MSI GS60 Ghost/ Ghost Pro Thread

Very nice!! :thumbsup:

 

Does anyone have a copy of the 504 or 505EC firmware? I want to flash a lower fan speed and it seems the 506 and 507 doesn't allow this.

 

there you go: http://dl.msi.com/download_files/frm_exe/16H2EMS1.504.zip
would you report back if it works and if it supports the old settings? would love to get back to something quiter

 

Nice one! I'll have a look now!

 

The ealier EC works fine and lowers the fan RPM to 2580rpm.

I've changed the following settings
CPU 43% Fan speed from 0C & 100% Fan Speed from 90C
GPU Lowered threshold to 83C and fan will be at 100% from this point. Should lower temperatures slightly.

Here's the file:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1j20zxpzan0ozg5/Modded EC.zip?dl=0

On a side not on battery with an underclocked CPU to 11W which is pretty decent! I wonder if I turn the Nvidia GPU off in the Bios if we can squeeze more time out of the battery,

 

Is there a way to reassign Fn key combos to other keys? For instance, I want to reassign Fn + arrow keys to Fn + wasd keys, so I can adjust volume and screen brightness with one hand. Being able to assign Fn to the right ctrl, or some other key combination would also work.

I'm not able to find a way to do that using the SteelSeries engine. Any ideas?

 

This is the limitation which requires the EC firmware to be modified.
The only person who knows how to do this is Svet from MSI forum.
Svet's Profile

 

I'm in the USA, so mine was sent to California for the RMA. I still haven't had a chance to go through and do all the performance optimizations (undervolt+oc gpu and change the fans; no point in playing with the cpu until I repaste...right now when I run the xtu cpu stress test, it hits 90C within 5sec and the the cpu gets throttled soon after that, which is about as bad as it gets). Unfortunately I first need to reinstall windows for the upteenth time as I'm going to go back to AHCI from my current RAID0 with 2 m550s (for the curious it gets around 900MB/s read/write). I wonder if we should spin up a new thread regarding gs60 pro tweaking/optimizations and keep the first to post to list all the tweaks/downloads/how-tos, as it's starting to be difficult to find things in this thread, even for someone who's read every post.

 

I agree. I keep meaning to do more guides but with the machine being away for a month and very busy with work I've not had the chance.

 

Ya, unfortunately work has been relatively nuts for me as well recently (I'm hoping for that to calm down sometime next month and to actually get to finally play a game on this laptop) and like you, I had 3 weeks of the machine down as well...1 week for me to actually have the time to put it back to stock factory parts and ship it, and 2 weeks in RMA.
This laptop is meant to be my main driver for both personal and work, which is why I've been spending countless hours dealing with encryption.....my life would have been much easier if this laptop just supported ATA passwords. Since it doesn't, I'm using an unsupported (at work; not that I care about support, but it can be a pain from software point of view) windows 8.1 just so that I can use Bitlocker's eDrive....but then that means I can't RAID0 for my personal stuff (so in the end I'll have a win8.1Pro on 1TB 840Evo encrypted through eDrive for work, and another win8.1pro on two 256GB m550s also encrypted through eDrive, but as separate drives and not raided/striped. I even tried having one OS in AHCI and the other in RAID0 and switch between the two each time I switch the OS, but it doesn't seem to like that)

I actually need to go to a store to get some fresh IC Diamond (not as brave as you to play with liquid ultra). Also, nice OC and results; once I get everything where it needs to be, I'll post my new results.

 

Do all the GS60 ghost pro models have IPS (or equivalent) screens? Asking because the user review for this MSI GS Series GS60 Ghost-013 on Newegg mentions a poor TN display.

 

Apparently the recent steam update caused the nvidia control panel to list default behavior as dedicated graphics instead of integrated.

In case anyone else was wondering why the orange light was on all the time.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

I've no experience with the encryption side of things. It's sounds like a pain!

I've Repasted the CPU with liquid ultra as there's not really much chance of damage by leakage. I'm going to get some icdiamond for the GPU this time.
They honoured my warranty and didn't mention the repaste at all but no explanation was given as to what went wrong so I'm going to play it safe this time.

 

Finally got hold of my GS60 2PE and just turned it on. Can someone give me some links and advice for the necessary downloads/software/drivers I need. Thanks.

 

I just received my gs60 a week ago (love it), but the battery life is a little short, may you guys give some tips to improve the battery life. And also the CPU fan is always on even at sub 35 temps, is there a fix to this issue.
Much thanks in advance:hi2:

 

Battery life goes up to 3 hours which is pretty good considering this is a high performance gaming system.
You can improve the battery life by minimizing environmental settings to try to get to 3 hours but no more than that.

 

I read about the new Maxwell cards 970m and 980m. The GS60 will be refeshed eith an 970m but would the performance be significant better than the 870m. I also heared that nvidia just improved the energy effiecency.
I paid 1200€ and the new one would cost me 600€ more. What would you recommend. Sell now and wait ?

 

I am waiting. I was excited for the GS60 Ghost Pro but after seeing the temps. I just said no, and wait for Maxwell. Hopefully MSI will keep a version with an IPS 1080p screen and a GTX970M.

 

It will be about the same, since the GPU gets about the same amount of allocation from battery.
Unless MSI can improve the battery density in the notebook, otherwise it will require more R&D time to fine tune the PCB design.

 

Re the improved performance, it's impossible to tell at the stage but looking at how good the maxwell 860m is I'm inclined to think the 970m will be impressive and run a lot cooler. Who knows when the refresh will be. My guess will be early next year.
I'm very happy with my 870m, it took some tweaking to get it running at temperatures I'm happy with. It plays most games at very high or high detail settings at 1080p.

 

For 3D usage, remember that the battery supply is the same, you can get some gains from the GPU since Maxwell is more efficient per watt.
Or perhaps it uses lesser power when compared with Kepler, thus you may gain a bit of battery time if you play game on battery.
1. Same battery consumption but more performance.
2. Lesser battery consumption but same performance.
This depends on MSI to manage the choices.

If it's just standard 2D usage, then it's Intel processor that handles the rendering, therefore the same amount of battery life should be expected as GPU is not factored in here.

 

for those who find the auto-dimming nature of the screen annoying:

The screen will brighten up when viewing bright images and darken when viewing dark images. This brightness shift is quite obvious.

After having a pretty decent look through this giant thread, I didn't find anyone addressing the annoying auto-dimming of the screen. I thought it must have been built into the firmware of the screen but after some playing around I found a way to turn if off. From what I can gather, it was just a feature of the Intel HD graphics chip used to save power. You can simply disable it:

Intel graphics properties > Power > the "on battery" tab > and disable the "Display Power Saving Technology"

the auto dimming feature seems to be enabled regardless of if you're plugged in or on battery. So disabling this seems to disable it for both battery and when plugged in.

you can also find a similar feature in the windows power options (in the advanced power settings) but turning the "auto dimming" feature off did not seem to fix this issue.

Lastly, I am assuming any kind of auto-dimming feature will be disabled when switched to the nvdia gfx. But I have not tested this. I apologies if this has been covered in the thread already.

I hope this helps some people

 

In igfx still handle the output of the Graphics even when the discrete GPU is doing the work.
Is this auto dimming only on the 3k version? I don't see it on my 1080p model.

 

I am using the 3k screen. So it may only be on this screen and not the 1080p model.

 

hey, i got back to 504 as well and also back to 2580 on idle till 55°C. but now it happens, that the fan jumps to 3300rps to go then back to 2800 (44% i guess). have you got a similar issue or do you know if there are values in the fantables over 44% that are invalid and cause the jumping? also deinstalled SCM (some older laptops had a problem with it), but still, after some time it just starts to jump even if the temperature is not surpassing 55%°. if the jumping would be gone, i'd be totally in love with the machine! oh, i did not use your file as i dont have a 870m. made my own with svets tool.

 

I've not noticed it jumping around but I've been gaming with a headset on. I'll keep an eye on it and report back.

 

There was a similar issue but from the past with GE60 reported by others.
We haven't heard of such issue with GS60, but it's definitely recommended to use the newest version of BIOS and EC firmware.
It's possible that the issue is there with perhaps a particular brand of cooling fan, or the fan values were invalid as you have mentioned.

 

Maybe I'll get in touch with Svet. The fan values don't change on the newest EC.

 

If Svet cannot fix it then it's possibly a defective fan.
Svet was able to resolve the issue on the GE60.

 

Well if the fan will clock down on the older firmwares on all gs60s and not on the newer firmwares I'm hoping it's software. Much easier to fix

 

THANK YOU!!! I am so annoyed by this. I WILL TRY IT OUT. I have the Pro version 1080p.

 

Wow I have the pro version and I've never ever noticed this dimming??

 

yeah take it off from power to battery and then go from picture of something then to desktop. it changes and annoys me.

 

A question for the resellers: I notice that many of you offer, for a modest fee, over clocking and/or windows tuning services. Considering the challenges with heat, etc, would it be out of the question to have the CPU/gpu undervolting done by you guys?

Not that XTU is intimidating, but, the vbios stuff certainly could be. It might be kind of nice to get that beautiful slab of hardware in the mail and know that it is ready to go right out of the box.

 

We dont offer any undervolting services.

 

I installed the new audio driver. but Im not happy with it. do you know where to get the old driver. Generic driver does not work. Needs to be special version from msi...

 

They are not available at the MSI download page? I remember they used to put previous versions as well as new versions.

 

Well I couldn't find my mx-2 that I bought like a year ago for $1, but I did find my ~5 year old IC Diamond, and apparently that thing has an awesome shelf life cause after re-applying it, I'm back to the same temps that I had after GenTech's IC Diamond application. The RMA folks clearly detached the cpu and did not reapply the thermal paste...it was terrible. Now I'm wondering if the GPU was touched by them..... I did try and and unscrew the 4 screws holding the GPU, but it wouldn't budge, so I'm guessing either I missed another screw, or they didn't touch it.

 

Well, after running Metro 2033, it seems as though RMA also messed up the GPU paste. After 10 runs with "Options: Resolution: 1920 x 1080; DirectX: DirectX 11; Quality: Very High; Antialiasing: AAA; Texture filtering: AF 16X; Advanced PhysX: Enabled; Tesselation: Enabled; DOF: Disabled" max temp was at 94C and avg fps was at 32.5...... whereas the last time I ran this before sending it off for RMA, my max temp was 78C and avg fps 46.10.
Time to take the laptop apart again....

 

The screws really are on tight. Be careful not to round them. Try using a thin elastic band between the screw and the driver for more grip.
I'll be interested to know your temps afterwards. Is it a while now board?

 

Also had this problem. One screw of the cpu was round so i exchanged it with the screw of the msata ssd, because they are the same size. Could i get problems with the msi service if i send it in for repair, because of the rounded screw?

 

What programs do you guys use to monitor your hardware temp and performance
And also what is the program w/pink performance letters w/fps, CPU, Gpu temps

 

Mine got sorted and had a slightly rounded screw. They even used the same one and sent it back.

 

Core temp started with Windows for CPU.
Msi afterburner with OSD monitoring fps, mem use, core speed, ram speed and temp.

 

Nvidia inspector and intel xtu have lots of nice graphing options.

 

I wrote that poorly; what I was trying to communicate was that I did unscrew the 4 screws holding the GPU, but the GPU still wouldn't budge when I tried to remove it from the mobo (after removing the 4 screws holding the CPU, the CPU came right off). It sounds like there are only the 4 mentioned screws holding the GPU to the mobo, and it should come right up after that. What I think I'll try is to run a gpu benchmark right before taking the laptop apart again...that way the thermal paste will hopefully not be 'hardened' but instead nice and soft which should help with the removal of the GPU (I'm guessing the thermal paste is acting like a glue atm).

 

I use all the ones posted above, as well as HWMonitor

 

But what is the program w/pink writing w/the fps,CPU, and Gpu temps in game?

 

Ah I'm with you! Yeah there's defo only the 4. Good idea, get it warm remove the screws then try rotating it.

 

Of the ones mentioned, you want 'Msi afterburner with OSD monitoring fps' and fraps is another popular choice (though I prefer afterburner).
Also, depending on the game you're playing, you should look into if it has an FPS setting you can enable. That should be the best choice from a performance pov.