MSI GS63VR Stealth Pro Owner's Lounge

Some of MSI's software gives you a notification that a new version is available but I only had that happen to me with the SteelSeries. As for drivers and firmware I haven't seen something from MSI.

I could be wrong since I've only had the laptop for a few weeks.

 

I just got a GS63VR-6RF-Stealth Pro-422US from frys electronics. With promo code and $150.00 rebate it came to $999.00. The specs are in the attached file. For people concerned about the display it is an LGD 0533.

 

Nope. The one I have now has a toshiba m.2. I can get the exact model if you would like.

I have had 3 of these so far and not a single one has had identical hardware though. 2 have had this toshiba. I honestly don't remember what was in the first other than it was not a toshiba.

The hard drives have been an hgst in the first one and seagate barracudas in the other two.

The memory has been cheap poem manufacturers in all three.

If you do not own this laptop already in would highly advise you to look at your options. If you do end up buying this model purchase a warrantee along with it. You will need it. Also if upgrading the m.2 yourself the entire motherboard gets removed. If upgrading to an nvme it compounds on the already poor thermals of this laptop.

 

That is correct...They don't advertise the brand or model because they don't always use the same ones, and don't want to be locked in to any particular brand.

Did you buy yours stock with no upgrades, like memory, or upgraded Thermal Compound? No dealer Q.C. testing?

Where did you buy it?

 

I bought mine of best buy...upgraded lcd and SSD and HDD myself im using and NVME drive and i have had it since december of last year and i havent changed the thermal compound, ans so far temps have been fine on, cpu,gpu and ssd, when at home i use a coolermaster coolingpad when using it in my lap, when i use it on the go i just use a bit more aggressive fan profile when gaming, so far laptop has worked great after a few settings with drivers and etc..

 

Can anyone explain to me what this, specified below, bios option on the MSI GS63VR is intended for?
"Thunderbolt Firmware Upgrade"

Looks like the default is "disabled". What does this really do, who/what is will be upgrading the Thunderbolt Firmware?

Thanks.

 

I noticed this option too when I was doing a fresh install of windows. Sorry but I don't know what this does either.

 

This is used when new firmware is available for TB3 and by default the option is disabled to avoid flashing to TB3's firmware. If the firmware update is available then the option needs to be enabled to allow firmware update.

 

Hi, can anyone confirm, that the thickness of thermal pads is 0.5mm? I am considering to order Alphacool Eisschicht 14W/mK and the price difference is almost 2x for 1mm version.
As i understand, the pads in laptop are pretty thin and the Alphacool ones are not very flexible so squeezing 1mm to 0.5mm won't go.

 

Use 0.5mm as it does the job.

 

Is anyone else experiencing issues outputting 1440p 144hz on this system? cant for the love of myself find out whats wrong.
Displayport cable, settings are set to 144hz. monitor is showing both in its own menu and in nvidia control center that it is outputting 144hz.

a simple ufo test however is locked at 60 fps....

 

I'm really thinking about picking up one of these as a replacement to my 9560 and I'm curious what kind of battery life you guys are getting with tweaks. I would love to be able to get 5 hours or so out of it.

 

Would love to know this and if you guys that have unclocked and repasted and still being thermal throttled.

 

NVIDIA WhisperMode Tested - Quieter Gaming for Notebooks
MSI GS63VR Max-Q 1070 vs. Asus GX501 Max-Q 1080

 

Sadly I guess this forum isn't very busy. I bought a gs63vr to give it a shot.

 

How is it? Do you have any questions in regard to the unit itself?

 

I haven't received it yet, but will post my thoughts here. No questions about the unit itself, but I appreciate the response.

 

A little update to my adventure after the first couple of hours of ownership of my GS63VR vs my XPS 9560

Pros of the GS63VR
Awesome keyboard- I like my 9560 keyboard but it's not near as nice to type on as the steel series
A number pad!
GTX 1060!
It looks cool, although it's a little flashy
Ability to control fans

Cons when compared to the 9560
The 6700HQ runs much hotter than my 7300HQ even with hyper threading turned off and it undervolted (not a totally fair compairison since I did repaste the XPS with liquid metal) - 68C on the XPS after 15 mins of prime95 vs 82C on the GS63VR with a -160mv undervolt and HT turned off
The CPU fan is way more annoying than on the XPS
No ability to charge it with USB-C - wtf MSI
Battery life - no real run through yet, just basic use it seems to be a couple hours behind the XPS
Have to take out the motherboard to change the M.2 SSD or ram
It's bigger than the XPS and not as portable - I could deal with it for the 1060 though

Overall I'm leaning on sending the MSI back - if anything for the annoying fan noise as most of that I could totally deal with. I still have to actually run some games on it and see what the 1060 can do.

 

is it normal for these GS63VRs to have such an annoying high-pitched fan noise? I don't know how anyone can stand it. I really like the machine but the fan noise is terrible.

 

Hi Everyone,

I'm new here, but thought I would bounce an issue that I've been having for almost 7 months now. Tried contacting support at MSI but haven't had much luck with them.

I have a GS63VR 6RF Stealth Pro bought from Best Buy last November. Laptop worked great until probably February. Then, the NVIDIA Driver started to crash constantly to where almost everything runs on the Intel driver. In talking to MSI, they said that I need to use the NVIDIA graphics driver from the MSI website (version 369.02 - released 8/19/2016). This worked for a while but the computer kept automatically updating to the newest version of the driver, which leads to the driver crashing. I would then reinstall the old driver, and it would work again for a while, but now I cannot get any games to work at all. I can hear the sound of the games, but the screen remains black. I updated the computer BIOS, but not really sure what to do at this point. I'm not a computer expert by any means but would appreciate any thoughts that any of you might have.

Should I really be using the old driver? Doesn't this impact the ability to run newer games? If I update to the new NVIDIA driver, do you have any recommendations on things I can try so that the driver doesn't stop working. About ready to throw this laptop in the trash.

Thanks in advance for your help.

 

I do not have any issues running the newest nvidia drivers. Now bear in mind this is a fresh windows install so it may be different. I would recommend running the display driver uninstaller (DDU) and completely removing your old nvidia AND intel display drivers and then doing a fresh install of each directly from their websites.

 

Thanks for your help. I decided to do a fresh windows install tonight since you mentioned that and for the first time in a long time everything seems to be working correctly. Hopefully this will continue!

 

What kind of battery life are you getting out of it?

 

I haven't played with it a ton since all of my school stuff is on my XPS. I did run PCMark 8 battery life on it and doing home "tasks" it got a good 4.5 hours when I enabled ECO mode. For comparison my XPS with the 56Whr battery gets 4.25 hours, but it scores higher due to the less stringent power saving settings. If this fan noise wasn't unbearable I would totally keep the MSI. Still trying to figure out what to do with it.

 

That's better than I thought it would get. Can you post of a quick vid on the fan noise? Is it just loud or a bad pitch?

 

Yeah I can when I get done at the hospital tonight. It's loud which isn't bad, but the high pitch is terrible...

 

Here is a short and crappy video of the fan noise:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0ByAHxCrW_caRRDdFaFFpQm4zS3c

 

Almost sounds like there is some stuff in the fan...have you tried cleaning it?

 

I hadn't considered cleaning it, it's a brand new unit. I suppose it could be a bad/off balance fan, but from what I've read they are all like that...

 

Give it look, you might be able to solve the issue easily. They aren't all like that.

 

Just took the bottom cover off and nothing is stuck in the fan or anything. It's either a bad fan or the norm, lol. Either way I guess it's going back, sad because I do like the laptop.

 

Well sadly the MSI GS63VR is going back because of the fan noise. It may be just a bad/off balance fan, but I don't think I want to deal with it. The laptop is really nice over all but the build quality is not as good as the XPS.
One thing that I am sad about:

 

Why not have your vendor, or MSI, just fix the fan issues and keep those great scores??

 

Because I don't want to miss my return window while I'm waiting for a new laptop to be fixed. I may re-order one or something else.

 

You know you can fix the fan yourself, right?
Get some Deoxit D5 or Shin-Etsu G-30M or G-40M (this stuff is available on Amazon for extremely cheap).





One of these two should do the trick.
Don't forget Shin-Etsu G-30M or G-40M also though!

 

I've repaired laptops for the past 15 years but sadly I'm not about to repair a new laptop that should have been worked out of the box. I will chat with the distributor to see what they are willing to do for me. Maybe if they cross ship I'll do that.

 

Just trying to minimize downtime and shipping costs.

 

Yeah I totally appreciate the advice. I don't have to pay for shipping thankfully, I wasn't thinking about cross shipping only because I had read so many stories about these fans being far too loud. If it's not the norm then I may just see if they can ship me a different one.

 

How loud is the noise like?

 

Sadly I don't have a dB meter but it's loud enough to hear it over my desktop and server in the same room as well as the central AC unit running across the basement. It pretty much ruined any chance of me keeping it regardless of how much I like it. I posted a video but it's terrible quality:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0ByAHxCrW_caRRDdFaFFpQm4zS3c

 

Were you running any tasks that might had been intensive? If not then can you verify your current BIOS & EC version?

 

It was while running prime95 to test an undervolt. I had updated the bios and EC version after doing a fresh windows install. The fan noise wasn't too bad until it gets to 5000rpm. I was pretty disappointed in the CPU temps running prime95 as well, undervolted and HT was turned off and the CPU still hit 80C with the fan running full speed. My dell xps has no issues running prime95 at 62C but that is after a repaste and some additional mods.

 

Due to form factor of GS63VR its thermal capacity is limited, and that's why the fan has to work harder to dissipate heat. Not sure if you had reviewed other slim gaming systems previously but this is actually quite common among similar products.

 

80c with an undervolt running prime95 on a thin and light laptop is amazing, and you don't need to run 5000rpm fan speed, let it slow down to 2000-3000rpm, or where ever it settles on "auto".

You are expecting too much, and passing up a nice laptop for a dream that doesn't exist.

Try gaming for an extended session with hwinfo64 logging and see where the temps are on "auto" fans and "balanced" power plan.

 

I mean if my XPS 9560 which is thinner with much less fan noise can keep the 7300hq cool, I would expect the same from the GS63VR. The XPS can cheat a little because it shares the GPU and CPU heatsinks, but the fans are much smaller. Regardless of the temps, the fan noise was just crazy, I wish my cell phone recording did it justice.

Auto is what I had it on and it "settled" at 5180RPM or so to keep it at 80C. The fan noise is terrible when running real bench, so much so that there is no way I could ever game on it without using headphones and being isolated from any person around me. Although my XPS is much slower in games because of the 1050, I could game in a library compared to the GS63VR. Anyway the GS63VR is boxed up and ready to go back tomorrow so the gaming session will never happen. I at least benched it first, lol.

 

What about gaming, what was the fan rpm / noise like then? You keep mentioning benchmarks that put the laptop through a much higher load than it will see while gaming, especially with G-sync limiting frame rate to the refresh of the display.

prime95 / Asus Real Bench has a much greater load on the CPU compared to what most games ask - it's more like a professional work load than a consumer gaming mode, it's likely that you picked the wrong benchmarks to do the final judgment of the GS63VR.

Lots of people are happy with the GS63VR, what else is it that makes you want to send it back? Do you have your eye on another laptop already?

 

The 7300hq is really a 35w CPU in an XPS 9560, it's meant to be vendor down TDP from 45w to 35w, and in thin notebooks that's how it's configured.

It's a sad comparison to a full quad core CPU with hyperthreading like the 7700HQ at a full 45w:
http://ark.intel.com/compare/97185,97456

The 7300HQ is 4 core without hyperthreading, 35w part, much less performance as well.

You are passing up a much stronger laptop in both CPU and GPU, if you don't learn how to tune the fans with custom settings before sending it back, you'll regret it later

 

They give a good indication of how loud the laptop may be. You say they are unrealistic which may be true for games, but it's an apples to apples comparison. The dell doesn't have the deafening sound of the MSI and it runs cooler.

The i7 with hyperthreading turned off and undervolted is roughly the same TDP. The VID to each CPU is also roughly the same as is the estimated TDP. They have the exact same all core turbo as well, and performance is probably better with the 7300HQ vs the 6700HQ with hyperthreading turned off. 20C is a huge difference to me. I realize I could tune down the fan and run the CPU in the 90s, but that's just not my style. I prefer things to run as cool as they possibly can.

I don't think I'll regret returning it, I will appreciate having my hearing when I'm older...

 

Actual gaming is the best indicator on how it will game, not synthetic benchmarks - we use those as a constant to tune against, not a end all to judge a laptop gaming performance.

If it's in the low 80's undervolted with full fan on, it'll still be in the mid-80's - well under 90c with the fan reduced a bit - for less noise.

I am a fan of low fan noise myself, and use tuning skills to reduce the load so the fans can run less feverishly while still getting good temps and gaming response.

You are just fooling yourself if you think detuning the 7700HQ to match the 7300HQ is a "thing", it's not

The 7700HQ is a "low" performance quad core cpu against the gaming unlocked CPU's, but it is way above the performance of the 7300HQ.

The 7300HQ might even be CPU blocking the 1050ti, and certainly wouldn't be a good choice for the 1060.

If you want to give it a try, tune the fans and game on it to see how it really runs. You'll never know if you don't try now before you send it back. You probably have most of the 2 weeks acceptance period left, you might as well use it.

 

The Dell with the 35w CPU and 1050 likely doesn't have the fan power that the GS63 needs for the full 45w CPU + 1060, so that's not a fair comparison is it?

If it's deafening then you likely have the laptop rear up against a wall or corner, you can reduce the reflected noise putting the rear of the laptop out into free space.

That little laptop hardly compete's noise-wise against the Clevo P870, listen at 02:20 and 06:50

Now, that's loud, notice how it's jammed right up against a wall, reflecting all the sound back at the user seating position.