MSI GT72S Dragon review: What it takes to get a laptop to game like a desktop - bremnerkiny1987

MSI's GT72S Dominator Professional G Dragon breaks barriers unheard of just a few years ago by offering desktop-class Mainframe performance, desktop-class storage performance and background-class graphics public presentation in a laptop.

The attention-grabber Hera is the use of Nvidia's newGeForce GTX 980 chip, which promises 1:1 performance of the desktop GeForce GTX 980. Yes, real. No joke.

If you need it explained in pictures, it's like Nvidia took this:

and jammed IT into this.

Bam.

Don't yawn, you cynical gamer. For sure, we've been able to get GeForce GTX 980M graphics chips all year pole-handled, just that part has only 75 per centum of its desktop counterpart's baron. With the bewilderingly named GeForce GTX 980 movable chip, it's true desktop carrying into action in the end.

Before we dive into performance, Sir Thomas More on this hit Tartar. It might seem like equitable a reprint of the older GT72 Dominator. There's one big remainder on the outside: The flying dragon on the lid of the laptop casts a glowing eye when the laptop is powered connected. It's a big upgrade over the rather sedate, black hat of the experienced GT72 Dominator.

pc gamer gifts msi 2 — Enter The Dragon. MSI's GT72S Dominator Favoring G Flying dragon features a, well, red dragon on its aluminum lid with an eye that glows when on.

A redesigned keyboard makes the keys brighter. Those keys, unfortunately are still just zone-lit—MSI officials cited the cost and power expenditure of a per-key RGB setup. The keyboard uses normal dome keys—if you want natural philosophy keys, you'll wealthy person to spit up for the GT80 Behemoth SLI.

The keyboard is denaturized from finish year's GT72 to even brighter than in front. It's standing just zone lighting though rather than per-of import lighting.

The keyboard was fine, but I'm still no fan of the buttons on the trackpad. They just take also much pressure for your thumb to activate. I found myself using my off hand's index to click the trackpad's buttons afterwards my ovolo became tired.

Inside you'll detect other key changes. The GT72 Dominator featured two miniDisplayPorts and HDMI outputs. The GT72S Dragon trades one mDP for a Bombshell 3.0 combo USB-C port.

For reposition you get a 1TB hard push back and an LG Blu-Ray burner with M-Disc support. The primary drive is pretty alien: a duet of Samsung SM951 M.2 PCIe drives in RAID 0. The two drives combined can cook forth sequential transfers speeds, with large waiting line depths equal to 2.8GBps reads and 1.3Gbps writes in CrytalDiskMark 5. The only harmful? The drives are a measly 120GB each.

Overclocking-gear up CPU with all the trimmings

Inside the shell of the GT72S Dragon you'll find an Intel quadruplet-core Skylake Core i7-6820HK chip. The CPU is unfastened, only the factory default is 2.7GHz to 3.6GHz on Turbo-Hike.

Sooner than the fancy whiz-spang UI that screen background motherboards get, the GT72S Dragon's BIOS looks equivalent information technology was lifted from a motherboard from 2001. There's no mouse control, zero print screen option and nothing to walk you through your overclocking attempts. Information technology's bare-bones. I'd expect this to improve if overclocking of laptops actually turns into a thing.

For my tests I dialed up a quick overclock to 4GHz from its stock speed of 3.2GHz. Even with the 4GHz overclock, the Central processor fan speeds didn't get obtrusive. Only under a stress test do the fans get over up and go. Overall, I'd say fan racket on the GT72S was kept to a minimum.

The BIOS in the MSI GT72S Dragon pales in comparability to a good motherboard's, but it's at least functional and rent us easily telephone dial up a 4GHz overclock on the Skylake cut off.

Because it's Skylake, MSI pairs the CPU up with an excessive add up of DDR4/2133 RAM exploitation four DIMM slots. Away excessive I mean some people really ask 32GB—but hey, why not go every in reactionist?

G-Synchronise display for sande gaming

The GT72S Dragon features a G-synchronize certified panel. The problem, of course, is that with the 17.3-inch 1920×1080 IPS screen and the GeForce GTX 980, IT's going to follow really hard to cause frame rates to drop to the 30 and 40 fps range where G-sync is the most good.

There are benefits: For instance, the G-sync control board is rated for 75Hz, so you'll get a slimly smoother feel in gaming and evening scrolling or moving windows round. It's not quite to the stage of a 120Hz surgery 144Hz panel, simply information technology's better than 60Hz.

G-sync also brings opposed-ghosting and equal works in a windowpane, but the truth is IT's hard to drag down a GeForce GTX 980 even at 1080p gaming.

GPU Performance

None of the fancy Dragon block matters if the laptop doesn't deliver, and it does. I ran 3DMark Firestrike Extreme on the GT72S Dragon and compared it to more or less beefy laptops plus our PCWorld Zero point background system with a GeForce GTX 980. The result? The Dragon is actually slightlyfaster than our desktop arrangement.

msi gt72s dragon 3dmark firestrike overall — Does the laptop GeForce GTX 980 stackup to a background GeForce GTX 980? Yup.

To see how the part stacks up in a real game, I likewise ran Tomb Raider set to Ultimate quality and at 1920×1080 resolution. I unfortunately don't wealthy person our Zero Point at the take down resolution accessible, but the only laptop that we've seen with more performance from is one with two GeForce GTX 980M cards in SLI.

msi gt72s dragon tomb raider 1080p ultimate — Here's how the MSI GT72S Dragon slews up in a real game.

I also threw Eye-earth: Shadows of Mordor with the 4K texture pack and Ultra-quality setting enabled. I have a somewhat smaller set of comparability numbers here, but the GeForce GTX 980 well schools the GeForce GTX 980M chips.

msi gt72s dragon middle earth shadows of mordor 4k textures ultra 1080p — The MSI GT72S Flying dragon performance in Middle-earth: Shadows of Mordor is as wel crowning nick.

CPU Performance

We all know play laptops do more than play. People who buy these honking big laptops also incline to edit video, photos, surgery do other content creation-orientated tasks.

The first run is PCMark 8 Home Conventional. IT's a synthetic bench mark designed to mensurate typical usage in a "home" environment and includes browsing, video editing, photo editing, word processing and light-duty play. It's a fairly easy test that any machine lavatory doh, but it favors the higher clock speeds similar the desktop chips in our aught-level testbed and the Origin PC EON15-X.

msi gt72s dragon pcmark 8 home conventional — PCMark 8 Home measures low aspiration gambling and general CPU performance in typical home (oscitance) tasks.

A more strenuous workload is our Handbrake encode test. We take a 30GB, high minute-rate 1080P MKV file and encipher it using the Android Tablet predetermined. Handbrake is hard multi-rib: The more cores, the high the operation. On the GT72S Tartar, I ran the test two ways. The first was at the stock speeds for the chip, and the second was with the laptop's CPU overclocked to 4GHz. The results are imposing.

msi gt72s dragon handbrake — The default clocks of the GT72S Tartar's Skylake chip is a tad slow but overclocked to 4GHz, IT'll civilis even a background chip.

If you look at the chart above, you can go out the Skylake chip turns in a better performance than the Core i7-4770K in our Zero Point desktop box. However, it loses to the Origin PC EON15-X with its higher-clocked Devil's Canyon chip. With the 4GHz overclock on the Skylake chip, we see a walloping carrying out increase ended the new musculus quadriceps femoris-core CPUs. Note that I didn't vet the 4GHz overclock for long term stability, to just to see how fast it would run. My guess is it's an attainable overclock, A it was fully stable during nine-fold 40 minute encode runs.

Let's smel inside

I don't typically take apart review laptops, only the GT72S Dragon was too interesting to decline. To undefended up the GT72S Tartar, just off the border screws along with the one under the warranty sticker (a wind?), then carefully intrude off the lid.

MSI GT72S Bottom — The MSI GT72S Dragon is well vented and generally fairly quiet except under the most extreme GPU loads.

Here's the actual at heart of the GT72S Dragon. Information technology's fairly straightforward, with easy entree to most of the components. The laptop computer actually uses four 8GB DDR4 SO-DIMMs, so I'm guessing the other pair is integrated on the other side of the motherboard. The GeForce GTX 980 is under the cooler happening the right in an MXM module spell the Core i7-6820HK is soldiered to the motherboard connected the socialistic. And no, you can't barter the CPU out, as Intel stopped fashioning CPUs for laptops using sockets opening with the wandering Broadwell CPUs.

MSI GT72S Guts — Access to the guts of the MSI GT72S Tartar is just seven screws departed—provided you'Re not afraid of excreting your warrant.

Thither's one other catgut shot that's genuinely worthy of getting point on and that's the storage ze-system. MSI actually uses a small daughtercard to mount the M.2 drives to. I didn'tdisassemble it whatever further, but I believe up to quaternity M.2 drives sack be mounted to it. That means up to four M.2 drives in RAID 0 performance for eve more than over-the-top read and drop a line speed.

MSI uses an newsworthy daughter plug-in that I believe mounts up to four M.2 drives on it.

Is information technology worth it?

At that place's no interrogation the GT72S Dragon is kicking-ass in performance. You'Re getting pretty much desktop-level performance without any compromises in gaming, compute and depot. It's also not very gaudy: The configuration I received notches $3,100 into your credit card. That toll will have every single desktop user chiming in and saying: "It own't Charles Frederick Worth it, just buy a desktop."

Yet if we bought into the narrative that there's simply no prise to a herculean gaming laptop that can be zipped up into the included backpack (thanks MSI!) in 60 seconds,we'd need benchmarks to know the Truth.

I went to PCpartpicker.com and spec'ed down a similar gaming PC. I didn't pick low-end components such as a $50 case or $4 baron issue, but I didn't sieve out-the-upmost components either. That desktops cost? Approximately $1,729 including the OS. That includes an OCZ Revo PCIe card, which is in reality slower than the pair of M.2 drives in the MSI but about the only comparable thing I could find in the very capacity range. Also note the GeForce GTX 980 I picked—an MSI one—packs only 4GB instead of the 8GB that the laptop computer's GPU has. There are actually no 8GB GTX 980 cards I could find. You tin can encounter my build Hera.

MSI GT72S backpack — This a very nice bear upon: The 8 lbs. 9 oz. GT72S Dragon comes with a backpack capable of swallowing the laptop computer and all your gaming gear inevitably too.

But wait: That's just for the PC itself. With a gaming laptop computer, you're also acquiring a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse, and speakers. In the GT72S Dragon's case, it's not just a cheap monitor either, it's an IPS G-synchronise panel. That might add another $500 on a inexperient PC. Once you toss in a good gaming keyboard for $100, and a brace of speakers or headset for $50 nonnegative a mouse and webcam you're up to roughly $2,500 for a complete system with somewhat equivalent glasses.

That means the price premium for the GT72S Dragon is around $600. Is it valuable it? No, not if you never place any value movable gambling performance. If you just ne'er fetch your rig to a friend's house on a whim (which you crapper do with a gaming laptop) or with you on a weekend trip up, then zero, why buy a gaming laptop? Pay back a background.

Simply if you are the kind of person who does need gaming you can take with you on a month-unsound get off or an overseas deployment, and then the price premium is well meriting it.

Are there improvements to be made? Certainly. As elegant as it is to see 32GB in a laptop computer, I'd trim that in half for the nest egg because the Brobdingnagian majority of populate retributive Don River't need 32GB of RAM. While under a normal GPU load or even overclocked to 4GHz, the GT72S Dragon fan noise was tenable—but on occasion, especially when coming out of standby, the fans would run at a loud full speed for a few seconds. And yeah, those trackpad buttons. I gues the factorytechnician World Health Organization calibrated them could bring up a Buick with her thumbs if these felt normal to her.

If you can overlook those faults, what you'Re getting with the GT72S Dragon is truly desktop performance in a laptop computer.