Kicking off this thread to split it from the big new models release announcement thread.
Hi all,
Received my GE40 bright and early Saturday morning, but due to a family visit didn't get a chance to really play until yesterday!
Heres the lowdown:-
Build quality:- Overall very good - only the wrist rest and lid top are aluminium, the rest is black plastic. The gloss screen bezel is a bit distracting, but not the end of the world.
Keyboard:- Firm base and nice springy chicklet keys - felt good on my hand while gaming and typing. Slight annoyance that the far right of the keyboard has Home, End, PGup/Down etc - the Home key specifically is very annoying, as I regularly hit it while aiming for backspace. Other than that, no issues. No backlighting as reported.
Screen:-
PRO's: Resolution is perfect for this size of laptop. Anything higher and your going to struggle to make out text and icons at a reasonable sitting distance (and I have very good eyesight). Matte screen does a good job of reducing reflections, and response times on games are excellent, with no dicernable ghosting or input lag.
CON's: Matte effect is quite grainy at first. I strongly suggest a wipe over with a damp microfibre cloth followed by drying off with a soft dry one - this greatly reduced the out of the box "grainy" effect on my panel without impacting its anti-reflection properties. Viewing angles not great - There is certainly a sweet spot to be had between brightness and colour, but only for one person sitting directly in front of it (fine with me, but others may feel otherwise).
Temps/Cooling:-
Under gaming stress (not furmark) - the GPU ranged from 72C (Skyrim extended play) up to 80C (MechWarrior Online). CPU went as high as 88C.The CPU is located roughly in the middle of the keyboard, but the GPU sits underneath the wrist rest, making it warm when your hand is sitting there. In contrast, the right hand side of the machine remains at room temperature... why gaming laptop vendors cant locate their GPU's and CPU's on the off-side of the laptop away from your WASD hand I shall never know.
The laptop is cooled by a single fan that draws in from underneath near the GPU and exhausts to the left hand side of the laptop. This area exhausts a constant stream of hot air. While the fan does get going when gaming, its not so loud as to be a problem if your wearing a headset, and certainly isn't going to be an issue for anything at a LAN party for instance. Be careful not to block the intake, or your gonna have a bad time...
I haven't had a look at the thermal paste etc yet - but I don't imagine changing it would be an issue, as the whole heatpipe arrangement seems to screw off in one go from under the (warranty sticker protected... sigh) backplate.
Performance:-
DISK: The unit shipped with a Sandisk 128gb mSATA SSD. A quick crystal disk mark sat Sequential 1MB's at 480 / 290 - not world beating but nippy. 4k + QD32 was similarly fast in write speed, which was nice.The mSATA drives do indeed live in a ODD slot caddy - I haven't yet worked out how to open this, and didn't want to just yank it out, so I haven't fitted my extra 256gb drive yet! The 2.5" is easily accessible internally though.
CPU: See any other 4702MQ review for details - CPU-z showed that the cooling solution could cope well, and that it wasn't capping the turbo during gaming. Not much more to say there.
GPU: The GTX 760m is a real star - Bear in mind that the best drivers I could get that fully supported it where the 311.70's OEM's from MSI's site (via a link on laptopvideo2go) - there don't appear to be formal 320 series drivers that support the mobile GTX7xx series yet. The laptop shipped with 311.42 or something preinstalled. The chip clocked up to its peak turbo of 812mhz constantly during gaming, even for extended runs in Skyrim, Borderlands2 and MWO that I tried and didn't throttle. Seems like a perfect match for the 1600x900 and 4702MQ they've put in this 14" laptop.
Non-gaming: Many of you seem interested in this - I clocked 4.3 hours before the 6% critical battery warning messing about on the web on Wifi at full screen brightness using the Intel GPU. The unit doesn't feel like a gaming laptop in this mode - its pretty damn quiet (low fan noise), very cool to the touch, and performs great. I could definitely live with carrying this around if I still took classes - not as quiet or light as an ultrabook perhaps, but you can actually do some proper gaming on it as well... which brings us nicely on to -
Gaming FPS: The interesting bit. I use a registered version of fraps to monitor how games were running.
Skyrim:- Native res, High defaults, AA and AF to 0, FXAA disabled: 60-80fps, no discernible slowdown, GPU capped at 72C during extended playtime. Game is butter smooth even in heavy combat/particle effects. Got some 60FPS microstuttering when enabling AA and AF (as per the Geforce control tool recommendation) - could be a driver issue as only happened when I panned the mouse about. Disabling AA/AF fixed this.
MechWarrior Onling:- Native res, Medium defaults, Post processing off. 35-50 FPS, no discernible slowdown, GPU capped at 80C during extended playtime. Game runs great, and is known for being poorly optimised atm. Nothing else to report.
Borderlands 2:- Native res, High everything except PhysX (Low), AA off, framerate uncapped. Average of 50-80 FPS depending on what was going on - didn't dip below 40 at any point - great fun and much more fluid and playable than at 1920x1080 on the GTX 660M in my old laptop.
Company of Heroes 2 Open Beta:- Native res, everything High, AA off. Average 65 FPS, dropped a bit to high 30's during big artillery fights - otherwise fantastic.
Overall gaming rating:- Frickin' awesome. Took everything I flung at it and performed better than I'd been expecting. I'm surprised that there is no sign of thermal or power throttling during my tests for a unit so small and light. Highly recommended.
Other Stuff:-
Bundled with a massive pile of bloatware pish that took 15 minutes to clear out. Highlights included Norton internet security, winzip etc. Also ships with a restore partition (on the hard disk rather than the SSD thankfully) and a tool to burn a restore disk (not sure if this works to a USB pen drive or just a CD...). The MSI software stack has some nice features - plugging in an external mouse automatically disables the trackpad for instance, and the FN+hotkeys are all sensibly placed and what you would expect. Webcam is a run of the mill unit that will be fine for Skype.
Audio is a Realtek HD audio chip, not the soundblaster I was expecting from the spec - the machine comes with some sort of SoundBlaster booster software however. A bit naughty to advertise it as SoundBlaster (implying creative) audio though imo.
Network is Realtek + some weird Wifi card. No issues.
BIOS settings - practically non-existent. Disk settings (AHCI, RAID, SATA) but nothing for the CPU, devices, memory etc etc. Will need a modified BIOS before we can try anything interesting on it really.
Next steps - I'm going to open her up, take a look at the thermal paste to make sure its up to scratch, add my faster 256gb mSATA SSD and do a clean Windows 7 install on there (drivers permitting - failing that I'll do a clean Windows 8).
I'll definitely be picking up a small laptop riser/cooler for extended play - both the bring the small machine up to a more friendly eye level and to help keep it nice and ventilated. Some kind of USB gaming keypad might also be in order, as while the heat around the WASD area (where the heatsink and fan are) is certainly better than my last alienware, it still annoys me a bit!
Hope this brief handson writeup helps some of you!
#Wonderdog
The Official MSI GE40-2OC Owner's Lounge
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