MSI GS60 Ghost/ Ghost Pro Thread

Is the keyboard LED supposed to be ON after you boot up? I like to keep it, unless otherwise, but the setting doesn't stick after I shutdown the machine.

 

Really interested in this laptop following it since rumors of CES back in January.

Just a need some answers to a few questions considering that it's a huge investment.

1. Anyone with the 3k model how is battery life and scaling down to 1080 on that?
2. MSI warranty through Gentech or Xotic , do they get the job done?
3. Boot times?
4. How smoothly do video and photo editing applications run?

 

1. We had a 3k model to mess around on that wasn't officially the final production model but I doubt they changed anything to alter battery life. I believe it was around 3-4 hours battery on average use.
2. Warranty will virtually work the same. MSI covers their parts, the reseller covers their upgrades. The details vary from seller to seller so I'd recommend contacting each individually to see how they work and what is best for you.
3. Depends on the configuration. Default with a single SSD should see boot times in the 10-15 second mark with a clean install. With dual though I've seen 3-4 seconds on a clean install. Doesn't seem too significant reading numbers, but when you experience it... pretty tough to go any less.
4. Shouldn't have too much issue with those programs. Photo editing will be a breeze as will video, rendering long projects will still take a little time depending on the intricacy of the work. Should be a solid machine all around.

 

Nevermind....

 

Oh, you didn't exchange it? You don't want to miss the screen on it for sure though.

 

Excellent news. Obviously each chip is different so this may not work for everyone but I'll keep my fingers crossed for a decent chip which will likes low voltage and high clocks ;-)

 

There is a thread that fix the elan mouse pad for a lenovo laptop can anyone try if it fixes your problem http://forum.notebookreview.com/ideapad-essential/751866-installing-updated-elan-track-pad-drivers-y510p.html

 

Guys whats up with this.. any confirmation on why his temps are so high on the CPU... also @ACEFSPADE could you post some gpu temps under load too thanks

 

I don't have one yet but from what I've seen it's a little high.
What are the temperatures in your room and are you playing at a desk?

 

That is a best screen I have seen. I compared it with some IPS screens (Asus nv550jk and some others) and it is the best and thats the reason I maybe will exchange or reapeare it.

Can man buy it (just a screen) somewhere on the net?

 

It's very scarce so I doubt it.

 

The command is
powercfg -batteryreport

The best way to run it is to shift-right-click on the desktop, select "Open command window here", and run the command. That will generate a report.html on the desktop that you can open with your browser.

Could other people give this command a try and report their battery charge? Theoretical maximum is 55K, but after 1 week I have 52K. I'm afraid the issues I had with the laptop switching between battery and AC may have affected battery life.

 

this my first post on this forum, but I desperately need advice.

I have to decide whether to buy the GS60 pro (with GTX870m) by tomorrow.

Is it a good idea to buy it at the moment? I'm especially worried about the thermal issues, as I'm not comfortable with using a custom vBios or something like that.

Any help would be VERY much appreciated!

 

Screen:
MSI GS Series GS60 Ghost Pro-052 LCD LED Screen 15.6" FHD Gaming Laptop Display | eBay

Don't quote me on authenticity. Just found this with a google search

 

Per Ken's comments on page 11, the screen is a Samsung 156HL01-102 (SDC324C). It's new for this year, so will likely show up in some of Samsung's 15.6" laptops (among others).

Odd that you prefer it over the Asus NV550JK. It uses the exact same screen.

 

There are no real thermal issues per se'. Because the GS60 comes with a powerful gpu in a thin chassis, it tends to run fairly hot under load, that's it. Still works as advertised, no adjustment is required for standard operation.

Custom vbios / fan profiles are for those who want to improve on their computing experience in one way or another, be it adjusting acoustic qualities at idle, dropping temperature, improving performance or whatnot. These forum posts are simply a way for enthusiasts to share their findings, do not let that scare you away from a great laptop.

 

Exactly and we all have to start somewhere with our tinkering. A vbios is a little advanced but I'm sure people will help you out later down the line if you do wish to apply one.

 

Hi again guys.
I was the one how installed windows 7 and as soon as I installed the video drivers for the NVIDIA the laptop got frozen.
I finally was able to get my hands on a recovery DVD set ($35 from MSI)
I installed the recovery and the laptop works as charm again.
What could it be?
I tried every driver available at the MSI site as well as the NVIDIA site.
It's really strange.
CoD Ghost works relay good on this machine now.
I'm relly worried that something is wrong with this particular unit.
Any ideas?

 

thanks for the replies!

I take it you guys don't regret getting the GS60?

Especially that post saying that the GS60/GS70 can't handle the GTX870m on stock values had me worried. I don't want it to die on me after two years or so ...

I just read the new Asus G750 review on notebookcheck. Thermals and emissions look very promising .. but ooooh so heavy and bulky. Why can't there be the perfect laptop?

 

No offence, but i don't really agree with Sen7inel and mardon. In my opinion the GS60/70 are faulty designs.

Driving a system out of the box into low 90s on the gpu is borderline and not only results in throttling (which we don't really want in a gaming notebook, do we? ) but also is in my opinion critical for the lifespan of hardware.
In addition to that, we are talking about normal climatic scenarios. What about summer or customers from tropical or general southern countries?
It is designed without any thermal headroom and with borderline temps out of the box! So that's not tweaking on a very unnecessary level, it's not about big overclocking things here, but just trying to get the GS60/70 to deliver its stock performance without throttling and critical temps.
It's quite sad, as i was very excited on the GS60/70.

Although the high temps are always described with the thin chassis, which is correct of course, but what does that help us, to say "But you know, it's sooo thin" if the notebook throttles the performance down under the level, we would normally expect from a 870m and drives the device to very high temperatures and shortens lifespan...?

Although i appreciate the tricks given in this forum and optimizations like modded vbios shared by people like Sen7inel and others :thumbsup: i don't really like the idea of being "forced" to tweak things just to get acceptable temperatures. That's not my job, it's MSI's. Just make the case a little bit thicker. I would buy it immediately.

Unfortunately we only have the decision between super thin (which i don't need) or on the other hand bulky chassis, which are more than double as thick as the slim gamer.
I really would appreciate a notebook, which would be just normal thin (not super super paper thin ) and therefore had potential for a bigger fan and better, proper cooling in general.

Don't wanna prevent you, TeddyGirl, from buying. But just my 2 cents.

 

You can find the same screen in the 2014 Samsung Ativ 8 model (87Z5G) which is available since february - at least in Europe.

 

I totally hear you, Chris. I don't actually need something as thin as the GS60 as I won't be carrying it a lot. However the alternative is a huge 4+ kg brick and since I like working with the laptop on my actual lap this is very uncomfortable.

Devil or the deep blue sea? Grrr....

 

Cool. Thin. Powerful. Given today's technology, you can have any TWO out of these three

Acceptable temperatures are subjective, to call GS60/70 faulty based solely on conjecture might a bit of a stretch?

In any case, it sounds like you might be in the market for a different laptop chris_laptopfan, have you looked into the Gigabyte P35W as an alternative? It comes with an 870m, but is a bit thicker and as such might offer better thermals out of the box.

 

For your comparison, GS60 Ghost Pro weighs 1.96kg/4.35lb (w/battery).
P35W weighs 2.26kg/5.01lb (w/battery).

 

NOPE
Asus NV550JK has LG Display LP156WF4-SPB1, sitting in a front of both now.....

 

Temperature in my room is 75 degrees. I played on top of a coffee table. Going to try playing later today for another 30 minutes and see if i have the same results. I'll try to test the gpu too. I hope it wasn't a bad paste job, otherwise i will need to request for replacement. Thanks.

 

Anybody else have this issue...

When i squeeze the bottom right corner of the screen, it makes a little noise and doesn't feel solid. Think i got a bad one, hope XoticPC has a good replacement/return policy.

 

You can open a service ticket under the Contact section on our site and we'll be happy to help you with this.

 

i have order (in Italy) a gs60pro and the dealer has just told me that a new version of gs60 is in production and that it will replace the actual one in the first week of June.

As he said it will have a better i7 and more ram. do you heard any rumors like that ?

it would be interesting to discover if this hw revision actually exists or is announced and if it will have a better cooling design or heatsink improvement

 

For All the guys who have this Problem I have a fix If you want .

I glued these edges myself and it is quite easy !
here is a little tutorial with pictures.

1. get a knife like this and some superglue :



2. tape the lid of the laptop




3. put some superglue on the knife like this:




4. Open the lid with a fingernail (like in the picture above) and put in the knife to apply the glue.
After that pull the knife out and press the metal and the plastic together.
Wait a minute and remove the tape.

5. here is my result:
Left edge:


right edge:


looks like new :thumbsup:

 

T

That's will be the Pro with 3000k screen. It's got a slightly faster CPU and 6Gb ram on GPU.

 

3000K screen might be a tad excessive lol.
But yes, I agree with mardon, it's the 3k display with the new i7-4710HQ (which should be exactly the same as 4700, but with a 100MHz bump to the clocks.....which you can do yourself (and more) via Intel's XTU).

 

Although I can understand that this laptop is not exactly what you would like, unfortunately, you can never make everyone happy. If MSI did release this laptop with a slightly thicker chassis and slightly heavier, but slightly lower temps, then you would other people complaining 'oh if only MSI had made this slightly thinner and lighter this laptop would be perfect because I don't care about a couple extra degrees because I always play on a cooler and/or I will undervolt the laptop and/or I don't play games that stress the GPU that hard.' Unfortunately you can never make everyone happy. (and as others have noted, all temps are safely under the 'max temp' for each component. I personally don't think there is anything faulty in the design, but again to each their own, and I hope you're able to find a laptop that is exactly what you want)

 

Generally you are right of course, Sen7inel. But these technologic possibilities are no digital steps, no black and white, but rather greyscales.
In the moment we unfortunately only have these 'black or white choices' though. Either you take a super slim laptop, but get serious heat issues or you have to pick a double as thick and heavy notebook, like the Clevos or MSI GT Series.
I'm quite sure, it would be possible to make a combination out of them. Not super thin but not bulky either. And as we see that a 870m can be cooled more or less in a very slim notebook but with very (for me too) high temps, i am sure it would be doing great in a "normal slim" laptop with still high, but noticeably lower and absolutely safe temps without throttling and at least a bit of a thermal headroom!

Don't get me wrong, guys! I don't wanted to denigrate the GS60/70 and i honestly wish you the best with your new notebooks!
Maybe it was a bit harsh to call them faulty designs, i didn't want to offend somebody, but if the GS60/70 throttles in stock settings out of the box and reaches low 90s , it clearly shows that the cooling system isn't really capable for that hardware.
Great tips and tricks of the community seem to help quite a bit, but out of the box the cooling is in my opinion unsufficient and has no thermal headroom for summer, warmer countries. That is to me no well thought out product design.

Thanks for the tip with the P35W v2, Sen7inel. I already know about that notebook and i'm very excited.
But if i remember correctly, the chassis is nearly as thin (+ 1-2 mm?) as the GS60's and has the same cpu and gpu. Therefore i am not very confident about the P35W v2 temperatures as well. But i would love to be proved wrong.

@ Sen7inel: Did you see only lower temps on the cpu from XTU CPU undervolting or at least slightly lower temps on the gpu as well in benchmarks and gaming? Did you repaste cpu and gpu with IC Diamond or similar? Did it lower the temps?

 

It sounds like theyre just putitngin the i7 that is 100 higher clock speed. and more ram you can get with ordering from xotic or gentec so... I dont think these are big updates..

now if the new version had a maxwell 870 or better cooling.. that might be something worth waiting for... I myself have been following the gs60 pro for 2 months now and still havent made the purchase so... well see

 

I just got my GS60 this morning and was super excited to finally get it after waiting almost a month for my order to arrive. After plugging it in and turning it on, my excitement was deflated. I knew going in about the fans being audible, but they're a lot more audible than I anticipated when idle. Sitting in my office with a very high end PC and a work laptop, and the new GS60 being the furthest away from me with these other two computers closer, I could easily hear the fan of the GS60 over the other two. I was shocked at how audible it was and this had been me reading all the people discussing the issues and preparing myself to expect it. I have another laptop where you can hear the fan when idle, so I was expecting something closer to that. I've tried the quiet profile that someone posted and the noise reduction just isn't enough. I'm sad to say that this is likely going back since I just came from a laptop that was at least this loud due to age and was hoping to get back to being a bit more quiet.

 

Yeah, thats whats holding me back from hitting the buy button.... that scares me

 

Agreed.

I wouldn't say it's subjective, since hotter temperatures can lead to throttling and/or uncomfortable touch surfaces. But without hard facts/data from multiple sources, it's hard to make that assessment.

Sorry to hear that. One thing to do though, is let the computer idle for a while, and make sure to turn off sleep or hibernate because for some reason Windows 8/8.1 likes to spin some processes a while, which puts load on the CPU and hence the fan. Not an excuse, if you don't like the loudness of the fans when loaded for gaming or whatnot, then that's an issue. But I've noticed a lot of new PC's have a significant load on the system for a little while. I think a lot of it is the anti-virus (Defender) scanning everything, as well as who knows what else.

 

This was just my exact same experience, but with the older GS70 with 765M a few months back. I had to return it.
On their product page, they market the thing as silent...

Sent from my GT-I9505 using Tapatalk

 

i have the gs60 860m version with 2X ssd and 16gb ram not sure if those stats make a difference but i do not notice any loud audible sound from the fans when on idle.. or even when just using word or the generic program while sitting in class.... i have even been using this laptop in quite zones in the library and at home next to my sleeping partner with no issues.This laptop runs pretty silent considering, but the fans can get pretty loud when the gpu is running.

-side note.

Anyone recommend any good protection for the laptop? any sleeves or such i should look into?

 

Would anyone know whether the HDMI / mDP ports on the GS60 Pro are muxed or hardwired to the nVidia card?

 

The external ports are hardwire to the dGPU i.e. NVIDIA card, which makes the GS60 very attractive for using multiple displays with higher refresh rates for instance.

 

Thanks for the tip on the screen seam. I love this machine but the gap around the screen has been bugging me.

 

I don't really blame the manufacturers. Looking at the product announcements and design specs, it's pretty obvious that most of these new laptops were expecting the Maxwell nVidia mobile GPUs to be out by now. Unfortunately those have been delayed by a year, purportedly due to TSMC having trouble getting the 20 nm lithography up and running. If you look at nVidia's 8xxm lineup, it's fairly clear they were expecting the size decrease for moving from 28nm to 20nm. That didn't happen, and the 870m and higher Maxwell chips are too big at 28nm (Maxwell has about 20% more transistors than Kepler for similar performance). So the manufacturers aren't getting the lower power/heat Maxwell processors they were designing around, and the cooling systems are being pushed to handle the higher-power Kepler GPU.

To give you an idea, the early reviews for the Gigabyte P34G v2 are coming in. Its CPU/GPU is identical to the GS60 except it uses a Maxwell 860m instead of a Kepler 860m. The reviews are reporting CPU temps in the low 90s, but GPU temps in the low 70s. And the P34G uses a shared heatsink, so the high CPU temp is probably raising the GPU temps. Based on the CPU temps, its cooling system is significantly worse than the GS60 (high 70s/low 80s CPU temp). But because its GPU is Maxwell it manages to hit the same GPU temps as the GS60's Kepler despite the weaker cooling.

I get the impression that had TSMC managed to get 20nm working by 1Q2014 as promised, allowing nVidia to roll out Maxwell versions of the 860m, 870m, and 880m in 1Q2014, we'd be seeing much more reasonable power, heat, and noise figures for these laptops.

But given the way events unfolded, if you want the thin, powerful, but cool version of the GS60, you need to get the one with the 860m. My guess is the GS60 was supposed to have the 870m all along, but the high power consumption and heat when it remained Kepler forced them to redesign a version with the 860m. Being that the motherboard and software were already designed with a Kepler GPU in mind, it was easier for them to go with the Kepler 860m. That's my theory.

 

Hard to consider the 860m version settling . Still for my money and usage experience the better of the two options for this chassis.

I can't wait to see a Maxwell version in the future refresh next year, that will be the true winner :thumbsup:

 

Seriously? They don't go through the Intel IGP? Wow that is great actually. Except when plugged in to an external your fans might spin more because the dedicated GPU will always be running.

 

I acquired this attractive laptop today.

However it came with Windows 8.1 bloated with crap, not to mention I never trust my OS to parties unknown. Standard procedure for me is to reformat and reinstall OS immediately.

This laptop didn't even come with a Windows product key, will I have to pull it out of the registry?

Also as a side-note, will Truecrypt work on win8.1 for full system encryption or will I have to use bitlocker?

 

Windows 8 copies that are provided OEM have the key hidden in BIOS to cut down on stolen keys. You can use magical jelly bean to pull it though. No idea on truecrypt though.

 

Thanks for the name of that application.
Do you know where I can acquire a clean copy of the regular win 8.1? (I assume the key won't work for 8.1 pro)
I was sort of hoping to avoid getting it from a torrent somewhere, but it seems like Microsoft doesn't provide the installer image.

 

If it was Win7, yes. I haven't come across a repository for Win8 images yet though.