I splurged on this purchase - a $3000 gaming rig with a RTX 2080 in it, 32GB of RAM, 1TB NVME, 2TB SATA disk, everything looked sweet. The laptop itself was built really well, or so it seemed, until I attempted Windows setup and one of my keys half fell-off. This is my first time dealing with one of these SteelSeries keyboards, and will be my last. After some searching, I found out that this is a pretty common problem. MSI wants us to send the unit to China for repair, which could take weeks. No thanks, Im going to return it.
Brian
5
Ive been gaming so long that my first multiplayer games were direct dial to the other player over 2400 baud modem on a IBM 286. Ive owned other gaming laptops but this is the first time my laptop has ever been able to out benchmark my desktop. My desktop is a 4th Gen I7 4790k overclocked to 4.8ghz with 32Gig DDR3 2400mhz, with a GTX 1070. This laptop scores about 300 points higher than the desktop in Passmark. The only category the desktop wins in is 2D Graphics (laugh). Heres What I like about the laptop: Full RTX 2080 (not max-q): From everything Ive read the 2080 max Q doesnt perform much better than the 2060. This thing beats my desktop 1070 easily. Small Footprint for a 17.3" screen: This is about as small of a footprint as youre going to ever get on a 17" laptop. Yeah you could save some room off the bottom bezel I guess but theres not much meat left on the the sides or top. I travel all the time and this thing fits in a 15.6" case. It also weighs less than 6 lbs. My last laptop was an Alienware 15 and that thing was a brick. Its extra weight is used up in cooling systems, which is where it should be. Nice size touch pad with "real" buttons and no extra function keys: I looked at the GS75 and HATED the massive touch pad with the built in left/right click. This one is a good size, well placed with good buttons. Most of the time I use a mouse but its nice to have a decent touch pad when Im not. Also there are no random function buttons. I always hated going for the top left corner on the Alienware and hitting some random function key. The keyboard layout I dont like since I use the windows key all the time but you can easily remap the keys in the software to your liking. Heat Dissipation: I ran into no real throttling issues after hours of gaming with this thing on a cooling pad. It only throttled a little when sitting flat on the desk. I didnt feed any real heat coming though the keyboard. Ease of Maintenance: Bottom is easily removable and all major components can be easily reached. Ram and Drive can be easily replaced. Screen: Its a beautiful FHD screen.... but its a FHD screen. More on that in the Cons Section. Bang for the buck: Full 2080 with 32GB ram, TB worth of NVME, and 2GB HDD for Mid 2000s... I havent seen anything else close. What I dont like (Very short List): No option for 4k: Many people argue about the need for 4k in a laptop. Simple fact is this also travels with me for work and I do design work of 1080p screens.... which I cant see fully in a window on a 1080p screen. Its annoying. Not annoying enough to make me not buy the laptop but I would have liked (and have been glad to pay for) the option. Battery Life: Is TERRIBLE. Now this is a very small thing since if youre buying a non max-q 2080 laptop... You shouldnt often be running it on battery but this thing lasts less than 2 hours in basic web browsing. They really didnt even try. Again I knew about i going in and was not surprised by it.
James Plunkett
4
My best laptop ever (& Ive been using laptops professionally since they were invented). Beautiful screen, great sound, fast, responsive, quiet, light... The SteelSeries keyboard has great feel -- plus,every key has independent color and intensity and you can save and switch between multiple setups, so it can be VERY useful to setup layouts highlighting keys for particular apps, or whatever effects you want. They keys are also individually mappable, although Ive found some minor limitations/bugs, so its best to just do that in each app anyway. Quirks: Touchpad doesnt turn off with bluetooth mouse, but it turns out that they have an even better function - just Fn+F3 to turn it on/off. Fans are very controllable, and often silent. Occasionally, some apps fall into a high resource consumption mode, but Im not sure if it is Windows or some of the machine drivers, so it might need watching for battery use. The two nits that Im not thrilled about is that the battery is not removable, and the [Home] and [End] keys are combined/overlapping on the [PgUp][PgDn] (and the bug I discovered is that they arent really remappable, now in the fix list at SteelSeries). Overall a great machine!
Wes
5
The PassMark rating for the machine is 6065.7 (97th percentile) as of this writing. 3D Graphics Mark is 13712.0 (99th percentile) I use the machine for 3D modelling, software development, and content creation. This machine handles these tasks well. Pros: -Build quality is good. This is my second MSI machine. My previous machine spend a year on the back of a motorcycle bouncing around the mud across Central and South America, and it held up without issues. This model "feels" even more solid; well see if Im right. -Screen is very bright and clear -Keyboard is responsive. -Dont worry about heat. Heat management is quite good. I hovered around 70-75/C after a couple of hours of gaming. -Fans are audible, but they dont have a shrill scream and did not annoy me at all. -Very light and thin for a 17". -MSI makes it easy to keep the machines drivers updated. Cons: 144hz screen was a choice I made, but a 4K display would have been nice.
Greg Fisher
5
Very solid overall laptop! I needed something that could be easily carried but more powerful than the super lights (max q stuff). At 5.8 pounds its only slightly heavier than the GS line but much better on performance. So.. powerful and very light compared to other full laptop RTX cards. I wish it had thunderbolt 3, but otherwise its 100% as expected. Update 4/17/`9 - NEW BIOS and Firmware unlock a huge speed boost. Still very happy with performance but now even better.
Vaerun1881
1
I bought the 2080 + 8750h version (32 GB ram, 1tb ssd + 2tb hdd). It seemed quite a steal for 2.5k. I got the laptop in a couple of days, and then turned it on. I play WoW a lot, so I installed and and much to my disappointment got around 40 FPS, no better than my 1060 + 6700k laptop. Well, I thought to myself, old and non-optimized game what do you expect. I decided to run 3dmark11, just to benchmark this beast. 7000+ score. My 1060 gives 12k fyi. All those forum posts about power throttling started coming back to me. I thought maybe my drivers might not be the latest. So I 1) Updated windows 2) Installed all driver updates from MSI, including the bios ones 3) Installed the latest drivers from NVIDIA 4) Rolled back to two older versions of the same drivers But no luck. The benchmark scores became worse the longer my laptop was on. 3dmark firestrike gave me 2k scores (bottom 7%). GTA V, a 2012 game, gave me 20fps at 1080p with all settings turned to max. To be fair, it gave me 100+fps with all settings turned off or low. I am not sure what the problem was - the larger SSD with the increased ram soaking up power meant for the CPU/GPU. As the GPU was being 100% utilized, but just did not seem to be doing enough. I have never returned a order so fast. This is my second MSI, the first one has lasted me almost three years without complaints. I will be sticking to Alienware now, overpriced they may be, but atleast they test their hardware.
Eric F.
5
Runs everything with amazing framerates and performance. Screen is beautiful. Out of the box the only thing that I wish I didn’t have to do is undervolt the cpu, the temps just get waaay too high over 95c+ while gaming. But! A simple 30 second change with throttlestop -125mv and the temps never go above 80c.. paste job from the factory was good.. I did repaste anyways because I took it apart to check.. but saw no change in temps.
Porter
5
TL;DR at bottom. Let me start by saying Im not the biggest MSI fan mainly due to two issues I had with a GT80 laptop. The "battery drain" feature which drained the battery when the power adapter couldnt supply enough power, so always draining and recharging during game play. Also the fact that even with a 330w power adapter the system would use well under 300w, so they werent even using the full spec of the adapter they supplied, causing the "battery drain" feature that I also didnt like. I wrote the MSI engineers at that time and decided to sell the laptop and stayed away from MSI until now. Im glad to report the 280w supply appears to be plenty for even the highest benchmarking and gaming sessions, and I havent noticed any battery drain. If its doing it its so small that I cant notice it. The laptop will run ok out of the box for most users, but I must add that with a little tweaking you can get it to run a lot better (cooler and little to no throttling). The warehouse deal I got was excellent, and I have no idea if it was a return or was opened or something but it looked brand new. I did not see any need to repaste after my tweaks. Basically I have undervolted the cpu using throttlestop (as I have every laptop the last few years) and tweaked some settings for various tasks. I have a quiet mode for battery (can be fanless depending on load), gaming mode with the CPU turbo lowered a little to reduce un-needed cpu power/heat, and a full CPU mode for benchmarking or when re-encoding videos where I want it as fast as possible. This thing plays games better than my 15" laptop with a 8700k cpu and a full 1080, and is much quieter, is thinner, lighter, and cost a lot less. I like to do benchmarks for fun and it keeps right up there with the big dogs graphics wise which is amazing in itself if you dont really need that desktop cpu power (like with my previous laptop that had an 8700k). My tweaked Firestrike graphics is 28,208 (overall score 21,112) My tweaked TImespy graphics is 10,985 (overall score 10,059) I cannot stress how quiet it is (realize that Ive tweaked mine so out of the box maybe wasnt quite as good). I can play games sitting next to my girlfriend in the living room and she can hear the TV much better than any other gaming laptop Ive had. If I want it even more silent than auto fans I can use nvidia whisper mode to limit fps and it gets even quieter! When by myself or at my desk I will use max fans and headphones. Ive used the MSI silent fan mode too which means the fans will be off mostly when surfing. Very nice to have options, and a normal user could just use auto fans and likely be happy. Battery life out of the box is not great, at about 2-3 hrs of light surfing its not the worst Ive had but also not the best. With more tweaking (mostly extreme limiting CPU power) I did a battery drain test over 5 hrs. That is with backlight at 25% and wifi on, so 4-5 hrs of surfing doesnt sound too bad to me. I dont use battery often so it wasnt a huge concern of mine. Pros: "Full" 2080 in such a small & light chassis 17" screen in basically a 15" chassis size (very thin bezels) Three storage slot options (two M.2 and one 2.5") Screen is 144hz, great quality color and no smearing/ghosting RGB keyboard feels good and lighting options are exceptional 6 core/12 thread CPU, a "real" 45w is awesome in such a small chassis Trackpad mouse works good for when you need to use it, real buttons to click on too Texture/feel of case is good, doesnt feel cheap and not too heavy It is thinner closed than just the base part of my 1 year old 15" laptop when open, same footprint size (width & depth) Cons: The laptop runs warm as most thin and light do, and thus out of the box you likely will experience some CPU throttling. I bet most users wont even notice this or have any issues under normal circumstance, it will play games great and do other tasks as expected. It might run a little hotter, fans be a little louder, and have slightly less performance than those that like to spend time tweaking. TL:DR This laptop does everything, and does most of it very well. May not be the fastest or lightest, but the features and form factor combine to make it one of the best gaming laptops out there in my opinion. Zero regrets even moving from a desktop 8700k cpu down to the lowly 8750H.
Amazon Customer
5
I think at this point you cannot get a cheaper laptop with better components. -It comes with the full, non-max Q RTX 2080 but this is not a bulky laptop. So really youre getting a ton of power but you still get the benefits of a much lighter computer than youd expect from something this strong. -Battery life is as expected when you buy a gaming laptop, which is to say poor. You do not want to run this thing on battery and do anything resource intensive. Plugged in, this runs beautifully though. Really not too loud even when gaming which is great. It falls short in two areas to me, but youre not going to be able to improve upon them in this price range without sacrificing other things. -Its not 4K which is really a little disappointing because when you look at whats inside this computer you realize it absolutely should be 4K, its just not. It seems like its a trend with laptops around this price range, 4K with weaker components or FHD with better components. Its an unfortunate trade off that the consumer has to make. -8th gen i7 vs 9th gen i7 or i9, yeah again the price comes into play here in a big way. It would have been nice to have the option to upgrade at least. All in all its a masterpiece laptop and easily worth more than youre paying for it. In order to have the absolute dream laptop with 4K and new gen processors youd have to shell out over $3k no questions asked. Highly recommended.
Faisal Alsalm
1
i purchased this laptop and it come with defective screen and a dead pixel and light bleed it should be replaced right ??? since there is no service center in my country i have to ship it to the nearest one and that cost 300$ i tried to talk to many service providers and MSI help and support and non helped THIS IS MY FIRST AND LAST MSI product
