MSI GT73VR Titan GTX 1070 SLI Gaming Laptop Review

A Closer Look

The first thing that stands out about the Titan is the size, this isn’t the kind of laptop you’re going to want to carry around all day long, that’s for sure. It’s big, it’s pretty damn heavy, and it’s more suited to those who need to take it home at the end of the day, or keep it in the boot of their car rather than providing true mobility.

The design looks great, and while it is quite thick, that depth means lots of room for cooling. There’s a large vent on each side, and plenty more around the back and on the base to keep the high-end hardware housed within nice and cool. Down the right side, you’ll also find 2 x USB 3.0 ports, as well as a built-in SD Card reader.

Down the left side, there are 3 x USB 3.0 ports and four gold-plated audio jacks.

The front edge is kept nice and tidy, with just a few small LED indicators sitting in the middle.

Around the back, an RJ45 port, DP Mini, USB Type C, HDMI (out) and the heavy duty connector for the power cables.

There are two huge vents around the back, which look like the vents on a supercar.

The fins on the back are angled in a way that should help push the air away from the system, rather than have it cycle back into the bottom air intakes and overheat the system.

The size of the Titan brings some nice benefits to productivity, as it’s able to feature a full-size Steelseries keyboard, it’s not mechanical, but it does have a very natural key spacing and great feedback; plus it’s RGB, which is a nice bonus.

The housing has a beautiful brushed metal appearance, quite a durable and quality feel to it; the chassis doesn’t flex when you rest your palms on it.

Most of the primary functions of the keyboard are accessible with FN-Shift, allowing you to tweak the LED brightness and volume levels on-the-fly.

You can toggle system profiles and performance features from the F-keys too, meaning you’ll spend less time tinkering with the desktop software, and more time gaming or working.

The touchpad for the mouse is quite large too, with dedicated left and right buttons for added control.

Should you need it, you’ll also find a built-in HD webcam and microphones at the top of the display; handy for Skype!

Finally, done the right side, a few dedicated shortcut buttons, as well as the master power button.

Fire up the system, and you can see that lovely LED lighting on the keyboard, as well as a little trim around the mousepad, giving it a very nice glow that’s easy to see in a dim room. The display is stunning, with deep blacks and very vibrant colours, and so it should be with 100% of the Adobe scale being covered by the 4K panel.

The base of the Titan has a huge amount of ventilation, with air intakes for all the major components, as well as four large rubber feet to give it the ground clearance it needs to take air in too.

On the front left and right corners, two speakers are mounted, and there’s a built-in subwoofer too; where you see the DynAudio badge.

There’s some serious hardware in this laptop, and that means there are some equally serious cooling requirements. As you can see, there are heat pipes running all over the place, from the two graphics cards (front left and back right), the processor (back left), and there’s even some passive heat fins fitted over the HDD array near front centre. Everything is piped through to the two massive blowers in the back corners to exhaust through the large rear vents.

Under this block, you’ll find the dual M.2 SSDs.

A close up of one of the GPU blocks, which an additional heat pipe breaking off to cool surrounding hardware on the motherboard.

Another three heat pipes for each block on the CPU and the other graphics card, which two more providing additional cooling to other motherboard components such as the VRM and memory.

Tucked in near this cooler, you can also see a wireless M.2 card.

The battery is quite small, but even with a big battery, the hope of running this kind of hardware for very long would be crazy, although it’s estimated you could get around 90 minutes of day-to-day use with this, and drastically less if you’re gaming.