MSI GT83VR
This pricey Titan earns its stripes in specs, but how does it perform in the real world?
We’d expect nothing less than a full desktop-grade Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 GPU for MSI’s mothership gaming laptop, but this unit actually has two of them, which can be used in unison through Nvidia’s Scalable Link Interface (SLI) tech.
The GT83VR has also been equipped with a quad-core, HyperThreaded Intel Core i7-6920HQ CPU, plus an astounding 64GB of DDR4 RAM. Add to this two NVMe M.2 SSDs in a striped RAID 0 config for 512GB of superspeedy storage, clocking in at the fast sequential read and write speeds of 3,114MB/s and 2,556MB/s, respectively. The caveat is that you need two enormous power bricks that have to cross streams in order to deliver the juice.
Interestingly, it also has a mechanical keyboard (with Cherry MX Brown switches) and a trackpad that doubles as a digital numpad.
The front edge is only fractionally bigger than you’d expect from a normal gaming laptop, at 4.2cm, but the chassis thickens out to 6.9cm as you get closer to the screen. All this adds up to a 5.5kg package that seems impressively lightweight for what it contains.
It’s a bit of an engineering feat to get two desktop GPUs to fit into a laptop chassis, but to keep them cool, you’ll either need an external water cooling system or enough fans to start a small wind farm. Since the GT83VR opted for the latter, you can hear it from over 5m away when the fans are running full tilt. Fortunately, they rarely actually hit top speed — even when gaming.
This comes at the cost of performance consistency, as the unit regularly failed 3DMark’s new consistency stress test, with scores around the 96% mark (to be fair, 97% is a pass). You can manually boost the fans to keep the GPU and CPU temperatures stable (and under 83ºC) which does rectify this, but you’ll need an impressive set of noisecancelling headphones to block out the whooshing noise this creates.
So how does SLI hold up on the go? As on desktop, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Many of the games in our test suite actually haven’t been optimised for SLI setups. This means that, despite wiping the floor with synthetic benchmarks like 3DMark — where it nabbed a mind-numbing score of 13,921 in the Fire Strike Extreme test — for lots of real-world games, that second GPU offers minimal speed improvements only (we saw an average of 7% across Batman: Arkham Knight, BioShock Infinite and Metro Last Light) and/or requires you to troubleshoot settings to get them to work.
In some instances, SLI reduced performance. As a case in point, running the demanding Far Cry Primal at 1080p Ultra settings netted 47 and 33, average and minimum frames rates when using a single GTX 1080 GPU. But that dropped to 40 and 24fps, respectively, when both GPUs were utilised. It’s hard not to feel that, despite being over a decade old, SLI is still not really ready for mainstream use.
One puzzling thing: considering you’re being asked to fork out $7,499 for a system that can reliably run intensive games when using 4K ultra settings, it seems bizzarre that a 4K screen was not included — but to be fair, this could be because 18.4-inch laptop displays don’t come in this resolution yet.