14 DAY TRIAL // If, for some reason, you thought gaming notebooks were bulky and awkward, we should show a little appreciation to MSI for proving us wrong countless times with its notebook offerings.
And after having announced the updated GS70 Stealth Pro and GS60 Ghost gaming laptops last week, MSI is making them available for purchase. Let’s take each at a time and give them some love, because they are truly impressive devices.
First off is the GS70 Stealth, which MSI calls the “world’s thinnest 17-inch gaming notebook” out there. The company has recently updated the laptop with NVIDIA’s latest GPU architecture, by slipping inside the new GeForce GTX 870M graphics cards (based on Kepler architecture) combined with 3GB of DDR5 VRAM.
MSI reveals that the 3D Mark 11 Performance test shows the new GPU is 35% faster than the previous GTX 770M card. Under the hood lies a 4th-generation Intel Core i7-4700HQ quad-core processor at 2.4GHz, which can be overclocked using Turbo Boost up to 3.4GHz.
The MSI GS70 Stealth will sell for the pretty chunky price of $1,899 / €1,375, but this is expected given MSI’s track record.
Moving on to the GS60 Ghost, this laptop has a smaller screen of 15.6-inch and has been fitted with NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 860 GPU. This particular laptop is pretty stunning as well, for a number of reasons.
For starters, it can be thought of as an Ultrabook, weighting only 1.99 kg / 4.4 pounds and being just 19.5 mm / 0.7 inches. For comparison's sake, Samsung’s latest ATIV Book 9 Style Ultrabook weighs around 1.95 kg / 4.3 pounds.
Another drawing point here is the 2880 x 1620 pixel resolution MSI calls 3K. There should also be the option of going for a little less, as MSI offers the full HD (1920 x 1080 pixel) option too.
There are two versions of the Ghost, one that sells for $1,699 / €1,230 that comes 750GB 7,200 rpm hard drive paired with a 128GB mSATA SSD, 12GB of RAM, 802.11 ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0.
The more expensive $1,799 / €1,303 model increases the size of the mechanical drive to 1TB and goes up to 16GB of RAM.