MSI’s GT80 is the first laptop w mechanical keyboard, and there’s no quibbling with its pedigree thanks to Cherry MX Brown switches and SteelSeries design. The keyboard and touchpad have been hauled forwards to the front edge, with the touchpad on the right – a design change that helps the GT80 to mimic a more conventional desktop setup.
Moving the keyboard and mouse forwards also enables MSI to devote more space to cooling. It’s a necessary change, as the GT80 has one of the beefiest laptop specifications we’ve seen: two Nvidia GeForce GTX 980M GPUs and an Intel Core i7-4980HQ.
The GTX 980M uses the same GM204 Maxwell core as NVidia’s top desktop parts, and has 1,536 stream processors – nearly as many as the desktop GTX 970. Its clock speed of 1,038MHz is a tad lower than that of the GTX 970, too, but it boosts to 1,127MHz. NVidia produces the GTX 980M with 4GB or 8GB of GDDR5 memory, and MSI has chosen the beefier 8GB version for the GT80, for a total of 16GB.
The Core i7-4980HQ is Intel’s most powerful mobile Haswell chip, with four 2.8GHz cores and a top Turbo speed of 4GHz – It’s paired with a whopping 32GB of 1,600MHz DDR3 RAM. The storage is similarly super-charged – a RAID 0 array containing four 256GB Toshiba HG6 M.2 SSDs. They have a combined capacity of 952GB, but beware the lack of data security – RAID 0 isn’t mirrored, and if one drive goes down, you lose all your data. There’s a more conventional 1TB hard disk too.
Meanwhile, Gigabit Ethernet and dualband 802.11ac Wi-Fi come from Killer, and there’s Bluetooth 4 support too. The GT80’s borders are versatile as well, offering five USB 3 ports, two mini-DisplayPort connectors, S/PDIF, an HDMI port, an SD card slot and a headphone jack. Two buttons lurk above the keyboard too – one to ramp up the fan speed and another to switch between integrated and discrete graphics.
The GT80 is sturdy and looks the part, with red lines and backlighting, but there’s no escaping its sheer size. Its 4.5kg weight and 49mm thickness make it twice as bulky as many cheaper and admittedly slower machines, and it’s so big that MSI includes a bespoke backpack. Also included is a foam wrist rest and MSI-branded mouse mat too.
Remove the base panel and it’s obvious why the GT80 is so large. The front half is dominated by the battery and keyboard, and the back is crammed with cooling hardware: the processor sits in the middle and is topped by two heatpipes, and the GPUs sit on raised daughterboards with heatpipes to chill the cores and memory.
The three main chips can be reached with a bit of elbow grease, and two memory slots are accessible, but that’s about it – two more memory slots and the SSDs are on the other side of the motherboard.
We’ve one doubt though – whether anyone really needs the GT80 at all. It’s heavy and unwieldy enough to ensure it’s never leaving the mains for any length of time and, if that’s the case, why not build a similarly specified mini-ITX desktop and save yourself several hundred pounds? Thankfully, there are more affordable SKUs. The 215UK includes a lesser Core i7 chip, one SSD, 16GB of memory and two GTX 970M GPUs for £1,999, while the 215UK maintains the two GTX 980Ms but cuts down the specs elsewhere for a revised price of £2,599. Given that the screen only has a 1080p resolution anyway, these cheaper versions will be more than capable.
Performance
There’s no disputing the GT80’s gaming ability. Its minimum of 92fps in Battlefield 4 is superb and it doesn’t even drop below 60fps in Crysis 3, maintaining a superb minimum of 68fps.
The rapid gaming performance was bolstered by good application results too. Its image editing score of 35,464 was strangely behind the 46,439 scored by the Dino PC, but it fought back with brilliant encoding and multi-tasking scores of 201,984 and 137,240, making for a cracking overall system score of 98,345. The high-end storage undeniably helps. The quartet of RAID drives combined for sequential read and write speeds of 1,507MB/sec and 1,095MB/sec – it’s just a shame that they also carry a large risk with them.
The hefty cooling gear helped the MSI to better thermal results than the Dino PC’s temperature too. The processor’s top temperature of 88°C was 9°C cooler than the Phoenix, and the GPUs topped out at 83°C – again, toasty but still cooler than the Dino PC. The chassis didn’t overheat either, and the noise wasn’t too bad. The fans do get loud, but the noise levels aren’t uncomfortable.
Meanwhile, the screen’s 1,920 x 1,080 resolution sensibly avoids the scaling issues that are sadly still prevalent with many Windows apps, but such a powerful laptop could handle a higher resolution with its two GPUs and 18.4in diagonal. The screen quality is great though. Its average delta E of 2.91 and colour temperature of 7,050K are both far better, and its contrast ratio of 1,086:1 is behind the Phoenix, but still excellent. The brightness of 391cd/m2 and black level of 0.36cd/m2 are both good, too. The MSI’s screen isn’t quite as dark as the Dino PC’s panel, but it offers great brightness, contrast and depth, and better colour reproduction too.
The speakers are good too, providing a surprising amount of volume, rich bass, a crunchy middle, and a top end that’s snappy and well-balanced. Not surprisingly, battery longevity isn’t the MSI’s wheelhouse. In a gaming test with the screen at 100 per cent brightness, the GT80 lasted for 63 minutes – longer than the Dino PC’s 28 minutes, but not long enough to enable any serious play away from the mains.
Conclusion
There’s no denying the speed available from the GT80 – it offers simply stunning gaming pace at the screen’s native resolution, as well as super-fast application performance and a great quality screen.
The ergonomics beat rivals too: the mechanical keyboard is excellent, and the right-hand touchpad is great. The price for the top spec, though, is far less palatable. Given that the graphics system is overkill for the screen’s 1080p resolution, and the risk involved with a four-drive RAID 0 storage system, you’ll get better value for money by plumping for one of the cheaper GT80 SKUs, still giving you the great chassis and screen, as well as enough gaming performance for the 1080p screen. However, as a luxury, niche product for gamers who take a ‘money no object’ approach to their hardware, the top-spec GT80 is still as good as it gets.
VERDICT
Incredible speed, high-quality ergonomics, a decent design and a top-notch screen, but the top spec version is just too expensive for most gamers to contemplate.
CLOUDY CIRCUITRY SCORE = 87
