MSI GS73VR

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DarkStar02

2[H]4U
Joined
Mar 1, 2006
Messages
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I picked up an MSI GS73VR yesterday afternoon hoping to replace the desktop in my sig (i5 2500k @ 4ghz, 16gb ram, 970). My impressions so far:

  • Very thin and good looking. I initially hated the font they used on the keyboard but after disabling the stock rainbow colored keyboard backlighting it's a lot less noticeable.
  • The stickers they put all over the palm rest area are ridiculously difficult to get off. Every single one of them left a ton of thick glue residue that I had to scrub hard with rubbing alcohol and a terry cloth.
  • Ships with some bloatware, not bad though (Norton, some music recording program, Xsplit, etc). Easily uninstalled.
  • The speakers are pretty "tinny" considering how big the speaker area above the keyboard seems to be. Music, videos, whatever, the sound is hollow and has a very slight echo to it. I definitely wouldn't want these speakers to be my primary audio source. The speakers on the Samsung 48" 4k tv I have it hooked up to (JU7500) are infinitely better sounding for being built into a flatscreen tv.
  • Battery life is TERRIBLE so far. On the first charge I barely got 2 hours installing programs and syncing files from OneDrive, Dropbox, etc with the screen brightness set at 40%. When I used it last night in bed I had the brightness set to 0% and the estimator showed an estimated 1 hour 15 mins with 80% charge left. I didn't use it for more than 15 minutes though so I'm hoping the estimator has some calibrating to do or something and that was just a very, very wrong estimate.
  • The keyboard travel feels nice. I'm not used to having the right side 10 key on a laptop so I keep accidentally getting my finger placement wrong when typing and the trackpad is slightly to the left so I keep right clicking. This isn't a bad thing, just something I'll have to get used to.
  • The ability to choose your keyboard backlight color and set up macros for different games and programs is awesome. The SteelSeries program has a ton of customization options.
  • I haven't run benchmarks yet but it feels about on par with my desktop
  • There is a surprising amount of flex on the display and chassis. I think this might be intentional to prevent damage during travel but compared to my wife's macbook pro it doesn't feel as premium, probably due to the pl. Don't get me wrong-- this is still a premium feeling laptop but relative to the macbook pro or even the new Spectre x360 I played with when I picked it up, the plastic chassis leaves something to be desired.
Anyone got any questions or tests they want me to run?
 
Do you by any chance play World of Tanks? I had the MSI GT72S Dominator and ended up getting rid of it because that was one of the games I like to play when I have to travel and the Nahemic audio software would crash it dozens of times per hour. You couldn't remove the software because then the mic wouldn't work.
 
I also have a GT73VR (1070 version) and have also found that Nahemic audio is crap. Certain games would have horribly distorted audio or missing audio (Doom for example), or not run well. In all cases, exiting Nahemic fixed the issue.

On the plus side, it's an absolute beast. Running Prime95 blend with Furmark and the temps stay in the 70s for me with (subjective opinion) very little fan noise. The 120hz Gsync display is gorgeous for being a TN panel.

**note: reading comprehension fail, just realized the OP was for a GS73 not the GT. Sorry for the hijack OP!
 
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Liking it alot! I think the 120Hz G-sync 1080p TN panel is a great match for what the 1070 can do. On super demanding games like Witcher 3 I can still get 60-80fps and Gsync helps out, less demanding games like Doom and it's 115fps+ for twitchy gaming. I was between this and the Asus G752VS but I felt like you get alot more for the money with the MSI (my subjective opinion). The cooling performance of the thermal solution has really impressed me, both in it's ability to cool the 1070 and CPU down and for doing it (what I consider) quietly. Running Furmark and Prime85 for hours at time and the fans are not loud at all (subjective).

I can't really speak to the battery life, and honestly I don't think I'll ever really use the battery for more than a UPS. I bought this because I'm on the road 4-6 months out of the year, but I also have a Surface Pro 3 for work that I use for the more mobile/battery required stuff, surfing, checking email remotely, etc.

I did add a Samsung 950 Pro 512gb and a 850 Evo 1TB for game storage, slightly dispointed that you cannot choose the 950 Pro as the boot drive on the current firmware (unless I'm really not understanding how that works). It shows up in device manager/disk manager and you can see it in explorer, set up a Steam library on it etc, but it doesn't show up in the BIOS. I do have the Samsung NVME driver loaded in Windows (which doesn't do anything for the BIOS issue obviously). Transfer rates are higher than Samsung quotes though, so their implementation isn't all bad. I've read a few guides on how people have managed to boot off of a 950 on other MSI laptops, but I'm just about to deploy so I didn't want to mess with it.

Also bought a Everki Titan backpack which can supposedly fit something this large. When it gets here I'll let you know if it fits. I wasn't super impressed with the MSI backpack, but then again it was free.

How are you liking yours? What edition do you have?
 
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Erebus said:
I did add a Samsung 950 Pro 512gb and a 850 Evo 1TB for game storage, slightly dispointed that you cannot choose the 950 Pro as the boot drive on the current firmware (unless I'm really not understanding how that works). It shows up in device manager/disk manager and you can see it in explorer, set up a Steam library on it etc, but it doesn't show up in the BIOS.?
Click to expand...

You won't see it in the BIOS, you can most certainly install windows to it though. Most motherboards out there don't list m.2 PCI-E drives like SATA drives in the BIOS. I have seen a very few that will show up in the boot order after installing windows to it but most just show the windows boot manager.
 
Erebus said:
Thanks LigTasm, I'll give this a shot this weekend.
Click to expand...

Yeah give it a shot, I had my GT72S which was also skylake based booting from my 950 Pro within 30 minutes of having it out of the box.
 
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