Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
Sry also found them as normal ssd
Look for example here:
Crucial 128GB M2 SATA NGFF M550 Solid State Drive, SSD - Flexx ram
read 550 MB/S and read 350 Mb /S so approximately 100 MB/S slower ?
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Can you please share the link? I tried to search on msi forum without any success
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Ok so I finally recieved my unit from the states. It spent longer in customs than it took to get to New Zealand from United States. I'd highly recommend GenTech PC if you're going to do an international order, their support service is fantastic and was able to put up with my badgering as I anxiously awaited the arrival of my laptop, props to them!
I have come from an ASUS UX51 which I loved to use immensly. Notebooks & Ultrabooks - UX51VZ , the design is elegent, it's light weight, nice keyboard and screen but not without its issues. Basically the MSI had to live up to this and more. My primary uses are Game Development, Game playing and generally lounging around surfing the web.
My (EDIT: NOT-SO)mini-review is of the GS60-052, i7 4710Q, 12GB, 128GBSSD+512GBSSD, GTX 870M, 1080P
Screen :
This is the first thing you see with this laptop and it is certianly one of it's strongest qualities. I love it, it's bright, saturated and has a lovely colour gamut. It's an absolute pleasure to look at not just because it's 1080p but because it's brilliant colours. Side by side with my UX51 it really stood out. The UX51 looked great on it's own but next to the MSI the UX51's reds were orange, the magentas were blue , the greens were lime and the yellows were dull. However with the MSI next to a wide gamut display, notably the Dell U2711 the MSI took the place of the UX51, but the difference wasn't quite as wide to the naked eye. The contrast is also fantastic, with really deep blacks contrasting with really nice colours and very little banding. In terms of light bleeding I have none noticable and the backlight turns blueish at much fewer angles than the IPS in the UX51, basically only from top down from the side. In general I find the display incredibly pleasing and since it's the thing you'll be looking at all the time it really becomes the most important part. if you're on the fence between the 3k and the 1080p I'd say you definitely won't be disappointed with the 1080p version (plus all the windows scaling benefits of 1080p at 15"). I'd be hesitant to pick the GS70 over the GS60 just because you want a larger notebook as the GS70 uses a TN panel I believe and the quality/viewing angles will simply not compare to the Samsung PLS (156HL01-102 according to linux) display in the GS60.
Performance :
This laptop does not disappoint, coming from the UX51 which had a GT650M to the GS60 with its GTX 870M is light years beyond it in terms of graphics performance. It even comes close to one of the GTX670 cards in my desktop setup. One of the slower games on the market at the moment is DayZ, which ran fluid smooth on this laptop (except for the usual lag spots in the game). Currently DayZ is very CPU limited, requiring very strong single threaded performance, but the mobile 4710 didn't really have much of a problem with it at all, and is on par with my desktop which sports an i7 980X (still really fast even today). Crysis 1 ran smooth floating between 45-60fps, Natural Selection 2 45-60fps, Sniper Elite 2 zombie something 40-60fps, all my games are incredibly playable and I'm blown away about how fast such a thin laptop can get.
As for SSD performance I haven't really noticed any problems. With mine I got GenTech to replace the 1TB HDD with a 512GB SSD (M500) which performs admirably with my linux install on it. The stock SSD is the 128GB M.2 drive and I'm half regretting not upping it to the 256GB one but it still shouldn't have any issues. The UX51 by comparison had 2x 128GB SSDs in RAID0 and was lightning fast on paper (700MB/s), however in reality I can't tell the difference between the two when it comes to launching apps or booting OSes. I think we're all rather spoilt when it comes to I/O performance these days.
Heat :
Heat most definitely is a thing to consider for this laptop and for comfortable playing you'll probably want a lap desk if you like sitting on a sofa couch like me. However I found that if I put the back end of the laptop off the end of my knees it felt fine even during heavy gaming, but your milage will vary (depends on your height, size of your legs, slumpiness of your chair). The only real area that has any issue with heat is the bottom at the back of the laptop. At the end of the day I'll just be making a tough cardboard plate to put under the laptop when I'm using it for gaming on my lap. The WSAD area never really got warm for me during gaming and the palm rests the same, I feel like the thermal zones on this laptop are really well thought out with all the heat at the back of the machine. Compared to the UX51 which at idle was ice cold the MSI doesn't do too bad, under linux I can get the same ice cold tempuratures at idle but not under windows (more on that later). Under heavy load the UX51 was still very lappable and barely noticable, which is a big difference when going to the MSI. However the MSI just reminds me of my old Dell XPS 1640 so I'm pretty used to it.
Noise :
I for one am never concerned about noise on a laptop and this one is no exception. The low hum of the fan is nothing more than a mere background noise that fades out when you start focusing on what you're doing. When you get into gaming the fans ramp up quite a bit and are much more audible, however this is to be expected of pretty much any laptop while gaming. In comparison to the UX51 it's deinfitely a good deal louder, where at idle the UX51 could not be heard and while gaming was only very mild at best.
Keyboard :
Another stand out feature of this laptop, not without its problems. The UX51 has a very similar layout to this keyboard and as such fails in the same ways ( arrow key placement ). My only real gripe here is the layout so let me elaborate on that first. Where the pause break button is above back space I much prefer my delete key to be as it's a key I use a lot while typing and now it's hidden above the numpad in the middle of a whole bunch of other keys. The windows key, probably a issue with gamers, I'd prefer to be back where it was and probably in the place of the fn key as I use it a lot in linux for keyboard shortcuts (I realise I'm the minority here). Compared to the UX51 I much prefer the GS60s layout of the special function keys like volume and screen brightness, kudos for this as it makes it way easier to find and operate them (having them on the F# keys just makes them confusing to find when you need them), along with the keyboard brightness keys on the numpad + and -, really good idea.
Dat keyboard font, why couldn't they have chosen something a bit more subtle :\
Onto the good, I loved the keyboard on the UX51, it had great amounts of travel and feedback, but this steelseries keyboard on the GS60 is just fantastic, it's an order of magnitude better than the UX51's keyboard, and that really is saying something. The keys feel really good and it's such a pleasure to type on. The switches have the perfect amount of resistance really decent travel. There's no flex in the keyboard itself, it just feels rock solid when you're typing away on it, which is very reassuring. When you hammer down on the keys as you type it has that really dull thud noise that doesn't last too long or reverberate through the chasis. This keys only have a very dull click making the keyboard very quiet and the switches have absolutely no rattle to them when you depress the key. When the keys are in their dperessed state that have no wobble to them, they sit there solidly awaiting your key press which is just lovely, I hate it when yoiu're gently resting your fingers on a key and they wobble side to side if you jiggle your hand a little, it just makes them seem like they have poor switches under the key caps.. I really look forward to spending hours banging out code on this keyboard. I only use mechnical switch keyboards on my desktops (work and home) so I have very high standards (I won't touch an HP keyboard with a 10ft barge poll, they are just the definition of cheap and disgusting feeling).
The lighting on the keyboard is a little too tacky at it's default setting but that's quickly fixed through the software and I love the fact that you can have any colour backlighting for the keyboard, I just wish the presets were saved to a firmware on the motherboard and didn't just work in windows software. However without the software the backlighting still works just fine (just without colour customisation options) with the brightness keys still adjusting the backlighting. On ubuntu as you tap the keyboard brightness up key it goes from red -> birighter red -> salmon -> white, and this is perfectly fine for me. The backlighting isn't as bright or as uniformly bright as the UX51 but to be honest i don't think it needs to be. At the dimmest setting it's bright enough to make it easy to find any of the keys in a dark room (which presumably is where you need backlighting).
Trackpad :
The trackpad is a big gripe for many users but to be honest I find that an over reaction. The textured surface actually works very well for me and the touchpad works beautifully under linux, supporting up to 5-finger gestures. I actually find myself prefering the touch pad to the glassy touchpad on the UX51 as over time I felt that my fingers become slightly sweety and that created too much friction on the trackpad causing fatigue. On the GS60 however the slight texture helps alleviate that and I can glide around on it for days. My only real problem with the trackpad is it's stiffness for clicking down on the pad, far too much pressure is required to get the bloody thing to depress. The amount of pressure in each of the bottom corners is acceptable but I'm used to being able to click anywhere on the bottom half, I only hope this will loosen up over time. For now I'll have to get used to tap to click again. To me the trackpad feels super responsive. It is workable under windows, and it really shines under ubuntu linux (along with touchegg for gesture support). Under linux two finger scrolling works everytime and is a joy to use, two finger right click similar. I love the size and position of the trackpad and couldn't really ask for anything more except ease of click pad depression. I feel the windows Elan software is what really lets the touch pad down and it's a real shame because the hardware is good.
Build Quality and Design :
The build quality of this laptop is fantastic, it feels solid yet very light weight. The magnesium alloy might not appeal to some though as it can feel like it might be flimsy or weak compared to an aluminium case, like on the UX51, but regardless it's strong and without bad amounts of flex. Given that, I feel the weight of the GS60 really makes up for it as it's just super light, somewhat noticably comapred to the UX51 which is a light laptop is its own right (2.2kg). One thing that I really like is the edge of the laptop facing the user, on the front of the wrist rest, is ROUNDED. No longer does my laptop dig into my palms painfully and this alone makes typing a pleasure. This was a problem I had with the UX51 and the macbook air line of notebooks, they sacrific user comfort for design.
The build quality of the screen is about what you'd expect from something so thin, it's a little bendy but not in any way that's detrimental and the compromise on weight I feel is a good one. However with my unit in the top right corner I feel like some of the glue has come away that bonds the shroud/bezel to the back plate, and everytime I apply pressure there I hear a disconcerting noise, a click or kinds.
The design is somewhat of a sore point for me as I wish it were a bit more elegant, a bit more subtlte, no stickers on the visiable surface (One newer dell XPS laptops all the stickers are hidden under a metal door on the bottom of the latpop). I could do without the MSI racecar logo and I'd prefer a two tone colour scheme for the chasis, some sort of grey and black, or silver and grey. To me the MSI brand logo screams 2004 and it's italics silver writing seems to clash with the actual design of the laptop iteself. I could do without the angled lines that flank the keyboard as they just don't look right, similar to the lines on the lid. I feel there also too many secondary colours at play here all over the laptop. You have blue/orange for the power notification LED, gold for the stereo and microphone jacks, black for the chasis, silver for the champhered edge around the touchpad, blue on the USB ports, red and black on the MSI symbol on the lid, blue for the status LEDs and by default your eyes are stabbed with a rainbow of colours with the keyboard backlight. I'd really prefer this hardware in a chasis with a simpler more elegant design language and that's what I'll miss from my old UX51, it sure was a looker.
As for the wrist wrest one of the best laptops I have ever used in terms of comfort and probably looks is the Dell XPS L521X AnandTech | Dell XPS 15 L521X: A Detailed First Look. It's something I would have liked to have seen here. It uses a rubberised finish on the surface that just feels amazingly soft on the skin and makes it a pleasure to type on. No finger prints are left on the surface and it remained uniformly clean. Which brings me to my other problem with the design is this laptop and that is that it's a finger print magnet, there is just no conceivable way I'm going to keep this laptop looking clean. The UX51 got around this by having a metal finish where the colours for it's two tone design were bright enough that you wouldn't see any finger marks, and the dark parts of the laptop weren't shiny. I think if MSI were to stick with the black colour it'd be nice if the rubberised the wrist wrest all the way i up to the screen or made it with a matte finish similar to the keys and touchpad.
Audio :
The headphone jack on this notebook works as expected and supplies acceptable output. I run it out to a headphone amp (the M600) with a pair of Sennheiser HD650s, and as of yet I have no reason to doubt it's capability. The speakers are about what I expect on a notebook like this, they supply passable audio and I don't really expect any more from them. If you're doing any music listening, movie watching or gaming on a laptop you'd want to use headphones anyway, no matter what laptop you're using so I don't really see it as much of a problem. It'll play the odd youtube video loud enough and with enough clarity so that people in your vacinity will hear it properly. Beyond that I wouldn't expect any miracles. I have yet to try the microphone input and doubt I ever will.
Linux :
Installing linux on this badboy is a breeze. I used Ubuntu 14.04 off a USB stick and the entire process went off without a single hitch. Which is in stark contrast to my old UX51 which had RAID0 SSDs and UEFI hurdles (mind you that was probably more of a problem with Ubuntu 13.04). I had to do nothing special to get it setup and going. After installing bumblebee and powertop the power savings on the laptop become obvious, sitting at idle with 1/4 screen brightness the laptop will sip away at the battery at a staggeringly low 5.8W, giving just under 10hrs of battery life. If you start listenting to music, and in my case an internet stream through VLC the power usage jumps up to about 7-9W depending on the situation giving the laptop about 6-7hrs of listeneing time. However when you start doing some real work involving web browsing, coding, writing out documents the power usage goes up hovering between 10-15W depending on the situation providing an admirable 4hrs of battery life. Watching youtube or h264 content will drop your time to about 3-2.5hrs. The great thing is under linux there are lots of things to tweak and I've barely scratched the surface when it comes to power tweaks. For starters I think the CPU scheduler isn't aggressive enough at power saving and it often jumps to turbo speeds when maybe it doesn't have to.
Multi-gesture input really shines on linux with the use of touchegg and I think it really blows windows out of the water when it comes to usability. However this requires some manual configuration so it won't appeal to those who aren't comfortable in a different operating enviroment. With effortless swipes I can reliably two finger scroll, navigate back and forth through programs that have back and forwards functionality, view a widget dashboard, view all windows in a mosiac on the current desktop, zoom out and view all desktops, switch left and right through all virtual desktop and adjust the audio volume up and down. I use KDE for my window manager and because the touchpad can so reliably accept gestures I've done away with the task bar and use gestures instead for app switching. We'll see how long that lasts though.
An aspect I really appreciate with this laptop is the power status LED is NOT software dependant. Even under linux it'll show blue when it's on the intel video card and orange when it's using the nvidia video card, fantastic!
Optical Media :
Thank goodness it doesn't have any of that rubbish! i do find it confusing though that the box comes with software CDs packaged but no USB DVD drive. I feel that's a little redundant. The fact that this laptop doesn't have a DVD drive is incredibly forward thinking. Considering the massive amounts of space a DVD/BR drive consumers for the 0.1% of the laptops life where you'd actually use it shows that MSI understands there's no real justification for an internal DVD drive, particularly for a gaming laptop where everything is downloaded through an online service. If you really need access to a CD or DVD there are USB external drives for this that sell for super cheap.
Battery :
My feelings about the battery are mixed. Under linux the laptop can do a pretty decent job of squeezing as much time as possible out of the battery but I can't help but feel the internal design of the laptop could have benefited from losing the 3.5" (EDIT: 2.5", thanks backfire) HDD bay. I'm not entirely sure how relevant that drive bay is and I would have much prefered they filled up that space with the battery and just made people use the M.2 slots. Under windows the battery life is somewhat of a downer. Most people will say "Oh but it's a gaming laptop, you should just expect that", which I disagree with. The GS60 is the embodiment of the whole idea of breaking the mold when it comes to gaming laptop stereotypes. It's thin and light, yet it has lots of powerful hardware and if you'd asked anyone for this 2 years ago they'd have laughed in your face saying it was impossible and you shouldn't expect anything else. I feel like this notebook could double as a really great work horse and little more longevity would have helped with that. These kind of gaming laptops have higher margins and with that I think we should raise our expectations of what makes a truely great laptop. If we want it they will make it
Weight :
This thing is incredibly light making it perfect for using on your laptop, transporting in a backpack and taking to work/LANs. I really appreciate how light this laptop is but somehow get that feeling that 200-300grams could have been used to add some extra battery life, make the speakers a little nicer, improve on the screen build quality or add some extra cooling fins as my old UX51 comes in at 2.2kg vs 1.9kg and it still feels very light for a notebook.
Wow ok, I didn't think I'd be able to type that much on a laptop I've only really had for a few days but there it is. Thanks to the great keyboard on this laptop it was a real pleasure to type out. -
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Thank you
. I haven't had any WiFi issues yet, I can't remember what exactly people were having issues with. So far I've only tried it on a 5ghz Wireless N network on both windows and linux. I will investigate further.
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MSI GS60 Ghost/ Ghost Pro Thread
Discussion in 'MSI' started by GreaseMonkey90, Jan 14, 2014.
