MSI GT80 GTX 980M 8GB SLI Titan Laptop Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

First off, we know that £3,499.99 isn’t cheap. Pricing something like this is fairly difficult, as obviously this commands a price tag of several decent non-gaming laptops combined. There is the saying that you get what you pay for and when you consider that every component used here is top drawer, it’s soon going to reflect in the price. Even things that people take for granted such as cheap chiclet keyboards have been thrown out the window in this scenario for the most premium upgrade possible. I can go onto other gaming notebook sites and create my own dream machine using the best bits available in a stock clevo chassis and it comes out roughly the same as this, without all of the extras that you get here. It will make your eyes water handing over that much cash no doubt, but there is absolutely no reason why this investment shouldn’t be playing games at full HD with ease for years to come.

Overview

Performance is the main element of this laptop and from the benchmarks, it pretty much sets the bar for others to follow. It blows every other laptop we’ve ever tested out of the water in terms of GPU performance, and CPU performance is best in class for a notebook processor. 4 x PCIE SSD’s in RAID 0 guarantees some of the fastest boot/load times you will have ever witnessed, perhaps even outperform even the fastest of desktop rigs you may have used. Obviously, there is the risk of RAID 0 (in that if any of the SSD’s fail, you lose all of the data across all of the drives), though if you are on a quest for every last drop of performance, this is the only way. To see read speeds of over 1.6GB/sec on a laptop is truly staggering and it has you smiling from ear to ear every time you load a large file/game.

Networking wise there is a Killer Double Shot Pro (GB LAN and A/C Wifi), which uses a rather nifty technology called smart teaming in order to combine LAN and Wireless connectivity to give the fastest connectivity possible.

Graphically speaking nothing comes close to 2 GTX 980m’s in SLI, especially in terms of mobile graphics and thanks to the huge amount of ventilation on offer they chug along nicely even under heavy load. As we have seen in previous reviews, a single 980m can deal with most games at 1080p, so as you can imagine 2 980’s have no problem at all. It’s almost a shame to see so much excess power not being utilised to its full potential with the resolution being the bottleneck here, though having said that it still looks superb. One thing to note is that although they support 4k, they do not support Nvidia G-Sync, which is a shame if you were planning on hooking this up to an external G-Sync panel.

Power consumption, as you would expect, is very high. I am pleased to report that even under prolonged load, the power brick remained warm and didn’t get anywhere near to being classed as hot. The laptop itself got fairly warm under prolonged load, but remained comfortable to use and didn’t seem to throttle either. The battery life was understandably short when running on dedicated graphics, only a bit over an hour when gaming in SLI, but wasn’t too bad when running on integrated only with Powermark reporting a running time of just shy of 2 and a quarter hours; why you would game in SLI on battery is beyond me, but there you go.

What MSI have released is a feat of engineering, for those who want the ultimate mobile gaming experience or those who simply cannot accommodate a desktop PC for whatever reason but still want the best, then this is it.  The price tag may be high, but this is the ultimate gaming package and you get what you pay for, one of the most powerful gaming laptops ever made to date, crammed with the highest end available; this system sets a new benchmark for other gaming notebooks to follow.

Pros

• One of the fastest, if not the fastest laptops money can buy
• Innovative hardware design
• Mechanical keyboard
• Dual use touchpad
• Highest spec componenst used

Cons

• 1080p screen
• No extended warranty options
• Very noisy when fans are ramped up

Neutral

• Very easy to open for upgrades, although this will sacrifice your warranty

“The MSI GT80 Titan is the ultimate gaming laptop for those demanding huge amounts of gaming power. No compromises are to be found anywhere on this system and if you can afford it, you’ll want this right at the top of your shopping list.”

Thanks to MSI for providing us with this sample.