*The Offical MSI GX60 Owners Lounge*

And what about changing the brightness ? Does it wrk with this version?

Thanks anyway ^^ !

 

No. But Skyrim FPS goes up from 40 something to 60.

I got a questions for you guys and girls. What's your temp on HWMonitor? I am getting high 80s to high 90s for the CPU cores on the APU on idle, but the iGP is on high 30s and low 40s. The laptop also feels cool. I think it's a bug. Is it?

 

high 80s on idle is really bad....., it better be a bug on HWMonitor...most likely the case, unless you can feel the heat on the bottom of your laptop

 

The only warm area is on the opening of the exhaust. I am not surprised since that's where the heat sink is and it is touching the plastic lid. The plastic feels warm (like under your armpit). When I press the fan button, the air is cool. The iGP which is right next to the CPU cores is only 30-40. Also, HWMonitor detect my 7970m temp to have min of 0C and max of 255C, so that's obviously a bug. I am fairly confident (over 90%) that it is a bug. But am I the only person getting this bug? Just want to check.

 

Overclocking does not work with hotfix driver. I started a game so the light is orange (7970 is on) then go to MSI Afterburner and do some overclocking. But the AMD driver will stop working, restart several times before getting a BSOD.

 

I hesitate on wether i shouldinstall these drivers or not, the gain of fps makes me wanna install them, but the fact that the brightness can't be changed and is not even stuck on the maximum settings holds me from doing it.

How come ATI can't fix this bug since it's been here from the release of their 3 last 12.11 betas.......this is a pity.

 

@ LisuPoland : I have no doubt 'bout the gain of performances with the enduro you submitted, but i had them installed three weeks ago, an for example in Far Cry 3, I had serious lags when up on a radio tower looking down.
I reinstalled the drivers from MSI's website and the lags were gone.....strange since they're anterior.

 

Finally opened my GX60 today.

Things to note ..

Screen has a fair few fingerprints or some similar greasy thing on it. All factory clear plastic film is present so I assume I ant got a used one so this must be from assembly/boxing ?

There is a spot just underneath the product features and specs label near/on the edge/curve of the wrist rest that has a hollow "click/tap" to it when my hand brushes against it, my hand does brush against that part allot when using the trackpad so I could see this being kinda annoying.

Also I nearly installed the ATI drivers on the top of this page, saw the issue with brightness before I did so however. What would be the newest drivers I could install and not have brightness issue ?

 

Hi there gays and gals, new on the forum just buying a GX60 from Gentechpc (thanks to the comments of the forum) that will be deliver on the 31, i did some changes to the original configuration just trying to gain a little speed from other places what is lost in cpu power, i took the special christmas deal and went to 12 Gb`s of ram, further i place a 256GB Crucial M4 C400 Solid State Drive SATA III 6Gb/s like primary HDD and a 750GB 7200rpm 16MB SATA II 3Gb/s like secundary, will these changes improve the speed of the pc?, it will be deliver with Win 8, should i let it stay or install Win 7 Pro 64 ? have anyone notice a diference in speed working with one or the other?, the laptop will be primary use for playing BF3, COD 4 and browsing and emailing, thanks for your help and merry christmas to you all.

 

Welcome to the MSI forum.

The shortcomings of the CPU most likely can't be made up by upgrading other hardware.

IMO the best choice for a memory upgrade would be 2 x 8GB DDR3-1600 = 16GB

The 256GB Crucial SSD is certainly going to be better as the primary boot drive for quick bootups and small file reads and writes.In gaming it should help with load times.

SDDs vary greatly with the type of data being read and written to the disk.

They're performance will vary greatly as they get filled up.

If price is the main concern then a Crucial M4 or Samsung 830 are good choices.

If you can afford to spend more on the SSD then look at a Corsair Neutron GTX that does very well up to 75%~80% filled and does a great job with both compressible and incompressible data.

There should always be at least 10%~20% free space on an SSD.

I've used Windows 8 daily since the Preview was released on February 29th.A few days ago I went back to Windows 7 x64.

 

Just ordered mine from Amazon last night excited to start modding it! The A10 7970 combo gets my interest to see what I can do to make it faster.

 

Mine is not going to be here until next week.... waited for almost 2months..>.<

 

Could realy do with other GX60 owners checking this if they can as its rather distracting, If others do the same then Ill just assume its something inherent in the construction and try and ignore it. If my description above is not clear I will put a picture or something here later today to show where the noise is.

 

I did not notice any clicking on my casing, is there a noticeable gap anywhere along the edge?

 

Anyone know whether there'll be a 17" version of this? Since it features both a AMD CPU and AMD GPU, it'll be the single best laptop for gaming and OpenCL programming. but for the later task a bigger screen gives more comfort to my eyes.

 

Cant see anything visually amiss no. I have had a good look today and if look in the battery compartment at the holes where the tabs on the battery fits you can actually see the rear of the wrist rest. Thinking maybe the different sound is maybe that there is a hollow void behind the aluminium in that spot but not elseware ?

Speaking of sound and i forgot to mention this, as really its a more serious issue then above so ive not idea why it skipped my mind..

The system fan will not slow down from full wind tunnel mode from a cold boot, at all. I have to sleep the system then wake it to get the thing to calm down.. until the next cold boot and then its back to full again..

I have poor luck at the moment with tech purchases so this kinda weird stuff is really kinda expected at this point.. was hoping to avoid with the GX60 though.

 

I haven't noticed any clicking either on my laptop. Also I do notice that the buttons on top for the fan and everything are not that sensitive. You really have to push and hold your finger before it seems to kick in. However its not that bad either. With the turbo fan button it does take a few seconds to slow the fan down it seems to do it gradually instead of a sudden slow.

 

Im having a minor problem now. When i try to listen to music say in xbox music. The sound is fine out of the speakers but as soon as i minimize it to do something else it goes really quiet and i can't get the normal sound out of it anymore. Anyone else have this issue or no a solution to this problem?

Fixed the problem: Steam was causing the problem for some reason. I closed it and works perfect again.

 

I have not read all the pages, but has anyone used pscheck software to undervolt and overclock the APU? I am curious to see the limits.

 

For me the fan will not slow down at all if I do a hard boot, it stays on full RPM all the time unless I sleep and wake the system. On first boot I had to get though windows setup with it like this.. I thought it may calm down once setup finished but it did not. Also at one point while it was left in sleep today with the lid down it woke itself up for a few seconds at full fan RPM before going back to sleep.

 

Did you remove the protective film over the touch bars?

 

Yes I did. If you meant me.

 

@ s1nner : for me the only drivers which do not have the brightness issue are the ones from msi's site on the gx60's page.

 

Adjustable brightness or playability in games...

Yeah looks like games it is for me. lol

 

So, having to choose playability vis brightness, the fan issue, and the wrist rest clicking issue. Makes me wonder ..

 

I'll check when mine arrives today - I think you unfortunately got a bad one by the sounds of it. I would recommend wiping and starting with a fresh install of Win7/8. I'm going to be imaging it (ordered it with a swapped HDD, told the guys at Gentech to send it bare) with Win 7 Ult today as well - hey, I technically have 150 licenses for it, might as well use some

Going to try stock drivers and latest CCC betas. I can live without screen brightness adjustment for the time being. I am very familiar with AMD drivers - I blame most of my rapidly receding hairline on that experience - but you cant deny that performance per dollar is amazing.

Anyway, if anyone wants more tests run, I check this thread frequently. I'll be running some new games I just picked up from the steam christmas sale (LA Noire, Borderlands, CS:GO), EVE Online, Far Cry 3, as well as a suite of games of bygone eras (My buddy just got me Shattered Steel... hehe). Any other requests let me know and I'll see what I can do.

I'm also going to be running some work related stuffs, mostly virtual machines and I will be dual-booting with Linux, so if anyone is curious of Linux Compatibility, I'll be running Fedora and BackTrack (ubuntu based but only by technicality).


Anyway, S1nn3r I hope you can get this resolved, this laptop really does seem like a low-budget miracle for gaming, I hope you get everything sorted out

 

Been doing some more messing around with this today. Fan issue is nothing to do with Windows as it starts from initial start-up of the system, before Windows gets any control. Also the turbofan button does nothing to control the fan when in Windows ether. So it looks to me like fan control on my GX60 is busted at the BIOS level for some reason, unless I am missing something ?

Edit: System just now woke itself up with fan on full for no reason for 5 seconds then shut itself down, as in full showdown and not sleep again like it did yesterday. This thing is possessed or something.

 

As i said before, i had lags in Far Cry 3 with the latest amd beta drivers that never occured with the ones from MSI, which are anterior........so a better playability is not even guaranteed...

 

None else has experienced this behavour I assume ?.. in which case I will be contacting Amazon/MSI, more then likely Amazon as they will do just a replacement if need be id imagine, because Amazon are awesome like that. No idea how long it takes for MSI to get things done, id imagine not as fast as going though Amazon. My current/old system is failing so time is very much of the essence to.

 

Yeah I don't even get full fan on when I cold boot, the only way I could get the fan to even be audible was manually turning it on with turbofan (no games yet, at work now haha). Aside from windows 8 (grrr) I got start8 loaded and norton uninstalled, I'll probably be keeping 8 - it's enough like 7 for me.

But S1nn3r, I would attempt to go through amazon if you can - at this point you have enough "little things" that I would opt for a full replacement over repair. The only other thing I can think of is reflashing the bios. (and it's american megatrends, uggh)

 

Of course it has to be one of the main games I want to play... haha. Well I'll give it a go. I wonder if I can go after AMD for hair replacement, I'm pretty sure the last decade of Radeon drivers is what has been chasing my hairline away

 

What anti virus are you using with the gx60. Some anti virus tend to bog your gaming down and with this not having a really strong cpu is there a good choice to pick to have on this machine?

 

When I installed 12.11 beta drivers onto windows 8 I had the brightness issues. I just put in a Sandisk 240gb ssd loaded up windows 7 64 no issues seems much faster and my WEI scores jumped up vs windows 8

 

The Windows Experience Index in Windows 7 assesses system components on a scale of 1.0 to 7.9

The Windows Experience Index in Windows 8 assesses system components on a scale of 1.0 to 9.9

 

WEI is always a bit wonky anyway, especially with switchable graphics setups.

 

I should stop messing around with this thing and install some games lol

 

MSE - I don't run separate antivirus, I ripped norton off. Running Windows 8 with Startdock Start8. Steam, UPlay, uTorrent, and a couple other apps in the background - stock MSI drivers. I have not found a game I cannot max. Far Cry 3 with every single setting as high as it will go produces no lag, I can smoothly wing-suit off a radio tower out over the ocean and swim back to shore. I don't care about frames but I assure you they did not dip below 30 or become visible. Skyrim, LA Noire, Rainbow Six Vegas 2, Counter Strike Global Offensive, Mass Effect 3, EVE Online - all of them, every setting at max, AA and Anisotropic maxed, highest quality.

So far VERY pleased. The few games I thought were running slow (LA Noire seemed to have a "delay" and was running 5-10FPS) was simply because you (sometimes) have to run the game, exit it and let the popup come to ask about graphics, then set it to max performance for that app. But LA Noire was pulling 5-10FPS with EVERYTHING maxed (including AA and all that) on the integrated graphics. I had turned off AA and Anisotropic and it was playable (20-30fps, but again, this is before I realized it was running on the integrated, so the integrated is still very powerful).


If you insist on running antivirus (and I won't fault you if you do), I have always found BitDefender to be a minimalistic yet robust, lightweight gaming friendly antivirus - full disclosure I have not used it in upwards of 3 years, I have found Microsoft Security Essentials to be more than enough (with a little common sense and intuition) to prevent any viruses. I will not be putting any antivirus on this machine either. At most, I would go as far as Spybot Search and Destroy with TeaTimer (active protection). Avira is a little oversensitive (plug in a thumb drive and the windows standard autorun.ini sets it off), AVG is a little weak, Avast is a little heavy on the load. All are good choices, however I would most definitely insist that you stay away from norton and mcafee - unless you like the primary purpose of your computer to be to keep your computer from doing anything at all in the first place

 

You will be quite pleased. Don't cave and try things dialed back, set everything as high as it will go and be wowed. If your frames dip, drop AA down a bit, and scale back.

As a side note, I never understood why people start low and work up. Start high and work down, doesn't anyone know how to negotiate? hahaha

 

I noticed that, I am getting a lot of game detection set to med-high because game detection only sees the integrated. Sure, it's easy to just set everything to max, but even setting the detection program to run with the 7970M, it still see's the 7730G. Then again, EVE Online mid game (with 7970M powered on and running) still states it is running off the 7730G.

Granted, shiny beautiful internet spaceships is all that matters, I could care less about what it calls the hardware

 

Especially once you get 7.9 and it says HD 4000 lol

 

Hey did anyone have any luck or figure out what keyboard we can swap in to get the backlight? That would be really handy, even if we can just get a compatible part number and go from there.

And as a bonus question, has anyone else noticed that light-bar looking thing on the lid? Wonder if I could pop a few LEDs in there... lol

 

The same one in the modern GT series or even a clevo one but I would advise against it.

 

Hey Meaker (or anyone else who can help!); This is my first laptop and trying to overclock a lappy is a bit alien to me... I'm using the most recent enduro drivers from amd, and luckily I don't seem to have the fan or display issues some here seem to suffer from. I'm getting around 4700 in 3DMark 11 but would ike to try pushing it a bit further.

1) How do you manage to overclock in MSI afterburner - GPU clock and memory are locked and I can't figure out how to unlock them... Can youremeber what clocks were stable at 1.075V?

2) Is Thaiphoon the only way to change memory timings? The BIOS doesn't see to offer anything to change other than an 1866 memory option which I imagine doesn't work (the CPU only supports 1600MHz doesn't it? Meaker can you remember what timings the Kingston 1600CL9 modules were able to run at?

3) Are there any options for overclocking the CPU?

 

You need to go into the ini and edit the eula and overclocking mode for MSI.

Yes thaiphoon burner is your only option to change memory timings. Even if you set 1866mhz ram speeds then it will run 1600mhz.

There is no overclocking to be done on the CPU.

 

Ok used Todo Easeus to clone the Hard Drive onto a SSD worked perfect! Cnet downloads has it for free.

 

Have you run an alignment test to make sure it has been properly done?

 

How do you do that?

Just found a program to do it running the test now

 

Little bit of command console action:

Ensuring 4K alignment on SSDs in Windows 7 « The NEZzen.net Blog

 

It wasn't aligned! Thanks for the heads up on this. So I used the MSI recovery software and backed it up to a 32gb USB drive then I moved the ssd to the main HD bay and it worked perfectly!

 

I'll have to do some digging - why would you advise against it? compatibility? I need some sort of lit-up keyboard, even if I could have my old ThinkLight from my ThinkPad I would be happy. I am a night owl and do most of my gaming and other stuff in the bedroom at night and keeping the overhead light on keeps my girl up. I'm sure I'm not the only one that can attest: If she's not happy, you're not happy. LOL


EDIT: Found a potential option. I might give it a try, but $105 is a bit expensive. I might see if I can talk my roommate into letting me try his GTR783 keyboard first to see if everything is functional - http://www.rkcomputer.net/rkcnotebooks/index.php?l=product_detail&p=366

EDITEDIT: I think it's a GTR783. Whatever the sandy bridge i7/570M 17 inch GT series is by MSI. But apparently they are all the same keyboard, and from hearing on here the headers are all there. I even have the little light button on the touch panel (though it does nothing, I am hoping it is software disabled or maybe I have to download the light manager...). I think I am going to try and see if I can do that in the next few days to see if it works, I'll be sure to post back with info.