***The Official MSI GT80S Titan (w/desktop 980 GPU's) Owner's Lounge***

MSI also recently released the MSI Vortex 980 SLI "desktop" using essentially the same parts as in the GT80S 980 SLI, but with more desktop like motherboard features - it's using the same MXM 980 GPU's.

The sad part is MSI also limited power by only building in a 450w power supply. Yeah, really. They should have built in at least a 1000w power supply, but they didn't.

Vortex G65 (GTX 980 SLI)
https://us.msi.com/product/vortex/Vortex-G65-GTX-980-SLI.html#hero-overview
https://us.msi.com/Vortexs

 

I am fairly sure they are using the 980 of laptop models, hence why they use 450w which is enough for those GPUs unless you plan to overclock.

Since the laptop does have performance caps, the question now is, how is your normal usage when gaming? I ask this because when gaming and pushing the syste, the battery drains to an average or continous 6 hours of gaming before performance is capped.

When performance is capped, the 980SLI perform, essentially, as 5% faster 980m SLI system. Do you play enough time or demanding games that the 6 hours limit might hurt your experience?

But now that you comment on your situation, I do think a desktop might be better for you. You can probably find a cheaper desktop with a 980Ti, hook it up to your displays and monitor, and enjoy excellent performance at a lower price.

 

In the Vortex G65 MSI increased the TDP requirements by replacing the 45w Mobile CPU with a 95w Desktop CPU.

The performance claims are higher than for the GT80S 980 SLI - so some of that 330w => 450w PSU upgrade is being put into better performance

 

Without compromising the Titan - it depends what you are planning to do with it?

Sure, the Titan - 980 SLI variant is the most powerful Notebook on stock settings. So, if you don't plan to overclock the components, it will perform as it should. But otherwise it is somewhat crippled due to the power limit restriction, which I find unfortunate for Enthusiasts.

On the other hand, if you don't want to make any compromises, consider getting the "Phoenix" - Clevo P870DM from a Prema Partner Shop with unlocked BIOS and vBIOS and no power limit restrictions. You can get it as 980m SLI or 200w 980 variant, which overclocks like hell!

Just take a plunge into the P870DM owners thread.

For all proud Titan owners: no offense intended!

Gesendet von meinem LG-H955 mit Tapatalk

 

Thank you all. We have a great community here.

I think Im going to just do the desktop set-up. I can put the tower next to me and use a cordless keyboard and mouse (like i do now anyway), but I'll need to find a way to get a 27" monitor to sit in front of me while in reclined or sitting on my reclining couch/section of the couch. Why 27"? Because I believe that screen size it the most optimal size for 4K and gaming. Anything more is just too much for me. May not be for any one else, but for me.

So yeah, I'll need to find a table of some sort that I can put/clamp a 27" monitor onto while at the same time swivel it towards me reclined, lol.

I havent built my own PC since 2007, so I'll be going the route of a custom built desktop. I think I priced mine around 8 grand buying a Falcon Northwest Mach V. Ive got the cash and it's not really going to dent my pocket (all thanks to God for my provisions and all needs met), so I know I'll be spending quite a bit.

 

So sad, no plans on allowing dual-PSU with the GT80S 980 SLI model.

 

msi just like any other regular OEM is too afraid to do so, thinking they would lose money as it is a niche market. from clevo's side the dual PSU and adapter was created and only meant to counter power problem for p570wm after they figuring out power issues with x7200 (previous gen). then new haswell/broadwell desktop parts used in laptop finally they have another reason to get dual PSU out, carried over to p870DM now so investment early might not get return until way later.

if MSI doesnt plan on doing dual PSU for GT80S, means this type of laptop will eventually die off and this might be a lot closer to EOL than we think.

 

I don't think MSI would give up the GT80 so easily. The 980m SLI works fine within the 330w single power supply limits.

MSI did an amazing job getting the 980 SLI to fit within the 330w + Battery Boost, even if it could be even better with more than 330w AC power.

The Pascal requirement is an unknown, but I am sure MSI will make it work within the GT80 limits, or extend the limits a bit to make it work.

It's probably good MSI got so much push back on the GT80S 980 SLI limits, that should give them second thoughts about trying that again with the Pascal GT80's, which should result in higher power being available for the top end GT80's

 

give up* means different thign to people. even if GPU is up gradable, i donno if they would put kabylake or canonlake cpu in gt80 or might just discontinue it all together. i mean with pascal/polaris coming out, we can still fit them into m18x r1 thats 4yrs old, apparently they might be capable go into m15x r2 which is 5 yrs old with mod or not, but those are still EOL.

 

"wouldn't give up" in this context was to say that MSI would not discontinue building the GT80 model line.

 

m18x line lasted 3 gen thats 3yrs. gt80s is now 2nd year right? it came out near the end of haswell and it updated right away when broadwell came right out and they had to make a new mobo for that i wonder how much money they lost lol.

 

MSI has popped out a number of revisions of the GT80, now the GT80S, and clearly is dedicated to tracking the new Intel chipset / CPU releases, and I am sure are anxious to ship the new Nvidia GPU releases too.

Maybe by then you will be ready to leave the AW behind, and get something new

 

MSI is very important to the future of MXM.

 

Considering they are the ONLY manufacturer using the standardized MXM 3.0b form at all popular hardware stores. Yep...

 

And don't forget Clevo too.

 

Is Clevo going to be the way to go in a few months after I sell my gt80s. I seriously rethinking keeping this machine with no supports from MSI.

 

Clevo is a good contender. What's wrong with your GT80S/MSi?

 

MSI most likely can't provide support beyond what's already designed as is on their blueprint until the next generation.
Still, the machine is able to provide better performance than competitions so don't feel bad with your purchase decision going with this machine.

 

It is great machine is I have said in the past. What irritates me is the power draw issue that is correctable but they will not correct it.

 

Kevin i do not feel bad about it at all just a bit disappointed that they will not fix the power draw issue. I understand if they can not stop the battery back up for more power. BUT they can fix the not using the power supply to its max.

 

You realize that if the laptop maxed the power supply instead of using it efficiently that the power supplies life span would be cut short?

We are at the turning point for laptops, they are in a stage where they will evolve and be better.

This laptop will make laptop makers think about these solutions in the future rather it be different power supplies/ stronger more effective ones, or more effective mobos, CPUs and GPUs.

Gotta remember, we got lucky with these CPUs. They got repurposed for smart car technology and they somehow got enough for laptops.

So, only time will tell if and when makers will be ready and as it stands this laptop and others with these GPUs are the first of their kind ever... Can't expect perfection the first time around .

 

I respectfully disagree about the power supplies. The 330w supplies have been around for a long while, and I've owned dozens of high powered laptops (330w powered and others) and never had a power brick fail even when overclocked for long periods and running super hot. While any adapter can fail, that is a ridiculous claim that they are "protecting" our precious power supplies. Those are one of the easiest and cheapest components to replace. They don't need to be protected from a "shorter life span".

With things becoming more efficient, and CPUs using the same or even less power than previous top end models, that should be allowing the GPUs to have more power available than previously. What we are seeing is they are adding limits well below the manufacturers specs. Also they invented the absolutely horrible, and not advertised, "battery drain" feature with no way for us to disable it without ripping the laptop apart and physically removing the battery. Even then you wont get the advertised performance since you just disabled their hidden "feature" that kills your battery. I don't know about you, but I would much rather take the chance on buying a new adapter every few years than trying to find a custom battery to restore stock performance levels after a year of hard gaming.

MSI is the only manufacturer to do this as far as I know, maybe others are doing it now too but I'm saying this is a new practice and needs to stop before it kills the gamer crowds interest. My clevo's never had any battery drain issues, nor any limit for power usage. Heck my 15" notebooks could be overclocked like crazy and never hit an artificial limit. At a bare minimum they should crank the max allowable power to the output of the adapter but we are all seeing 300w output on the power adapter, or 330w at the wall. The adapters are rated the safe output power they can supply. That 10% or so they are robbing is reducing our performance and killing our batteries at the same time by running them up and down every night when we play games.

On top of all of this, weather you agree or disagree with my statements, the whole way they handled this situation is unacceptable on every level. I tried to help them by letting them know that the "battery boost" is never stated in any literature, that they need to add it to their web pages and advertisements, and some of us bought this model just because it DID NOT have that feature that was on some older models we had. They even drew me a picture by hand to explain how it works to me, you'd think it would be in the manual and on every web page explaining the features. As of today it doesn't look like they ever added that, so more and more folks will keep buying this model without know about this undocumented feature that they may not want and has no way to be disabled.

Also the low power limit, which should be as easy as saying, oh look, "we messed up and put a too low of a power limit on the EC, lets raise it to 330w that the adapter is rated for, for those who need the full power". Nope. Realize you can get much more out of them than that, as many of us have done for years without issue. Also when Geno acknowledged the issue in the "ask MSI" thread we never heard back from them again even when I(and one or two others) repeated asked for any sort of an update. Not a single, "were still looking into it" or "we will contact you and try to work through the issue". Nothing. I am frustrated and have spent way too much time troubleshooting their issues, only to be slapped in the face and never given a fix, explanation, or offer to remedy the situation in some way.

I make a lot of money, and I spend a lot of money. I have a lot of influence with my company and my friends. MSI is losing more than just one costumer and a couple sales, they are losing many customers and many more sales. I'm keeping the GT80S for now until a non-MSI solution is released that I like since I know I will lose about half of my investment (about 6k, lucky to get 3k out of it). I have a slight hope left that they may resolve this before I am forced to move on and never look back.

 

All manufacturers and models have power limits for both CPU and GPUs. The difference is we can remove them most of the time (throttlestop, bios/ec, vbios). GT80 should be no different, because GT60/70 had the battery drain feature and at one point there was an experimental unofficial bios/ec that removed that. I think the only non power limited GPU might be the 200W single GPU version of the 980. Other than that, they have performance caps. These are also affected by drivers as far as I remember, because I have seen benches that trigger plimit visually with GPU-Z

Actually, you can easily "kill" PSUs with any unlocked machine that sports high end components. By Kill, I mean that the PSU shutdowns to protect itself, which in turns results in the machine loosing power because the battery is much less capable of the wattage. I have "killed" 120w, 150w, 180w, 330w, PSUs via overclocking. One 180w actually did die off, had to get a replacement heh.

Now, I don't know the reason behind a particular ### wattage limit, but any limit is annoying. It can drive people crazy. I know it drove me with the CPU. The sad thing is that GT80 had a good balance with 980m but by slapping the desktop 980 they shot themselves in the foot. Even if you had full 330w from the PSU, you will still drain from the battery. They should have revised it in a way to properly use dual PSUs. After all, the 980 version of the GT80 is a very particular model.

Likewise, the GT72 with single 980 should have come with a 330w supply.

MSI needs to say the battery drain is in their models, completely agree on that part. But if only you knew the extent of this with other manufacturers.... It is why I can't recommend certain brands and models because despite having X hardware, they can never run at said performance.

I think the best option you have as a consumer, is to evaluate other machines and have someone do proper testing (something you don't see in many review sites, which is why this forum is great). If it werent for the testing of you GT80S users, no one would have said or done anything. The majority of people don't know nor care as long as they can use their machine and play games.

 

I agree. MSI shouldn't left out the details and if they mentioned such in the first place then perhaps consumers won't feel tricked. But without such feature, nobody is going to be able to provide that kind of horsepower due to power adapter limitation.

 

while I was checking this laptop at HIDevolution tonight, I noticed that you can opt for a 3x330W power adapter(s). Would that fix that power problem? why hasn't anyone done it anyway?

 

Possibly a management decision rather than an engineering one in which case hands will be tied.

 

No it wouldn't, you could tether 6 330 watt adapters together and it will still have the same power regulation due to the EC actually limiting the power and providing a power drain on the battery. The only way to get around the battery drain is to wire up ac converted current to be available through the battery pins.

 

Both Dufus & GTVEVO are correct on this matter.

 

You might want to point HIDevolution to this thread so they can be up to date on the problem.

The GT80S 980 SLI will only use 1 330w power supply, and according to owners that have measured the power draw compared to a GT80 980m SLI their 980 SLI model draws less power at maxium.

MSI has limited the power input, and switches to battery boost for more power, rather than overdrawing from the single 330w PSU. MSI didn't engineer to support multiple power supplies, such as 2 x 330.

Buying and using more than 1 330w for the GT80S 980 SLI will currently (no pun intended) not make any performance difference.

Funny thing is, the GT80S 980 SLI GPU performance is still faster than 980m SLI machine, even with this limitation.

From MSI's point of view, they have fulfilled the goal of the GT80S 980 SLI, it's the fastest GPU performing SLI laptop of this generation.

But, MSI left a lot of OC potential on the table

 

That's fair, but it's almost as bad as the 970 3.5GB fiasco. A huge label, "performance may vary, depending on battery life" needs to be stuck on the chassis.

 

We are not offering multiple AC adapters for the intention of using them in tandem. We offer multiple power adapters so the user can have a backup and so he does not have to carry around a 2nd/3rd adapter if the system is used in multiple locations. This is how we describe it on our product page:

Constantly on the go between 2 places? Being mobile means that every ounce counts! Purchase an extra AC adapter for the 2nd location and leave the heavy power "brick" at home!

 

ahh that clarifies it to me then. I thought that would solve the issue. I really wish MSI can fix this somehow as this looks like a killer machine with dual 980 GTX in SLI

 

The processor will limit the heck out of the performance.

 

The

Like HMScott said, the MB is limited to 300W power. Even MSI willing to unlocked the power consumption to unlimited but there is no way to buy the dual power adapter anymore.

The dual adapter is designed and made by Clevo and Clevo is completely discontinued it. They are not making it anymore.

 

I don't see why they limited it to 300W power. That is what bothers me.

 

Johnksss said the delta 330w psu can do up to 380watts (the good batch). I don't see why they can't just make better grade PSUs marginally bigger. I fear we won't get to see 130w MXM again, but then again, MD I stuck those monster babies in their trashcan looking computer. No offense intended, it looks like a turbine/trashcan of the future.

 

Under best practice guidelines, any manufacturers will not exceed such value since it can post a threat.
The market for 330W+ adapter isn't big enough if you compare the amount of notebooks that use below 90W AC adapters (including 45W, 60W).

 

Reading over this thread it seems many people are complaining there is not enough power available to overclock the graphics cards if I am understanding this correctly. Ok, I see the gripe.

You are saying you will be forced to move on and never look back. What are you moving to? What is this more powerful gaming laptop that you are switching to exactly? I don't think they are losing any sales if they are still the best option.

I think you may be overestimating your own influence by the way.

 

It is not about influence it is more about the fact that the power draw restriction was not disclosed. Also at that part if it can be fixed. Msi just needs to remove the 300 watt restriction. If they did that it would name most happy.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-N915A using Tapatalk

 

You're not understanding this correctly. The artificial power limit is too low to even run the GPUs at stock. Once your battery runs to 30% after several hours when plugged in, which will get even worse as the constant charge/discharge completely shafts its capacity, the crippled throttle limit is too low to run the GPUs more than a little bit past 980M performance.

It's not about taking money away from MSI. I've only cost them 4 sales that I know of, which is peanuts to them. But to those who would've found themselves with a crippled machine after spending $4.6k, that's a huge deal. If they want to throw people buying their top end product under the bus, that's their prerogative, but I'll do my best to see as few people screwed over as possible.

 

Even if you do not run them at their full capability what or who is topping this right now?

It only stands to reason that MSI has room to improve this notebook further.

 

Of course they have room to. That's why I spent a month and a half having a 60 e-mail conversation with their support department trying to convince them to update their EC firmware, only to have the BIOS team flat out refuse to fully address the issue. They cited liability concerns, which means that upper management likely played a part. So I wouldn't count on them changing their mind anytime soon.

I don't count any performance with a time limit as performance. 6 hours of gaming at 130W/card seems reasonable now, but say that again when your battery has dwindled to a third of factory capacity, or worse, when it stops charging altogether. At 105W per card with the battery out of the picture, we're talking stock SLI 980M performance, at which point I would go with the P870DM, or even the 980M GT80S. Why pay $1200 more for performance you can't use?

 

I can certainly see how that's frustrating but I'm thinking they are refusing because nobody is pushing them and frankly this notebook is still awesome regardless.

Should it be an issue? No. They should resolve this and fully utilize the hardware.

I plan on picking one of these up unless once again there is a better option?

 

It shouldn't, but it is, and will likely remain an issue until someone releases a modded EC. But don't hold your breath on that one either.

If you fully understand its limitations and still want one, go right ahead. The build quality is excellent, and aside from the disaster that is the EC firmware, the GT80S is an excellent machine.

If you plan to upgrade to Pascal later, the GT80S will lose out to the P870DM because of its desktop CPU and much higher power limit with the Prema BIOS, but as far as right now is concerned, GPU-wise it beats everything that exists until the battery dips below 30%.

 

MSI pulled an old Alienware/Dell trick on this one. Too bad they didn't learn from their mistakes. This decision completely ruined their product.

Sent from my LG-H901 using Tapatalk

 

I moved on to the P870DM. It has a 200w GPU vs the two 130w and desktop CPU, overclocks way better, better cooling, is a little more portable. It is faster in many games, and once the battery dies it's better on almost all games. I've not had good luck with SLI in games so many times I'm running off one card where the P870DM always wins by a huge margin. The P870DM has fully replaceable parts which is a huge plus for me.

I'm selling the GT80S for 1k less than I paid. It's an ok machine but just not for me at all, and I feel burned by all of the issues and the way MSI handled it.

 

I get 4 days ago new MSI GT80S with two 980m SLI, i want two desktop 980, but i cant find it on ebay, what is the hardware name of partnumber, were i can but two awesome desktop 980 for my beast ?

 

Since you now have a single 980 configuration, did you think ahead of time to benchmark a single 980 configuration of the GT80S? Disable SLI, and use all the available power envelope for the single GPU OC.

The desktop GPU 980 claims 165w, so the 180w/200w versions are "over spec" - and benchmarks show the 180w benchmarks the same as the 200w - within individual 980 samples vary in OC capability.

So you should be able to get the GT80S GPU performance up to the same as the P870 980 single GPU performance, all on a single 330w power supply, just like the P870.

While you still have the GT80S available, give it a shot

 

Yes, I have already been playing games off one GPU so I know what to expect, and have benchmarked a single 980 stock and overclocked as well. I expect about a 20% increase in performance off a single and non-SLI games, and 20% decrease in performance in SLI capable games. Benchmarks will decrease quite a bit of course due to them being showing perfect SLI scaling (which I don't see on most games).

I expect some games to be playable at 4k, and some in nvidia surround as well. All without any SLI issues I have been fighting on my 2x980m and 2x980 machines. I figure if I ever want to I could go with newer (1080,1180 etc) tech to get more performance if I am able to. I like the ability to repair/upgrade even if I have to give up some very slight performance in exchange.

 

My point was the GT80S 980 SLI could be configured as a single 980 the same as the P870, essentially doing the same job as the P870 980, while still being able to do SLI 980 for faster results as well.

I don't see the advantage of the P870 over what you already have with the GT80S 980 SLI.

The 95w CPU isn't going to improve GPU gaming performance, and 99%+ of a gaming laptops job is high GPU performance, not CPU performance.

There can be needs to fill for a 95w CPU in a laptop, but it's not gaming.

The GT80S Intel i7-6920HQ is more than capable of performing the job needed to keep the 2 x 980's busy, or 1 x 980 max OC