Review MSI GT80 2QE TITAN SLI -023UK

MSI produces more gaming laptops than virtually any other company, and its latest model, the GT80 TItan, doesn’t just deploy high-end hardware – it’s also one of the most innovative gaming portables we’ve seen.

It’s the first time we’ve seen a gaming laptop with a mechanical keyboard, which should make this machine a more satisfying typing tool than many rivals. It’s huge, too, thanks to its 18.4in screen.

MSI GT80 2QE TITAN SLI-023UK: DESIGN & BUILD QUALITY

The inclusion of a mechanical keyboard is a clear nod to proper gaming PCs, and that’s not the only area where the MSI takes inspiration from desktops. The trackpad is to the right of the keyboard, and the 18.4in screen is bigger than nearly all rivals.

The keyboard has good pedigree: it’s made by peripheral experts SteelSeries and is built with CherryMX Brown switches. They’re fast, tactile and quieter than the firm’s blue, red, green or black switches, which is handy to avoid annoying fellow gamers.

ROUND-UP: Best Gaming Headsets

The MSI is a serious gaming system with typically ostentatious design. The lid has MSI’s Dragon gaming logo and sleek red lines, and the wide area above the keyboard is decorated with a subtle MSI Dragon Gaming logo amid the brushed metal. Build quality as good as you’d expect from a machine this size - it's got to be strong enough simply to support its own weight, after all.

The dimensions don’t mess about, either. It weighs 4.5kg and it’s 49mm thick, which is so big MSI supplies a bespoke backpack for lugging the GS80 to and from LAN parties. That’s a millimetre thicker and almost half a kilo heavier than the Alienware 17. Considering the presence of a mechanical keyboard here that's actually an impressively small margin.

This heft, though, is in direct opposition to recent trends, which have seen many gaming notebooks shrink. The Gigabyte Aorus X7 v2 weighs 3kg and is 24mm thick, while the MSI GS70 is just 21mm thick and weighs 2.66kg.

The desktop-style experience is enhanced by additional accessories. As well as the backpack you get a spongy wrist-rest to prop in front of the laptop, and the WASD and Escape keys can be replaced by gold-effect versions to add a bit of glamour. A mousemat is included, too.

The base panel pulls away to reveal impressively substantial cooling gear. The processor hunkers down beneath a heatpipe in the middle of the motherboard, and the two graphics cores sit on either side, raised on daughterboards. They’ve got heatpipes of their own, with separate cooling for their memory chips. The pipes feed towards fans in the corners of the base.

There’s access to a pair of memory sockets but, as far as components goes, that’s it – everything else is on the other side of the motherboard. Despite the MSI’s size the deep keyboard cuts down on the interior space, with systems like the Schenker XMG U505 and Alienware proving far more accessible.

Connectivity is better. The edges serve up five USB 3.0 ports, which is more than we see on most laptops, and there are two mini-DisplayPort outputs and an HDMI 1.4 connector. The single audio jack is joined by an optical S/PDIF connection. On the inside, wired and 802.11ac wireless connections come from Killer, which is designed to prioritise gaming traffic – a boon for competitive players.

MSI GT80 2QE TITAN SLI-023UK: SCREEN & SOUND QUALITY

The 18.4in matte screen has a 1,920 x 1,080 native resolution. While this is perfectly adequate, considering many 27in monitors still use it, if ever there were a laptop that deserves a higher resolution it's this one. Not only does the sheer size of the screen mean that you can get away with a higher resolution without having to use the awful Windows scaling tools to make icons and text readable but also the monstrous power of this machine means it can easily play games at higher resolutions.

Resolution debates aside, the display is good quality. It’s brighter than every laptop screen we’ve so far mentioned and its black levels are good too – deeper than the Alienware and Gigabyte machines, and not far behind the Schenker and MSI GS70. The result is a contrast measurement of 1,057:1, which is an improvement on the Alienware and Gigabyte machines, barely behind the 1,059:1 of the other MSI notebook and only falling significantly behind the XMG.

The upshot is there's a real vibrancy and punch to the image. It doesn't look washed out or muted.

Colours are reasonably accurate too. Temperature is a little cool at 7,050K, but the Delta E of 2.91 is decent. That’s an improvement on three rivals, with only the MSI GS70 proving superior.

It’s got better colours, contrast and black levels than most of its key competitors, which makes the GT80’s panel one of the best around. If screen quality is vital, though, the MSI GS70 and XMG screens are slightly better.

The 4.1 audio kit (a sub speaker sits underneath while the main speakers run along the top edge, behind the keyboard) is suitably beefy, with great bass and a snappy top-end. It’s as good as the speakers on any other gaming notebook, and you won’t be disappointed.
MSI GT80 2QE TITAN SLI-023UK: PERFORMANCE

We rarely see notebooks with dual graphics, let alone two of the fastest mobile graphics cores available. This GT80 locks and loads two GeForce GTX 980M cores that use the same architecture found inside the firm’s beefiest desktop cards.

The hardware has been cut down a little to squeeze the chips inside laptops, but each GTX 980M still has 1,536 stream processors clocked to 1,038MHz – only a little behind the GTX 970, from the desktop range.

In other areas, each GTX 980M outstrips most of Nvidia’s desktop cards. Each GTX 980M has 8GB of memory, which is double the amount of the desktop GTX 980. That means there’s a dedicated 16GB of graphics memory (although as with all SLI systems, only 8GB can be addressed at once).

The monster GPUs have a devastating effect on our benchmarks. Fire Strike is 3D Mark’s toughest test, but the MSI scored 13,552 points. The MSI’s nearest rival, the Schenker XMG U505, could only score 8,302 points. The GT80 was even more impressive in Unigine Heaven’s Extreme 1080p test, where its average framerate of 87.7fps was forty frames ahead of the U505.

The insane benchmark results translated to real-world performance. In Battlefield 4 at 1080p the MSI averaged 118fps, which is streets ahead of the Schenker’s 64fps pace, and in Crysis 3 the GT80 averaged 104fps. In that test the U505 scored a lowly 58fps.

The GT80 is, quite simply, the fastest gaming notebook we’ve ever reviewed.

Its processor is no slouch, either. The Core i7-4980HQ is Intel’s top mobile Core i7 part, which means it’s got four cores, a 2.8GHz clock and a mighty 4GHz Turbo Boost speed. It’s paired with 32GB of memory – the most we’ve ever seen in a laptop. The MSI tore its way through the PC Mark 7 test to a table-topping score of 6,808, and its Geekbench 3 result of 14,626 is similarly dominant.

The boot drive is formed by a quartet of 256GB Toshiba HG6 M.2 SSDs in RAID 0. That provides a formatted capacity of 952GB, but be aware of a lack of security – there’s no mirrored data, like with RAID 1 so any failure will result in complete data loss. Elsewhere, there’s a 1TB hard disk.

The four SSDs provide stupendous pace, with results of 1,507MB/s and 1,095MB/s in our sequential read and write tests. That’s better than the Schenker and every other machine we’ve mentioned here, and it means games on the SSD array will load rapidly, to say the least.

MSI GT80 2QE TITAN SLI-023UK: HEAT AND NOISE

Slimmer gaming laptops struggle with heat dissipation and noise, but the GT80’s gigantic chassis helped it cope well despite the monster components.

When stress-tested on its own the processor topped out at 77 degrees, with the graphics cores four degrees chillier. When both parts were tested simultaneously, they reached 89 degrees and 84 degrees – hotter, but no cause for concern.

The noise wasn’t anything to worry about, either. The GT80’s fans did spin up during intense games, but it’s not enough to prove distracting. It’s on a par with the noise churned out by larger gaming laptops like the Alienware, and quieter than many slim, cramped rivals.

The heat doesn’t make it through to the exterior, either, so there’s no chance of uncomfortably hot plastics and metals on your lap, and MSI even includes a button to ramp the fans up if necessary.

MSI GT80 2QE TITAN SLI-023UK: BATTERY LIFE

The GT80’s eight-cell battery sees this otherwise-barnstorming machine fall into familiar gaming laptop territory when it comes to life away from a plug socket.

Our standard test loops a web browsing and video-call simulation with the screen at 40% brightness Here, the MSI lasted for two hours and three minutes – less than the other MSI machine and the Gigabyte laptop, and less than half the longevity of the Alienware 17.

When gaming the situation isn’t much better, with the GT80 lasting a few minutes short of an hour. If you want to play games, make sure you’re near a plug

MSI GT80 2QE TITAN SLI-023UK: KEYBOARD & TRACKPAD

The MSI’s Cherry-backed mechanical keyboard is streets ahead of other gaming notebooks. The keys hammer down with huge speed and precision, and the sheer size of the buttons and the laptop itself means there’s more travel available than on any other gaming portable.

It’s more satisfying to type using the GT80 than on any other gaming laptop, and that’s not the only area where the MSI excels – the laptop comes with five gold-coloured keys to replace the WASD cluster and the Escape button, presumably for when a £3,500 laptop with a mechanical keyboard just isn’t flashy enough.

As with the MSI GE62, we do have one fairly major gripe with the keyboard, which is the layout. It uses a US-style one with single-height return key, enlarged right shift and the Windows button is only on the right-hand side. Some users may find they'll get used to this but for others - particularly if you're flipping between a couple of differents computers on a regular basis - it will be a regular annoyance.

The huge keyboard has shunted the trackpad to the right-hand side. This setup mimics a desktop PC's ergonomics, and the pad itself is far larger than many gaming laptop equivalents – the size, and the smooth surface, makes it easy to whizz around in games.

The trackpad also has a neat trick up its sleeve. Tap a button just above it and it converts the trackpad to an illuminated numpad. It's a little temperamental to switch modes but if you're entering large volumes of numerical data it's a boon to have the numpad option there.

OTHER THINGS TO CONSIDER

The GT80 is ruinously expensive but, thankfully, MSI makes a couple of cheaper SKUs. The 215UK has a slower Core i7 chip, one SSD, half as much memory and two GTX 970 cards and costs £1,999, and the 215UK keeps the two GTX 980M GPUs but has a more modest processor, 16GB of memory and a single SSD.

When a machine is this bulky, though, it barely functions as a laptop at all – and that means it’s worth comparing the GT80 to desktop machines if you’re after something to lug to LAN parties.

We put together a machine with a similar specification to the MSI: a Core i7-4790K processor, 16GB of memory, a mini-ITX motherboard, a 500GB Samsung 850 Evo SSD, 2TB hard disk and a Blu-ray writer, and included a BitFenix Colossus Mini-ITX case. We then added a mechanical keyboard, gaming mouse and Asus PG278Q gaming monitor, and kitted the machine out with a trio of high-end graphics cards: Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 980 and Titan X, and AMD’s Radeon R9 295X2.

Unsurprisingly, all three alternative specifications were cheaper, with prices ranged between £2,103 and £2,520. The storage isn’t quite as quick and there’s “only” 16GB of memory, but those will have limited real-world impact, and our desktops demonstrate a significant saving on MSI’s monster laptop.

Share this post