MSI GE72 7RE-074AU Apache Pro
You know what they say about laptops with big screens...
The cumbersome nature of 17-inch gaming laptops has always elicited a somewhat ambivalent response from us here at APC, and although we’re impressed by the MSI GE72 7RE’s better-than-average 2.7kg weight, this unit still suffers from the same bulky physique as most of its brethren.
The GE72 7RE has an identical streaky blackmetal finish as its smaller sibling the GE62 7RE (opposite). It also seems to share the same fans and vent layout, which does a similar job of keeping the GPU cool, but could perhaps manage the Core i7 CPU’s uncomfortably-hot 96ºC peaks better.
Don’t be fooled by these similarities, though. A new seventh-gen Intel Core i7-7700HQ CPU — reported to be 8% faster than last year’s top-of-the-line laptop CPU — sits at the centre of the GE72. The new 2.8– 3.8GHz chip isn’t the only debut packed into this unit; this is the first laptop we’ve tested with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti. Add to this a 16GB stack of DDR4 RAM, a 128GB SATA 6Gbps SSD and a 1TB Hitachi HDD and you’ve got a wellrounded gaming laptop.
A Core i7-7700HQ CPU and 16GB of RAM is a combo that’s naturally going to execute binary tasks expediently and since we’ve only tested one laptop CPU that outpaced the GE72 (the Intel Core i7-6920HQ from MSI’s $7,000 GT83VR), this laptop clearly stands up to expectations. Nailing a multithreaded CPU score of 735 and a single-core score of 144 in Cinebench R15’s CPU benchmarks, compared to the i7-6700HQ weilding MSI GS43 6RE’s respective scores of 674 and 123, supports the claim that these chips are 8% faster faster than their predecessors. Although there is the option for a PCIe SSD, the 128GB Toshiba SSD on the unit we tested uses the notably slower SATA 6Gbps interface and so only hit sequential (Q32T1) read and write speeds of 553MB/s and 265MB/s.
When comparing the overall framerates churned out by this laptop’s 4GB GTX 1050 Ti to other laptop GPUs, its performance was closer to the scores of a 1060 (with 2GB VRAM) than it was to the GE62’s 4GB 1050 on many of the game titles we tested.
The longer-term applicability of these real-world scores should probably not be taken for granted, however, since you see a big distinction in results from 3DMark’s Fire Strike Extreme benchmark that pegs the GE62 7RE (GTX 1050) at the bottom with 2,611, with the GE72 7RE (GTX 1050 Ti) hitting the board in the middle with a score of 3,620 and Gigabyte’s Aero 14 (GTX 1060) shaming both of them with a lofty 5,223.
We wouldn’t recommend counting on this unit to last very long while not plugged in since the 51Wh Lithiumion battery only manages to stretch to 2 hours and 6 minutes in PCMark 8’s Home Accelerated battery life test, with the computer in a balanced power profile.
The low 5ms-latency 1080p screen is definitely one of the highlights of the GE72 7RE, so we’re willing to curb our criticism of the device’s overall size, since it’s inexorably part of a package that many will want. At $2,199, you’re getting an excellent raft of often high-end components that won’t disappoint, and there are enough additional upgrades over the similar GE62 7RE to justify the extra 10% outlay.