The GPU seemed to have issues dealing with shadows slightly lower than expected than what you would see with a Gigabyte mobile unit. I ran Homeworld 2 perfectly on all setting high minus object shadow which it just wouldn’t run on high. You should be able to run current gen titles though as Nvidia recently sent out a patch to optimize mobile GPU’s. The Core i7-4700HQ is a 2.4GHz, Hyper-Threaded quad-core processor to me shined on it’s own when I threw in some video editing, rendering was a breeze with me editing a fully loaded 5 minute video in 1080p in less than 20 minutes on Premiere Pro. Blazingly fast on the drive side as well with its 237GB boot drive that’s formed by combining two 128GB SSDs in RAID 0. However all of this does come with issues, the GS60 will start to heat uncomfortably after 30 minutes, even if you’re not throwing much at it like browsing. It got uncomfortable to a point I couldn’t use it on my lap anymore and this is probably with the way the heat dissipates from the device at the back.
Table of Contents
Battery
Here’s why I gripe about gaming laptops, 52Wh, six-cell battery will all but be empty after a long gaming session within two hours before you run off to a power adaptor. The GPU even renders better based on battery mode or not to get the extra support. There’s not much to say really since this is a common issue with using mobile devices to power through the day, with the new GPU’s delivering better performance per power it will get better but this isn’t the case with the GS60 2PE.
Ergonomics and Software
With the success of the GT70, the MSI’s keyboard by SteelSeries is back again and it’s a joy to type on, not as much as a joy to look at. The backlighting is too dull and if you’re walking with a MSI, the first thing a gamer would do is flaunt the device and it will take a lot of punishment from intense gaming sessions. They even fit a number pad in there but it would have been better to maybe add gamer specific macros, the same kind you’d see in a razor blade. Another annoying thing was the positioning of the windows key on the right side which might mess up the flow for some people used to tapping on the windows key on the left and I kept hitting the function key as a habit. The steelseries keyboard is fully customizable with the keyboard program built in as expected giving you the ability to make it light up the way you want to.
The trackpad is bigger and has snap buttons on the bottom, but as a gamer you’re more likely to not use this at all and the pad mainly serves as navigational tool for the laptop. I’ll be honest, it can take some time to used to and it was disabled during my gaming sessions. I found that it didn’t work well either outside of the gaming spectrum since the gestures would read wrong and if you were to use two fingers for the keypad and trackpad it would lead to poor results.
Thankfully, the MSI doesn’t load up your device with a lot of bloatware, it is welcoming however if they ditch the social apps which just go to a broswer and open the homepage there.
