Johnny
The first unit I received shortly died after a few hours of usage. The power surge/ac adaptor blew up the capacitor and possibly fried my laptop. CPU and RAM were running low. GPU wasnt drawing a lot of power because I was playing World of Warcraft on the recommended settings. Either I just had bad luck or I was thinking maybe that I drew too much power from all the usb ports to power and connect my Logitech G13, Laptop Cooling Pad, and Logitech PowerPlay Pad with G903 Mouse. Got my replacement recently and I havent had any major issues so far. I did have to plug my laptop into its AC Adapter to turn it on the first time which was weird because the battery was already at full charge. Im still worried about the quality of capacitor and conductor inside this thing. I just hope it doesnt go pop and start burning again. Overall, it is a great laptop for the price. I would recommend updating the RAM from 8gb to at least 16gb. The CPU runs super fast and doesnt start utilizing its full potential until you start doing things like installation of applications, but the Memory Usage sits around 40-50% the most of the time. I can notice some slow downs when opening Windows Explorer any some of my apps when I have other programs up. I like the addition of the cooler boost button, but most of the time I dont have to use it because I have a ThermalTake Auto Laptop Cooling Pad that monitors the bottom surface of my laptop. If I dont have my ThermalTake fan on the laptop can get as hot as 93-97 degrees Fahrenheit while sitting idle or playing games. My fan can get it as low as 82-83 degrees, consistently, while idle or gaming. Booting it up from a restart or shutdown is about as fast as an SSD. Trackpad is OK. The SteelSteries Keyboard feels great and looks awesome, but the keyboard surface of the laptop can get warm while sitting idle or gaming even when I have a fan pushing cold air underneath the laptop. There are air intakes/air vents that take in air on the bottom of the laptop. So I suggest getting a mesh aluminum or metal stand/cooling pad with your purchase. The monitor is bright and colorful. I dont see any problems with it. 1920x1080 is fine when gaming. Wireless card is finicky with both units I had. My laptop seems to lose its internet connection at random times. It is a bit frustrating. Some bloatware, but not as bad as it was 10 years ago;. Most of the bloatware seems to be from Microsoft itself after the laptop installs the updates. Uninstall Minecraft, Candy Crush, the preloaded Microsoft games, and the two Norton Internet Security applications then youre fine. Keeping the MSI software is optional, a few of these are useful like BurnRecovery to make a backup of your version of Windows just in case anything happens. Ill update and give more stars after Ive had this laptop for a month without any issues. Update(09/02/2018): After using this laptop for for almost a week now the headphone 3.5mm jack is now only outputting audio to the left side of my headphones only. I checked the balance settings for both sides on the windows volume mixer menu and they’re both set to default. I used three different headphones and I still had the same issue. I updated the RealTek Audio drivers and tested it using Razer Surround’s audio drivers; It still did not fix it. So now this leads me to believe it is a hardware issue. I’m taking one star off because every it is very frustrating to spend my time to install and update everything on this laptop to only have a hardware component fail shortly after. I’m returning this and purchasing something else from a different manufacturer.