MSI GT80 Titan review: A crazy-fast gaming laptop with an old-school desktop keyboard - evansfrod2002

Ah, the eternal Internet argument: Can a gaming laptop really be faster than a gaming desktop? American Samoa admitted ironware snobs with a bias for gaming desktops, the easy answer has e'er been no. Never. Not in our lifetime.

That serve may bear gotten out-of-the-way more complicated with MSI's insanely latched GT80 Titan  SLI laptop. Believe IT or not hardware snobs, IT'squicker than the big majority of gaming desktops come out of the closet on that point.

Even crazier, it's not the gaming performance of the GT80 Titan that grabs your attention—it's the inclusion body of a mechanical keyboard that's the first the globe has probably seen in a laptop since, well, the 1980s.

Gordon Mah Ung

The MSI GT80 Titan SLI features a SteelSeries-designed keyboard with Cherry tree MX switches.

The keyboard isn't some knock-off knockoff, either. MSI broached famed keyboard maker SteelSeries for a plank using old Cherry Maxwell switches with replaceable keycaps. Flush the most jaded laptop user will break out in a grin after hammering KO'd a fewer sentences happening the MSI's mechanical keyboard which imparts a undiversified feel.

Many another will say the keyboard is a gimmick, only I have to say that after an afternoon with it I was hooked and it ready-made Pine Tree State realize that I have been wrongly subsiding for the horrible, mushy laptop experience for likewise long. Testament information technology set off a trend? Believably not.

There is a purpose cost to be paid for that keyboard. Mechanical keys suck up a Brobdingnagian amount of blank—so overmuch so that components that usually inhabit underneath undergo to sick back, while the keyboard is pushed clear to the edge. This means there's no palm rest to speak of, thusly MSI includes an old-style gelatin palm rest with the laptop. MSI also tosses in a lightly cushioned backpack, which is a nice speck because IT's jolly hard to find bags that'll fit these monsters.

Gordon Mah Ung

The trackpad gets pushed over to the slope and pulls double duty as a soft ten-Key when you need it or can be toggled back to a normal trackpad.

There's besides no room for a trackpad, thus MSI moves it off to the right root. Similar to what Razer did with its Razer Blade Pro 2022, it lets you use the trackpad as an ad-hoc mouse for gaming. It kinda works in a pinch, but it's no replacement for a real mouse. I see no point to building in a beautiful keyboard and then trying to swallow a trackpad as a mouse for gaming. One exciting move that is definitely in the gimmick column: The trackpad converts into a virtual ten-key out, with the numbers keys distinct in light at the push of a button.

The heart of any gaming laptop is its GPU. In that case, information technology's 2 GeForce GTX 980M units flying in SLI. The desktop GeForce GTX 980 packs 2048 CUDA cores with a baseclock of 1.26MHz. The mobile version has 1,536 cores and a base clock of 1,038MHz.

What this means, according to Nvidia, is a mobile GPU that gives upwardly about 80 percent of the performance of its desktop vis-a-vis. To find just where the GT80 Colossus falls, I first ran it against the HP Bode and Razer Blade Pro 2022. Yeah, I know, information technology's not exactly carnival to couch five-Pound gaming notebooks against one that weighs 10 lbs. but information technology's worth seeing sensible what you're getting for the weight down you're putting on your shoulders.

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It's not fair to set the GT80 Colossus against a pair of lighter weight laptops merely it's close to get word what you're acquiring for the extra weight.

It's no surprise: The MSI GT80 Titan is unbelievably fast against more typical gaming notebooks. So to find retired how the GT80 Titan does against real hardware, I decided to run the numbers against gaming desktops. I compared it against our zero-point reference arrangement with a Core i7-4770K, 16GB of RAM and azygous GeForce GTX 980 card in it.

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We saw in good order performance and grading from the MSI GT80 Titan even against an overclocked gaming corner with two GeForce GTX 980 cards.

Because 1920×1080 is a fairly low resolution for two GeForce GTX 980Ms, I ran the laptop connected an 30-inch outside panel at 2560×1600. For comparison, I also threw in the AVADirect X99 rig. That simple machine packs two GeForce GTX 980 cards in SLI and an overclocked 8-core Intel Core i7 5960X on base.

The results are fairly eye-opening. As mortal WHO takes the domination of screen background nontextual matter over changeable as an article of faith, it's a reality check to see the SLI 980Ms wide such a sizable carrying into action disruption complete the single GeForce GTX 980 card.

As to Nvidia's claims that the GeForce GTX 980M offers "80 percent" the performance of the GeForce GTX 980? We can confirm that, as the GT80 Heavyweight gave US about 80 percent of the gaming performance of the AVADirect X99 rig with its dyad of 980 card game. In the parlance of our times, the reserve phrase is: Dayum.

4K gaming, too

I know you're going to wonder whether the MSI GT80 Titan can handle even heavier workloads, so I spooled up the MSI GT80 Titan on a 4K Monitor for kicks. Running Tomb Raider adjust on Ultimate at 3840×2160, I saw from 40 to 50 Federal Protective Service. That's perhaps a trifle lacking for a first-person shooter, which commonly demands 60 Federal Protective Service, simply respectably good gaming performance from a laptop. I might tune the settings to get to a more consistent 60 Federal Protective Service, but there seems to be enough performance. The performance at 4K is in all likelihood helped by the 8GB of RAM per GPU that MSI uses in the GT80 Titan. For comparison, a typical desktop GeForce GTX 980 will pack 4GB of RAM.

In that respect are a couplet of weak points of the GT80 Titan, though some English hawthorn disagree. The first is the jury. It's an 18.4-edge jury at a pedestrian resolution of 1920×1080. With this much graphics oink, gaming at 1920×1080 practically handcuffs the pair of 980 cards. The good news is, the laptop is set up to support three monitors in surround mode using a distich of miniDP ports and an HDMI port.

The other weakness will hemipteran those who intend to usage the GT80 for CPU intensifier tasks. Despite its mass, the GT80 Titan is really no more faster than the HP Omen and Razer Blade Favoring 2022.

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Disdain its size, the GT80 Titan SLI isn't much faster than gaming laptops far smaller than it.

That's a little disappointing. For gaming tons, it's really no bad deal. In fact, for someone who is primarily interested in a gaming laptop computer, I generally say skimp on the C.P.U. and throw information technology all at the GPU. Still, to get a line the thick GT80 pull even with the thin-as-  hell HP Omen is, well, a letdown. It's like stomping on the gas foot pedal in your vintage muscle car at a stop light, laying some rubber, and then arriving at the next light to see the singular electric car you thought you burned sitting right close to you. And yes, I included the encoding performance of the AVADirect X99 and its 8-core beast to show you who is large and in shoot up.

Gordon Mah Ung

Underneath the pinnacle chapeau you'll find slots for four M.2 devices, two more pieces of RAM                    and a laptop hard drive too.

MSI may take skimped on CPU in our config, but it was generous with storage. The company takes advantage of the fruitful space to give you the ability to run up to four M.2 SATA drives in RAID 0. Our unit came with two Kingston 128GB M.2 SATA drives in RAID 0, and performance of both was a blistering 1,000MB/s reads and 600MB/s writes. Call us picky bastards, but we wonderment what performance would be like with symmetrical faster drives, or with quaternion.

Acquiring to those drives is easy, too. Evenhanded unscrew two Philips heads on the bottom and slip up public to memory access all four M.2 slots, every bit well As two extra And then-DIMM slots for RAM, the optical drive (a Blu-ray burner in this case), and a 1TB Hitachi HDD.

It's also worth mentioning the acoustics of the GT80 Titan. Nether a CPU load it's quiet, just after a mindful sitting of gambling the fans will reel up sufficient to let you know they're at that place. It's not loud, but it's right the border now and then. Luckily it's a dull hollo, non a strident whine. In that respect's straight a button to bobbin the fans capable max rpm's, but with overclocking currently disabled on the transferrable GTX 980 parts, I'm not sure what the point is.

Gordon Mah Ung

MSI's GT80 Titan SLI is the first laptop computer to feature a mechnical keyboard that we know of since the 1980s.

The past big cost is the actual cost. Such an rum-duck laptop packed to the gills with hardware won't be threepenny. The contour I reviewed, the GT80 SLI-001, wish set your credit card back $3,400. Most superior gaming notebooks with a single GeForce GTX 980 will set you back down $2,300. That  means you're definitely paying a hefty premium for the GT80 Heavyweight SLI, but you're really getting desktop-like performance and that cunning mechanical keyboard.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/431876/msi-gt80-titan-review-a-crazy-fast-gaming-laptop-with-an-old-school-desktop-keyboard.html

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