Display & Sound
The display is a beautiful 17″ 1920×1080 FullHD anti-glare panel. Its viewing angles are wonderful for a laptop and can be easily seen in bright sunlight. Colors look rich and vibrant with no backlighting problems whatsoever. My biggest complain about the display is that the brightness adjustment is quite limited. Even when turned down as far as the software will let me, the screen is still very bright in low light situations. More manufactures should take a hint from Apple’s MacBook line of brightness adjustment levels.
Another outstanding feature that MSI has packed into the GS70 is the ability to output to not 1, not 2, but 3 external displays! There are two mini display port 1.2 outputs alongside an HDMI 1.4 output. Mini display port 1.2 allows for a maximum resolution of 3840×2160 @ 60hz; while HDMI 1.4 allows for the same maximum resolution but only @30hz. The desktop user in me wants to complain that MSI should have included 3 mini display port outputs, but it’s really not necessary. The GPU, although quite powerful for a laptop, does not have the ability to run three 4k displays at 60hz. Even the highest end desktop GPUs in a quad setup can run that many pixels at 60hz. HDMI is more convenient for laptops anyway as they’re more commonly going to be used to hook up to a HDTV. For productivity such as photo editing, 30hz will be plenty.
Audio is crisp and has a surprising large amount of bass for a laptop. It’s not super loud but again, this is a laptop folks. If you want crazy high end audio, get a DAC. The Headphone/MIC/Line In I/O ports are gold plated for optimal quality as well. Even using run of the mill ear buds, the audio experience with the GS70 is impressive.
Battery Life
As soon as you see a 17″ laptop one of your first thoughts are that the battery life must suffer. Although it’s not as impressive as my 11″ Chromebook or most modern MacBooks, the battery life is certainly no slouch. With Wi-Fi on and doing modest business work with the display brightness turned down, I get about four hours from the battery. While playing a graphic intensive game with the Nvidia 765M active, I’ll usually get about an hour to an hour and a half. While watching movies I’ll generally get around two hours. With Wi-Fi turned off and brightness turned all the way down I get upwards of five hours. Again, all very impressive considering the size of this laptop but it doesn’t quite keep up with most laptops these days.
Storage
The GS70 has the amazing feature of having three drives! Two of those drives are mSATA and come configured in RAID 0 for optimal speed by default. The third drive is a 1TB HDD. For gamers, photographers and pretty much everyone – this laptop is perfect. MSI rates the speed of the RAID 0 SSD setup to be around 900MB/s. See below for our results. With this kind of modern setup you won’t have to upgrade to a new laptop for many years. Once my warranty expires I plan to open up the laptop and replace each mSATA SSD with at least a 1TB each and the HDD with at least a 2TB. Although in two years I’m sure those numbers will be doubled if not tripled. Let that sink in for a moment… this laptop has the potential for 2TB of SSDs and 2TB of HDDs, and that’s with hardware that is readily available.
Other Important Features
MSI has this laptop packed full of amazing features. It’s cooling system, although not silent, is very efficient and the laptop never gets painfully hot (in any part). During gaming the fans can get a little lout unfortunately. They have also integrated Killer DoubleShot, which combines Killer Ethernet and Killer WiFi adapters for superior online gaming speed. MSI also includes a very sexy protective case; the inside is padded to provide protection and featuring MSI’s GamingGSeries dragon logo on the front. A perfect companion to an already sexy laptop.
