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MSI GS60 2QD (Ghost) 470UK Gaming Notebook Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

At £1300 you hit the fork in the road where improvements on specifications are drastically reflected in the price. £1300 in itself is a lot to pay for a notebook, but when you start pricing this up versus the competition it is fairly good value for money (especially the fruity based competition, but lets not go into that). The GTX 965 from a pricing point of view, helps fill the gap between the low to mid end mobile GPUs and the top of the line GTX980m; more options are always a good thing in my opinion.

Although I’m naturally drawn to the biggest most powerful of mobile systems that cost megabucks with mega specs to match, sometimes practical purposes like work and not arousing the suspicion of the budget holder (usually the Mrs or boss) is key, and this is where the GS60 excels – it looks understated, yet it is reassuringly fast.

Overview

Overall I really enjoyed this laptop and the extra bling that the limited edition colouring brings to it is very nice indeed. I had a friend visit during the time I was reviewing it and his first reaction was to pass comment on how stunning it looked and take a photo. It’s the kind of notebook I could justify to the aforementioned “budget holder” as needing for legitimate work purposes though clearly buying with the intention of having a sneaky gaming session at lunch times. It is pretty formidable as an everyday notebook in terms of multitasking thanks to the punch of the i7-4720HQ, and is more than capable of being used for some photo and video editing. Gaming wise I would say that most games will be perfectly acceptable on high at 1080p with a small amount of tweaking to the settings. Although the GTX 765 is between 15 and 25 percent slower (depending on the game and scenario) it does a good job overall, and I found in a lot of games it was perfectly acceptable to knock the in-game resolution down to 1600×900 to help free resources to keep the frame rate in the 50’s and above.

Battery life wasn’t bad at all coming in at a respectable 3:42 life via PowerMark, though obviously if you’re gaming on battery or other demanding tasks you can expect this to be less. Storage is provided in the form of a PCIE M.2 SSD which is nice and speedy, coupled with a traditional 1TB 7200 RPM mechanical hard drive. Although 128GB isn’t a huge amount of space, it’s still enough for OS, a selection of applications and a few large games. As for document storage, the 1TB is more than sufficient for downloads, music, movies and more – so nothing to be concerned about there. We tested cold boot times and the M.2 SSD had us from off to functioning desktop in under 14 seconds, which is fairly impressive to say the least.

Unlike our previous notebook from MSI which came with pretty much no bloatware / additional software installed, sadly the same can’t be said for the GS60. A trial version Norton Internet Security suite is one of the first things you are greeted with when you turn it on, and going into the “all programs” part of the Windows 8.1 menu shows a bunch of other apps and games that I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting on by default. There is Xsplit Gamecaster which comes with a free bonus 3 month subscription for purchasing so you can be streaming in no time, though again I know for a lot of gamers it’s not their cup of tea versus the free OBS. It’s not all doom and gloom though, you can have the whole lot removed in under 5 minutes should you wish, though in my opinion trials of software should never make it to being on there in the first place.

Under normal web browsing / desktop conditions the GS60 is whisper quiet, occasionally the fans will spin up slightly then down again. It is only when gaming when the combined CPU and GPU thermals start that you get a noticeable amount of noise. The fans themselves aren’t actually too noisy, considering there is a mid to high-end graphics card in there you’d expect them to be a lot louder. With regards to thermals it does get fairly warm, almost to the point of being classed as hot though not quite. We performed all our benchmarks with the laptop on a completely flat surface, and it seemed like if the feet were literally a millimetre or 2 larger we would have room for much better air circulation underneath. Still, thanks to there being a large amount of ventilation around the back this isn’t much to be concerned about. I was able to sit and play Bioshock Infinite for over an hour with the GS60 on my lap at our benchmark configuration without feeling uncomfortable, though it had warmed my jeans. As a boot-note we should mention we experienced no throttling due to thermals, which was nice.

What we have here is a deceivingly powerful system which is stylish in design and yet modest in dimensions.

Pros