartphones. MSI GT60 2OD 3K IPS laptop uses “3K” (or WQHD +) resolution as the manufacturer calls it. In pixels it is 2880 × 1620 (the diagonal of the laptop screen is 15.6 inches). Thus, the resolution is almost the same as that of the Mac Book Pro Retina 15 (2880 × 1600).

If in the past year, almost all flagship gaming laptops were equipped with a matrix with Full HD resolution, then in the next year, I think we will see an increase in the resolution of laptop matrices (however, this will affect not only gaming models). It is quite possible that in 2014 we will be able to see on sale and 4K resolution in 17-inch format.

Game on three monitors with NVidia Surround

In addition to the above, the new product from MSI supports NVidia Surround technology, which allows you to display the game image on three external displays if you want more immersion in the process. The video card used for these cases is NVidia GeForce GTX 780M

SSD array

The use of SSDs in laptops is becoming commonplace: the price of solid-state drives is falling, the increase in operating speed is more than significant compared to conventional HDDs, and energy consumption, on the contrary, is reduced.

The MSI GT60 2OD 3K IPS Gaming Laptop uses a SuperRAID 2 array of three SSDs, providing read / write speeds of up to 1500MB per second. Impressive.

It is unlikely that in 2014 all gaming laptops will be equipped with RAID from SSD, but the fact that all of them will acquire solid-state drives of various capacities, and some will lose their HDD – in my opinion, it is very likely.

What else can we expect from gaming laptops in 2014?

Most likely, nothing unusual, among the possible directions for the evolution of portable gaming computers that seem to me, can be distinguished:

Great compactness and mobility. 15-inch models no longer weigh 5 kilograms, but are approaching the 3 mark.
Battery life, less heat, noise – all the leading laptop manufacturers are working in this direction, and Intel helped them with Haswell. The successes, in my opinion, are noticeable and even now on some gaming models it is possible to “cut” more than 3 hours.

Other important innovations do not come to mind, except that support for the Wi-Fi 802.11ac standard, but not only laptops, but all other digital devices will get it.