\/\/\/\/\/\- The Official MSI GT60-2OD Owner's Lounge -/\/\/\/\/\/

Besides getting personal high scores in synthetic benchmarks I'm wondering why people feel the need to OC, OK I can see bumping up the clocks on the GPU to smooth out some extremely demanding games but overall the stock CPU paired with the GTX 780M can handle every game on ULTRA settings :

These are test done by notebookcheck with GTX 780 and i7-4700 all on ULTRA or highest settings


Battlefield 3 (2011) 50 fps
CoD: Modern Warfare 3 (2011) 117.3 fps
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011) 68.3 fps
Anno 2070 (2011) 72.6 fps
Alan Wake (2012) 54.1 fps
Mass Effect 3 (2012) 59.9 fps
Risen 2: Dark Waters (2012) 53.8 fps
Diablo III (2012) 188 fps
Dirt Showdown (2012) 66.4 fps
Max Payne 3 (2012) 54.5 fps
Darksiders II (2012) 136.9 fps
Sleeping Dogs (2012) 30.8 fps
Counter-Strike: GO (2012) 194 fps
Guild Wars 2 (2012) 41.2 fps
F1 2012 (2012) 100 fps
Borderlands 2 (2012) 83.3 fps
Fifa 13 (2012) 307.7 fps
Dishonored (2012) 125 fps
Medal of Honor: Warfighter (2012) 54.8 fps
Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2012) 59.9 fps
Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 (2012) 95.1 fps
Hitman: Absolution (2012) 33.8 fps
Assassin´s Creed III (2012) 42.6 fps
Far Cry 3 (2012) 30.4 fps
Dead Space 3 (2013) 144.2 fps
Crysis 3 (2013) 29.3 fps
Tomb Raider (2013) 65.3 fps
SimCity (2013) 39.9 fps
BioShock Infinite (2013) 46.6 fps

I'm more than satisfied with this kind of performance and really don't see why the need to OC, but to each his own I guess, just my 2 cents.

 

I see numbers lower than 60FPS there.

 

And that's bad?
For me anything over or around 30FPS looks pretty smooth to me but maybe it's just me, carry on then.

 

I agree... Crysis 3 runs fairly smooth on Ultra. I see about 30FPS also.

 

how quiet/noisy is this laptop during light usage? the single fan design sounds like a recipe for consistently high rpm, but maybe it stays low while optimus is on?

 

Its pretty silent, haven't heard the fans at all.

 

Reading this board is kinda painful... With mine still shipping I just get too impatient.

 

same I'm hoping mine arrives before the weekend but I don't think it will..

 

Hahaha the waiting it definitely the hardest part

 

And there you have your answer, for you

 

I can't even tell its running when not gaming or benching. Its pretty silent. The system does a good job of spreading out the cooling job along the combined heatsink. This allows it to keep the fan near idle for everything except for gaming.

 

The key is this being a single GPU and smoothly running over 30 FPS with everything maxed out on ultra. The age old debate about 60 FPS being the target can go on forever; however, pulling off 30 FPS or better with a single GPU sure as hell beats dealing with micro-stuttering around 30 FPS with dual GPUs in SLI or Crossfire. I think Haswell + 780m is showing itself to be quite formidable, at least until the Maxwell GPUs are launched in 2014 or 2015.

 

Anyone have any ideas on the best way to get this laptop in Canada? Shipping from US sellers seems complicated/expensive, but I haven't found any Canadian sellers that seem to have it.
Thanks!

 

Either wait or ship one over is really your only choice. Some sellers add in Canadian RMA shipping cover for a bit extra.

 

As a guy who moved from 30 fps gaming to 60 fps gaming (when I upgraded my desktop) I can say there is a big difference in twitch-based FPS shooter games alone. Any other game that's not twitch accuracy heavy FPS or TPS will run and look fine at 30 FPS.

 

Yeah the FPS are fine, I'm not too concerned about the video card. In the future with new demanding games you can just turn down the details and play them fine and running engineering software or design software on the GPU shouldn't be a limitation.

If I got this laptop, I'd want the ability to overclock the CPU more so than overclocking the GPU at all. This is because the CPU, with non-SMP aware applications, and there are a lot of them still, the new Haswell processors still hasn't reached 2x the performance of a Penryn Core 2 Duo, clock for clock. The 4700MQ is a beast with multitasking but Explorer.exe (often when deleting files on a SSD or searching for files), game installation programs uncompressing the archive files, windows updates, Firefox, Windows Defender, poorly coded defrag programs that use a ton of computational power on nearly full drives, Outlook and AOL when searching through the offline mail database, Word/Excel 2013 when dealing with huge files, PDF viewers when dealing with huge files or complex files, Ghost boot disk making a backup with high compression setting with fast drives/interface and more.

I can overclock my X9100 to 3.5GHZ 100% stable so that is close to the 3.4GHZ+ (might be able to do 3.7GHZ for short period of time on 1 core before TDP turns it down) of the 4700MQ and the 4700MQ I'd say is only about 50-75% faster clock-clock in non-SMP aware applications or so. It's a great boost with great efficiency but it's not epic.

So if the BIOS has set "lock bits" so you can't use an Extreme chip or tweak the stock CPU, or if the power consumption while fully utilizing unmodified GPU and CPU settings is over 160w after AC adapter inefficiency...
Not concerned about the GPU, that doesn't have any weaknesses.

 

Any comments about MSI "bloatware"? I ordered mine from today, and haven't owned an MSI before. I had to get rid of a lot of bloat with my last lenovo. The reseller I purchased from had a $15 option to remove the bloatware, but I didn't select it.

 

To everyone who owns this machine:
Have you all had to repaste the CPU and/or GPU? I saw some really high temps for the CPU and MX-4 is really cheap anyways so I was wondering if I might as well order it now while I wait for the laptop to come in.

 

The factory paste job seems to be poor from what I've been reading so far, and a member a few pages back went from 90C to 70C average by repasting with IC diamond. It's no secret that factory thermal paste jobs range from decent to terrible (more often terrible than not), and redoing it yourself properly will make a big difference, even if you don't use top of the line paste.

 

^^This. The factory job on my GPU/CPU for thermal paste was pretty poor. They used way too much. A quick repaste with IC Diamond made a huge difference. See what the temps are first, and make your own decisions if you need to repaste or not. I would order paste either way. Having some on hand and readily available is a must for me. I usually repaste at least every 6 months, and blow it out for dust once a month or more. This is simple maintenance I've found to keep my laptop running like it should, and doing the best I can to extend is life.

Post 400!! Woooo!

 

There is some bloatware, but not too much. I have definitely seen a lot worse on computers. Your name suggest Lenovo, I just sold a Yoga 13. That had a lot more bloatware on it. This machine has a few petty xbox games, paint, and a couple of other little things. They are not bad. The main thing I would look at is reducing the disk size through hibernate and page file. This machine comes with about 60g of the 128 used.

 

I repasted with MX-4, it was all I had laying around. It made absolutely no difference, but that was the first tiem I ever repasted anything. I did order some IC-Diamond, so once that arrives, I will repaste and run A LOT more benchmarks with temps! I owned an Alienware m14x, but that seemed entirely to tedious to pull apart to repaste. This was very easy to do!

Hopefully, by end of next week I will have results for everyone.

 

Do lower temps with ICD make the fans work less when gaming?Does it get loud?
I know the full fan speed mode is noisier but when not using it when gaming how loud does the new cooling system get.

 

Just got the Laptop from Gentech Today, had it repasted 3x128 mSSD. Wow, this is a beast.

I installed the Arma 3 Alpha and played through the "Infantry" showcase with Ultra settings, I only reduced the draw distances to 2000 overall and 1000 objects, set AntiaAlias to 4x.. and I got somewhere around 35-45 fps all through the showcase. AA at 8x and the default drawing distances had it somehwere around 29. Quite amazing. Fans where left to auto and they didn't get noisy at all. I would say around 1/3 of the speed of cooler boost. But MSI afterburner did show the gpu temp at around 90 while playing.

First impression is that I hate the stamped MSI logo on the front on the matte screen bezel. I wish they had some nice chrome sticker or nothing at all. Aside from that, only the fan makes a weird noise when idling.. Maybe because it's going too slow? It's like a pulsating sound.

 

See if the noise goes away, it shouldn't make any noise. Maybe because its a new fan it has to wear in a bit? Or open the case and make sure the fan is secured properly. Possibly unscrew and re-seat the fan. Otherwise I would simply request a replacement fan. Its a 5 minute job for you to replace it. The reseller might offer that option because it would be cheaper than shipping the laptop back.

Also I just got Arma III Alpha last night. Wow! I have no idea what I am doing. I'm pretty sure they wanted to kick me from the server lol.

 

Okay so I order my new toy yesterday (yay!), should be here by Wednesday. Quick question. Xoticpc gave me the option to have the stock SSD setup to cache for the 1TB HDD. It sounded like a good option, so I took it. However, I just discovered that my plan to dual boot OSX & windows won't work with caching. If I stick a second SSD, say a 128GB crucial, and put OSX Mountain Lion on it, do you think it would work as a dual-boot Windows 8+ OSX hackintosh (I don't really care about using the 780M in OSX, and have found a good, cheap workaround for speakers & WiFi) ? I've seen a number of people hackintosh last years model, but I wanted to check if there were any changes to the 2OD model that would make this little project more difficult. I need to be able to run xcode for a course I'm taking next year, and want to have the ability to code when I'm not at home (I have a mac mini I picked up cheap two years ago for this purpose). Anyone see any potential issues with the new hardware (I would assume its a new mobo since we can now have 3 SSDs). I really don't want to break anything, so I'm checking before I try to put OSX on it. I could of course survive just coding on my Mini instead of going ahead with this little project, but where's the fun in that?

 

Points to MSI for not voiding the warranty for maintaining your machine Asus would have none of that beyond RAM & hard drive mods. It's a good feeling.
If anyone happens to see the model# of the fan (not the heatsink, the fan itself) while they are dustin it out, feel free to post. Interested in how many milliamps it can draw.
Why don't you guys use a paste that's rated for high durability so you don't have to repaste every 6 months or year. MX-2 supposedly lasts 8 years. Maybe cut that in half for a high end laptop. But of course you can't have both worlds, super thermal conductivity and super durability.

EDIT: fan model#, possibly an MSI model number is E33-0800182-MC2 and that is the same in the GT60 and GT70 95% sure. It says on the label that it draws 0.55 amps at 5V.
http://www.mini-laptop-accessories.com/e330800182mc2-msi-ms16f3-ms16f2-cooling-cpu-fan-p-21185.html
http://n-south.en.alibaba.com/produ...5F_PF3_DC5V_0_55A_laptop_cpu_cooling_fan.html

And a more specific model# is brand=T&T ,, 6010h05f - PF3 (or possibly PFR, further verification needed) and so if yours wears out it looks like you can buy a replacement fan for only about $20 rather than forking out $80+ for the whole housing

 

I wonder if we will have a new SuperRAID adapter with M.2 NGFF compatibility in the future for our notebooks
Seeing the next-gen controller from LSI capable of 1.8GB/s sequential speeds and 200k IOPS... Maybe not possible because of the SATA ports on actual adapters...
Anyway I'd be happy even with a pair of Samsung 840 Pro based 256GB mSATAs in RAID0.
Wishfull thinking

 

I've repasted about 4 times with OCZ freeze (old but good stuff) and can only get my temps to drop a little (now runs about 87C CPU and 90is GPU, down from low 90s on CPU and GPU). This is under load from 3dMark and BF3. I've only repasted one other laptop, but I have experience with using thermal compound on desktops.

My IC diamond will arrive in a couple of days (maybe this weekend). I will repaste and place new thermal tape on everything and give it another go.

I'm curious what method was used to obtain the 60-70C range posted by others. IC diamond swears by the pea method, so I'll stick to my guns on that. If I can get everything to stay in the 70s under load I think I'll be happy with that. Generally, thermal compound isn't going to drop your temps 10-20C, but maybe my other stuff just hasn't held up.

 

Hi, new here . Got mine from gentechpc last sunday and sent it to a friend of mine in CA 3 miles away from gentechpc headquarter. Now i´m waiting for 17.06 when this friend come to brazil with this beast *.* .
Currently i have a Asus G51J 3D and i´m really exited waiting the new toy arrive =D

Here is an interesting article from Tomshardware where they put the ssd raid-0 reputation in proof

:hi2:

edit: I want to thanks KEN for the great service provided in my case. Thanks Gentechpc :thumbsup:

 

So Ken nudged me to tell you guys that my beast is shipping as well. I join your ranks!

 

Congrats on your order/shipment! I am so looking forward to mine arriving on Monday .

 

If you do not mind the noise... the cooler booster fan will drop your temps 10 - 20° under load.

 

Hmm, these reported temps and loud cooling are disappointing. I've been spoiled by Asus G series for years with fantastic cooling and quiet operation. Definitely an area I'll be watching before I order something. Love the performance per dollar though!

 

Yes, we have a G-series as well, and that's one of our most favorite features. I couldn't find any of their models with the 680/780m, though, so they're not a possibility for someone demanding a top-spec GPU.

 

What are your ambient temps? Those make the biggest difference in the laptops ability to cool itself, and make my temps vary daily as well. Also make sure the laptop is sitting on a flat surface, with back of the laptop raised if possible. Don't have it sitting on a couch, bed or something like that while gaming and running tests.

I just ran 2 tests to prove this laptop is not that hot. I am not sure what others are doing. But like I said after I repasted with ICD7 my temps dropped pretty significantly. This might not be entirely due to the paste type, but the poor paste job done at the factory. I used the line method for both GPU/CPU. There is a great youtube video (I will link it later) which shows how to properly paste you laptop with ICD. I'm not a fan of the pea method or spreading it. I always have done the line, and then let the pressure of the heatsink spread the paste for me.

Idle Temps:

3dmark11 Run Cooler Boost OFF:

3dmark11 Run Cooler Boost ON:


These temps are far from disappointing. With Cooler Boost off during my 3dmark11 run the laptop remains very quiet.

Good video for repasting:

 

Ambient temps are ~23C, so its maybe 3C higher than yours, sitting on cool flat table. Thanks for the pics. It gives me hope. I will repaste w/ IC diamond when it arrives using line method. Please link youtube video when you get the chance. My temps are with cooler boost off.

Also, what is the dark reflective strip that sits right next to the CPU cores?

 

Nope, I agree, these temps are nice... Curious why the others are so much hotter for other owners, even those that have repasted. I've never used IC Diamond, but MX-3 and Arctic 5 over those years all worked quite well, can't imagine IC dropping the temps 15+ from what others are reporting with other compounds. Thanks for the info, I know what my next paste will be!

 

Out of the box, without the cooler booster I was seeing 89-91°. After Repasting I was seeing pretty much the same. I used MX-4, and I am no expert at pasting, that was my first time. I do have some IC-Diamond on order though. Once that gets in I will compare the results. I am thinking I will see about a 10 - 15° drop with IC Diamond and a better paste job (better with experience). I am looking forward to the new paste and seeing if it makes that big of a difference.

erikranger

 

Look forward to seeing your results, I just can't see IC performing 15° drop over MX-4, assuming it's installed properly. I've been very happy with MX-3 over the years... maybe I'm just out of date ha.... Keep us posted!

 

Paste as many times as necessary. Remember that the quantity needs to be small. You can aid yourself with pevious GT70 repaste videos to get a feel to it. You need just enough to cover the exposed die are in direct contact with the heatsink, with a very small sheet of paste between them for maximum effect. Any excess or lack of paste is detrimental.

It seems that stock paste on the MSI machine is a bit abundant from what I have seen with other users pics, so that would explain the elevated temperatures.

 

MX-3 Is fine. The real performance difference is not 15~C drop. It definitely shouldn't be that high. It should be small single digits between good paste jobs between both paste brands/types.

 

Agreed, shouldn't be more than 5 C difference between the lowest performing performance oriented paste and 1 that is bleeding edge so must be a bad paste job or HS mounting job, or inaccurate temperature sensors on the CPU die but not sure if that's possible. From what I've seen, MX2 is middle of the range performance wise but says that it has 8 years of durability so shouldn't ever have to repaste I guess

Not with the Asus G50V G50VT G50VX and G51J, they have a single fan for cooling as well and not as powerful of a fan as the 1 in this MSI but still kind of loud at full RPM. Those Asusi laptops use a Forcecon DFS541305MH0T “F8U5” fan. The newer Asus laptops with dual fans yes.

 

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/Thermal-Compound-Roundup-January-2012/1468/5

Scroll down a bit and there's a graph of thermal paste performance. The numbers shown in the graph are the temperature difference between ambient and load.

Overall, most thermal pastes offer good performance, and the quality of application is more important than the paste used IMO.

 

Just ordered some IC Diamond!

I'll let you know the temps before/after

 

I thought it was a bad idea to use IC diamond on a laptop due to how abrasive it is.

 

im gonna use lipstick on my GTX 780M