MSI GT60-2OK 3K Mobile Workstation Review
Chris Hadley / 11 years ago
Final Thoughts
Pricing
With this system here being an engineering sample, stating a price is not so easy and the specification that is seen is not necessarily going to be the same as the systems that can be brought from various vendors. Instead of displaying a chart with comparable prices, I am going to list the different SKUs that are available in each region with their individual price tags.
United States:
GT60 2OKWS-278US : GT60 2OKWS-278US Intel Core i7 4700MQ (2.40GHz) 16GB Memory 1TB HDD 128GB SSD 15.6″ – $2699.99
GT60 2OJ-097US : GT60 2OJ-097US Intel Core i7 4700MQ (2.40GHz) 8GB Memory 750GB HDD 15.6″ – $1919.99
GT60 2OJ-097US : i7-4800MQ, Quadro K2100m 2GB, 8GB, 1920×1080, 750GB HDD 15.6″ – $2044.99
United Kingdom:
GT60-2OKWS-422 : i7-4800MQ, 15.6″ 3k Panel, 128GB SSD + 1TB, 16GB DDR3 , NVIDIA K3100M Quadro 4GB – £2399.00 (inc VAT)
GT60-2OJWS-420 : i7-4800MQ 15.6″ 1TB 8GB DDR3 K2100M Quadro 2GB DDR5 – £1498.80 (inc VAT)
GT70-2OLWS-882 : i7-4800MQ 17.3″ FHD256GB SSD+ 1TB 16GB DDR3 K4100M Quadro 4GB DDR5 – £3198.00 (inc VAT)
France
GT60 2OJWS-291 : i7-4800MQ 15.6 ” 1TB HDD 8GB RAM Quadro K2100M 2GB 1920 x 1080 – €1781.25
Overview
When we tear this system apart and look at what gives a workstation system its title as opposed to a gaming series notebook, the difference may only be subtle, but it has one major impact on the market that it will go into. With the system stripped of its graphics card, the GT60 workstation series notebook is almost the same as the gaming series equivalent. Both units pack Killer LAN, both offer Full HD 1920 x 1080 and 3K 2880 x 1620 IPS panels, both have the same chassis so on and so forth. The reason why we don’t see gamers running for this system is purely down to the way it handles DirectX workloads; which is exactly what games are built on. Back in the early days of graphics cards, OpenGL and Direct3D as it then was, were equally matched, but as time has moved on, OpenGL has become the go-to place for image rendering and the development of 3D workloads along with being a required specification for AutoCAD workloads.
By taking an award-winning design and retuning its specification for the business market with a Quadro based graphics card, MSI have brought the same essence of high performance and quality that we expect to see, especially with the SuperRAID 2 mSATA storage array, high performance cooling for both the CPU / GPU and the option of a glorious 3K IPS panel. Sticking on topic with the 3K panel, truth be told I was a little dubious to start off with about having such a high pixel density presented for me and it being somewhat usable due to everything being so small. I will be honest and say that it does take a little bit of getting used to and you may find yourself moving closer to the screen whilst your eyes adjust to everything being much smaller, but if you decide to opt for the 3K panel, then you won’t be disappointed. I’ve seen some impressive displays in the past, but this particular panel is verging on perfect in terms of brightness, colour reproduction, smoothness and contrast. Switching constantly between this screen and the 15.6″ LED panel that resides upon my XPS laptop, you soon start to realise just how major the difference is.
Looking across the vast range of performance figures that I have collected, it is clear that this system is not going to work if you intend to play games, hence the reason why I went out to prove this with a set of benchmark results. Alternatively, the performance across the rest of the system and especially within the tests that can take advantage of the OpenGL platform is very good and in some respects performs very well against a full-blown desktop with up with dual socket Xeon’s as I looked at a couple of years back.
Taking into account that the system we’ve seen here is only and engineering sample and therefore possibly with a combination of components that may not appear in a retail lineup, I can only but say once again that the performance figures here should be used as a rough comparison as not one of the retail systems that I’ve listed above come with the full body of components as seen within this review. With the markets still taking their time to adjust to the ways of modern computing, mobile workstations like this have a strong chance of being more common, but the relative cost factor at the moment in time is in some respects monumental. With the GT60-2Ok coming in as a business class model with the essence of the Gaming series notebooks, there is the potential there for a strong response from the market, with a number units being sold. This is a timely factor and at this moment, even though this is a very high spec system with a high level of performance, the desktop equivalents hove more than a slight margin in terms of performance for the price
Pros
- Rapid SSD array with over 1.5GB/s read speed on tap
- Optional QXHD+ 3K IPS Panel
- Up to 32GB of ram to support even the biggest workloads
- Up to 1TB of secondary storage
Cons
- Not the lightest or slimmest option on the market
- Heavy price tag for a system with top-level specifications right through
“After a slight retune to turn the GT60 series of notebooks into a professional workstation powerhouse, MSI have targeted the business sector of the market with a high performance system that is crammed into the confinement of a notebook, but even though there is the option of a 3K IPS panel, the cost factor may be too much to swallow for some given the performance margin that is on offer.”
MSI GT60-2OK 3K Mobile Workstation
Thanks to MSI for providing this review sample.
