All the motivational posters in PC Labs say, "Press the Turbo Button." The MSI GT70 model 0NC-011US ($1,999.99 direct) laptop has a button for what the company calls its Turbo Drive Engine that purports to give extra graphics performance. We tried the button (which only works under AC, not battery, power) and found it gave anywhere from a 0 percent to 4 percent boost in gaming benchmark scores. We also found that, when it comes to discussing the MSI GT70's speed and engineering features, it ranks well down the list.Priced $600 below the MSI GT783-625US that copped an Editors' Choice for under-$3,000 gaming laptops less than two months ago, the GT70 flaunts one of Intel's brand-new, third-generation Core "Ivy Bridge" processors, the 2.3GHz Core i7-3610QM quad-core, along with 16GB of DDR3 memory and a particularly hardcore storage system: Its 750GB, 7,200-rpm hard drive is relegated to second-banana status behind a pair of 64GB SanDisk U100 solid-state drives, yoked together under RAID 0 for blazing speed. Add Nvidia GeForce GTX 670M graphics, a SteelSeries multicolor backlit keyboard, and a Qualcomm Atheros Killer E2200 Gigabit Ethernet adapter that promises to optimize gaming throughput at LAN parties, and you've got a ton of hardware for your two grand. Or 8.3 pounds of hardware, anyway.
Design
The MSI GT70 Best Deal: %displayPrice% at %seller% has a handsome, typically bulky (2.2 by 16.9 by 11.3 inches, HWD) black case with brushed aluminum lid and palm rest and plastic sides and bottom. A light-up MSI logo mid-lid serves to intimidate, or at least inform, your opponents.
The glossy plastic around the 17.3-inch screen is somewhat reflective, but the matte-finish display itself is not. It's a full HD (1,920 by 1,080) panel with vivid colors, jet blacks, and ample brightness. MSI ships the system with text and icons set to 125 percent size for squint-free viewing, but you can change them back to 100 percent via Windows' Control Panel.
The black tile- or chiclet-style keyboard offers a first-class, slightly clicky typing feel and full-sized numeric keypad, though we were disappointed that Home and End are doubled up on the PgUp and PgDn keys. There is no context-menu key, either; the Windows key is moved to its place, out of gamers' way. While there are no special gaming keys, the SteelSeries keyboard supports up to 10 simultaneous key actions as well as left, center, and right backlighting zones; a supplied utility lets you choose backlight colors or wavy or pulsating ("breathing") light effects. The touchpad and its twin mouse buttons work smoothly.
Touch-sensitive LEDs above the keyboard include the aforementioned Turbo Drive button; a Cooler Boost button that increases fan speed—causing cacophonous fan noise—when the action gets hot and heavy; keyboard backlight and Wi-Fi toggles; a screen blanker; and the eject button for the Blu-ray burner. Some of these, like the options in an S-Bar software utility/program launcher that hovers at the top of the screen, duplicate items on the function keys. Always looking to pare down bloatware, we turned off S-Bar, only to find the optical drive eject button stopped working and there's no physical button on the drive itself. At least right-clicking the drive and selecting Eject in Windows Explorer still worked.
Features
Next to the Blu-ray drive on the MSI's right side are two USB 2.0 ports, with three USB 3.0 ports plus a memory-card reader and four audio jacks—headphone, microphone, line-in, and line-out—on the laptop's left. At the rear are VGA, HDMI, eSATA, and Ethernet ports.
Windows 7 Home Premium and the GT70's software preload—a handful of utilities, Microsoft Office and Trend Micro Titanium Internet Security trials, and Magix photo, video, and music managers—leave 70GB of the RAID SSD drive C: available. A recovery partition leaves 687GB free of the D: hard drive. MSI backs the GT70 with a two-year limited warranty.
Intel Wireless Display (WiDi) is missing, but Bluetooth and 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi are present on the wireless front. Two Dynaudio speakers and a subwoofer crank out fairly loud, fairly bass-worthy sound.
Performance
MSI GT70 0NC-011US The MSI GT70 is a productivity and general performance benchmark monster. Its Core i7-3610QM processor powered the laptop to a Cinebench R11.5 score of 6.26, within hailing distance of the mighty and pricey Alienware M18x's 6.52, while its dual SSDs contributed to a sky-high PCMark 7 score of 4,375, topping even the 4,099 of its GT783-625US Best Deal: %displayPrice% at %seller% sibling.
