MSI GS60 Ghost/ Ghost Pro Thread

I've had this problem on my GS60 and the GT60 I also own. It's because of APM in the HDD, as others have said. I use CrystalDiskInfo, allows complete customization of settings and solves the problem.

Crystal Dew World

 

It's more about battery performance than hdd wear.

 

I'm trying it out and it seems to do the job - thanks!

What settings do you have yours on? I've got mine on FEh just to test it out

The HDD is getting a bit warmer than usual (38C) - as expected with the new APM settings - but at least the noise is completely eliminated.

Should 80 hr be enough to prevent to spin down?

 

80h means "Minimum power consumption without Standby" so it probably will be enough. But it depend on your HDD model so you will have to check 80h and 81h. Maybe it will be better do disable APM completely so OS will handle hdd spindown

 

Has anyone else experienced bad colors on the steelseries backlight keyboard? If i leave it on red it works great. However if I do any color besides the primary colors the mixing of the colors on my control button shows two distinct colors. red = red, purple = two colors noticeable (FFE21DC7). There are tons of variations of this. If you turn on the color by music you can really tell. I'm just wondering if my keyboard is unique to this problem or if others are having the same issue. Also the brightness of my control button is almost blinding to me when i look down in a dark room.

Picture time!!!!
1st intentionally BLURRED pictures to demonstrate what I mean of the different colors when using normal and all 3 are on the same color
2nd picture is of the cntrl on gaming mode when set with that color. At time it can be blinding depending on your angle as seen in the picture.

 

Hi guys

I received my GS60 Ghost Pro about 2 weeks ago and I'm starting to have a problem since last Monday. The laptop won't start normally, when I press the power button it will start, show the MSI logo and then just turn off. If I press the power again after that it will start normally, as shown in this video (the only sound coming from the laptop is only the one at about 00:13-00:14 mark, please ignore other noises). It is not because of overheating because this video was taken in the morning, the laptop has been off since last night.


What could be the problem with it? I'm hoping this is not serious that need to be sent for RMA

 

Has anyone here played FarCry 3 on their gs60 870m? I've noticed I have to be much more kind to the gpu when playing that game in comparison to Metro 2033 (and the Metro 2033 benchmark). Seems my max is -62mV at 1500 Memory and 987 Core (I might be able to push memory further, but that's it for the core or the game starts crashing). At those settings the game runs at 88-91C, so no throttling. Of the top of my head, I believe the 3d mark firestrike score for the above was around 4800.

 

Repro here. I have started it a few times and walked away and forgot about this funny issue. The boot time is short so I don't mind but still would be nice to have the power button always turn it on.

 

Hi all,
I read almost all post here - i took me with breaks almost two weeks - ugh. Now I am missing some information:

Is there any significant notable difference in common use between using one SSD disk in M.2 port (with stated cca 550 MB/s of read and write speed) and using two of such SSD disks in RAID 0?

Is it possible to create RAID0 from one used disk attaching other disk to the raid controller and build raid volume without data loss?

Is it possible to destroy such RAID0 and move all data to one of the disks (if amount of data fits the capacity)?

Is it possible to make partial raid volumes over the two physical disks? I mean to use for example 50GB from both disks as RAID0 and rest (e.g. 70GB if 128GB disks used) as RAID1 or JBOD? If yes, can the volume manipulations be done without data loss?

If manipulations cannot be done without data loss, is it possible to backup the volume to the HDD, make the changes and restore the volume keeping its possibility to boot windows?

Thank you very much for your answers.

 

your post do make me feel a bit safer

in your case does it still keep happening or does the problem go away after sometimes?

thank you

 

The simplest fix is to not use shutdown, just use restart or leave up and running and make sure hibernate isn't going.

 

1. The double the read/write speed by using a stripped raid(0). I get ~800+ read, and 350+ read

2. See #5

3. Anytime you create/destroy a raid all data is lost, you must back it up on another drive and then copy it back.

4. When you create a raid you use the entire volume, which can be split into multiple volumes of the combined raid. But as you mention if the raid has issue then you lose all of the data.

5. I'm 99% sure this is what most people do when they add another m.2 drive because they copy the data off using a utility then create the raid and then copy it back.

 

Anyone know how to control keyboard backlight in Ubuntu/Linux ?

 

You'll have to be able to reverse engineer the way MSI keyboard works first and then make a new software that is compatible with Ubuntu/Linux in order to make it happen.

 

Thank you again. Ok, I understand that there are no advanced management possibilities for raid configuration.

What I am mainly interested in is the question 1. Please, let me explain the background more briefly.

I am going to buy GS60 with Adata Premier Pro SP900 SSD drives ( Premier Pro SP900 M.2 2280 Solid State Drive_Specifications_Solid State Drives_ADATA Technology)

And now I am deciding between two main options:

1) To buy one 512GB SSD (roughly around 330 USD) and in the future when it will be cheaper I would buy maybe the second one and put both to raid0 or not to buy if the speed and capacity will be still sufficient.

2a) To buy two 128GB SSD (roughly around 200 USD) and have the raid0 from the beginning, but quite limited capacity with necessity of buying two modules in the future and seling or throwing away these two.

2b) To buy two 256GB SSD (roughly around 350 USD) with the same future like option 2a).

Of course the speed and capacity is important but the possibility to make cheaper change in the future is also important. So I would need to know, what is the real difference between having 550MB/s drive and maybe 900MB/s drive. I understand that the difference in disk operation will be measurable by technical speed test, but will it be noticable in comon use? Will computer as whole be significantly faster so it worth to go by option 2b) more than go by option 1) and "loose" to possibility to cheaply upgrade in the future if it would be necessary?

Hope you understand what I am asking for.

Have a nice day!

 

Ok I will do this. Please let me know if you found the real fix
Thanks

 

Do you do a lot of downloads?
If not, then it's recommended to go with 2x 256GB since you will have 512GB and normally it's enough.
Performance-wise, it is going to be better than 128GB due to superior spec, and no doubt slightly inferior than 512GB.

 

Just to add on to what Kevin already said, it comes down alot to what you'll be doing with the laptop. I run dual boot win8.1 pro, one from a samsung 840 Evo and the other from a raid 0 m550. On a day to day usage, there is zero noticeable performance difference. The only time you're going to notice the difference is during sustained, long read/writes to the drive. So if you're not doing alot of read/write of very large files or lots of small files, you're not likely going to see much of a performance difference (you're not likely going to notice a game loading a second faster). On the other hand, if you're using the laptop for maybe large development or you play around with large video files, it might make sense to go with raid 0. If you're not sure on your usage, you can use some monitoring software or just bring up task manager, performance tab, and select the disk; this should help you figure out your use case.

Quick note: doing large netowrk downloads will not matter unless you have goggle fiber, att giga power, or your using an internal gigabit network (and even a gigabit connection is only at max 1000/8 = 125MB/s which is no where near the ~500MB/s of a single ssd)

On a side note, you might want to consider crucial m550 as well to the adata; price point and speed seems on par, but with the m550 you also have capacitors that keep it powered long enough to finish a write during a power failure (especially important during a raid0) and it supports hardware encryption.

 

My Asus N550 does the exact same thing, and I have been using it nearly a year now. I wouldn't worry about it, but i am still not sure what causes it. I want to try changing the RAM first in case somethings up there, but I haven't had the chance!

 

Worth a try seeing if it does the same with one stick of ram in it.

 

Can anyone confirm that their gs60 doesn't turbo boost while on battery? Not sure if this is limited by hardware or software and if it can be disabled.

 

I could depend on what your power settings are for on battery. If on "Power saver" it probably will not.

 

Ya, that's the first thing I checked, but it didn't seem to make a difference.

 

Bump - anyone did a raid 1 to mirror 2xM2 drives ? thanks !

 

The option should be there in the BIOS.
Have you checked its options?

 

Im having issues updating my bios. I followed these steps (source) and then I get stuck at the part where I physically type out "flash" and interestingly, the files in my Bios folder dont have any of the "flash" or even "efi" files, even though I did all the steps. I downloaded the BIOS from the MSI website for my GS60 Ghost Pro. Im wondering if there is something Im missing?

Btw, Im doing this update cause my laptop keeps crashing randomly sometimes. Each time I get a different error... Im hoping a bios and EC firmware update will fix this issue somehow

EDIT:
So apparently I was using version 1.2 of the Guide. I used v1.0 and that helped me update the BIOS easily. This is it (source) for anyone else who has this issue

I hope my Windows 8 crashing reports stop now

 

Hey All,

I have my GS60 connected to a Universal USB Dock (Warpia SWP240). I'm having issues with it randomly disconnecting from the dock though and it has to do with the USB Selective Suspend in the power options. The problem is that if you edit any of the built in power options to disable the selective suspend it doesn' stick (Presentation, Movie, Game, etc). Does anyone know of a way to configure these so the changes will stick? Or if you can change the "ECO" key to use different power options?

Thanks

 

BIOS flash is done within the BIOS update itself.
EC flash is done within the OS.

Have you tried a different USB port instead?

 

Hey guys,

I'm about to buy GS60 with GTX 860m, but still I'm unsure about these wifi issues (also I'm going to use bluetooth mouse). Did actually MSI/Intel fix it, or it isn't software related problem? Also I've found Broadcom wlan card for the NGFF (m.2) slot (BCM94352Z). Is it possible to replace Intel's card with Broadcom's one (whitelist etc.)?

Thanks

 

I have just bought it and have no problems with wifi. Connected to dual chain router at 300mbits speed.

 

Do you use 2.4 GHz N standard? Is the connection stable when you are playing game with 860m active?

 

Yes. 2.4n 2x2 mimo. I am fighting with installation of os, apps and data migration. No time for playing yet.

 

Bought the GS60 Pro 3k--

Installed 2x8GB Kingston HyperX Impact @ 2133mhz and they were plug-n-play without needing to set an XMP profile.

Also replaced the 1TB platter with a 1TB SSD.

Happy camper so far, this thing is nice and much easier to carry around compared to the M18x R3 it replaced.

 

I have the 870M and love the wifi on this thing. Its actually better than my macbook pro. I have a dual band wifi and using the 5ghz band and it works flawlessly. I love this laptop! I just ordered a Razor power adapter and I will let you guys know how it works.

The only thing that I am not used to yet is the location of the 0 button on the numpad. they moved the arrows closer together and so the keyboard is a bit different from what I am used to. Also switching between a mac and this laptop I expect the cntrl button to be different but a WELCOME change.

 

Hello Guys!
For the last 2 months I've been a happy owner of the GS60 Ghost Pro with 128GB SSD and 1TB HDD. I noticed a problem however. When i try to watch movies that are stored on HDD, the picture freezes every few minutes for a sec or two, then plays normally for a few min and then the situation repeats itself. This problem doesnt appear when the movies are played from SSD.

Also, with some games installed on HDD, the situation is similar. No matter what settings I will choose, the game freezes for a few sec and then goes on perfectly, and freezes again.
When the game is installed on SSD, the problem is gone and I can play with max settings.

I scanned the laptop with 2 different anti virus programs, defragmented the HDD, then checked the HDD for bad sectors, and of course nothing found.
I also tried to kill all the unnecessary processes that might slow down the system but to no avail.. and now I'm really out of ideas..

Maybe you guys could advice what can I check to fully use this amazing laptop and its 1TB of space.

Thx,
Max

 

Could be slow read times from the HDD especially if the movie is a high bit rate or you happen to be downloading and writing to the HDD at the same time. You can run a program like CrystalDisk to check.

 

Does the drive click every so often or do you hear it spinning up during the pause? It could be a drive sleep setting and it's waking up after the cached data in ram runs out.

 

Well I tried everything to no avail, so I turned to research instead. This seems pretty undocumented, but it seems like it's due to MSI's hybrid power: the only way you can get max GPU or CPU is with both plugged in. Here's pretty much the only comment I was able to dig up: "We have already criticized the MSI GE70 for being unable to use its Turbo Boost on battery power and the same applies for the GS70 Stealth." from the GS70 review: Review MSI GS70-65M21621 Notebook - NotebookCheck.net Reviews

Although I understand the battery might not be able to provide enough power to run both the GPU and CPU at max, msi should have made hybrid power much more intelligent as I'm pretty sure that if the IGPU is being used, there's plenty of power in the battery to turbo boost the 47W CPU. This is kinda of a bummer since it means if I'm building code while away from the AC Adapter it goes from 12min to 18min, a 50% increase (which makes perfect sense since the turbo boost is almost a 50% clock increase when OCed).

 

Ok, Im offically running out of ideas with trying to troubleshoot the GS60 Pro. Essentially, for the last two weeks or so, some BSOD. Each day they are becoming more and more frequent. So this weekend I did the following in order
-Updated Windows
-Updated all drivers manually from MSI and Intel
-Intel Wireless, chipset, graphics, bluetooth, audio, and all
-Ran Windows Memory Test (Pass)
-Ran sfc /scannow
-Updated BIOS from MSI
-Updated Firmware from MSI
-Ran multiple windows trouble shooters
-Reinstalled Windows 8.1 from Recovery USB
-Downloaded only necessary drivers
-Trimed the SSD
-Ran sfc /scannow
-Ran MemTest 86

None of these stop the laptop from getting random BSOD errors. The laptop runs fine during gaming and use. These BSOD errors occur when it is idle. Only once it got the BSOD 30 after I got up and was about use leave the room. Thats the closest it got to getting an error while "in use." Also, when it crashes it restarts and shows a different error. Sometimes it crashes a second time only to show a different, third error.

Today, however, a new thing is happening. It crashed (like how it usually crashes) and then it instead of trying to turn on, it restarts and beeps. This happens 4 times, so I guess it means that it beeps 4 times. Im not sure what this means. Like I said, this happened twice today before it would finally turn on and start to "prepare automatic repair." I really could use some new insight and assistance this super depressing issue. Btw, I have had this laptop for only 1 month. I haven't even moved it off my table yet.

Here are the various errors I have gotten:
-System_Service_Exception
-PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA
-SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED
-Driver IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL tcpip.sys
-kmode exception not handled
-Bad Pool Caller

Again, if anyone could guide me or help me out, I would be insanely happy.


EDIT:
It seems the issues have gotten worse now. It just froze on me and started flickering the screen while I was using it.

 

You are absolutely correct Meaker. During the pause the drive spins up and the HDD led lights up like a christmas tree. Where can I check if this sleep setting is on for the HDD? or how to turn it off?

*EDIT*
Just for info: I already had the required setting in Advanced Power Options turned on to "never". But maybe it only applies to system drive and not secondary?

 

Control Panel\Hardware and Sound\Power Options\Edit Plan Settings -> Change Advanced Power Settings -> Hard Disk -> Turn off hard disk after

 

It sounds like it could very well be a software issue; I would either reinstall windows or do a win8.1 'factory reset' to bring it back to stock. Win 8.1 even has a mode that will 'reinstall' windows without touching your stuff (in case the problem is with windows system files).

You could first clone your drive (aka create a backup) in case the above doesn't help, in which cause it sounds like you have a hardware issue and I would RMA it. Once it comes back (or even before you send it in) you can clone your image back.

 

Thx Svegetto but it turns out I already had this setting set to "never".. So I guess there are two options now:
- this setting only concerns primary SSD and not secondary HDD - maybe there's a hidden setting for the secondary HDD in Win 8.1?
- problem lies deeper in the HDD itself.. How do you interpret results from CrystalDisk?

 

Check this out: http://forum.notebookreview.com/msi/742589-msi-gs60-ghost-ghost-pro-thread-401.html#post9784426

 

i have a gs70 and sometimes my touchpad stops working!!! and can not be activated by pressing fn +f3, windows task bar shows that is activated. When it occour i need to turn down my Laptop completelly to start working again...

anyone have ever had this issue?

 

Thx a million Svegetto! works like a charm I went through this topic from page 300 and page 401 must have slipped away in the process..

Now time to fully enjoy this monster machine

 

I think Im going to do a full, clean installation and see how that goes. Before I did a refresh, but that didnt really help cause the problem is still occurring.

 

I need some help about the GS60, maybe someone can help me out, on the MSI GS60 GHOST-013, do i need a hdd bracket to mount the the 2.5 mechanical drive? i cant say from the online video that i seen online.

 

yesterday, I took off back cover to figure out source of a clicking noise ive been having and the hdd was very well exposed. im 90% sure that no bracket is needed.

 

I have been lurking this thread for over 1 month and have read all 400 pages. I have been a mac user for past 4 years and decided to make the switch due to load of applications that I needed to work in win8 + being able to connect 2 monitors when needed.
Macbook pro is a great machine which served me well and I really wanted to find a good replacement. After reading some of the comments I imagined GS60 as something plastic mid quality build which IT is NOT. I like everything about it except for trackpad and battery life. The Trackpad is absolutely terrible in my opinion, I tried samsung drivers that posters have suggested and still find it awful.

WHen I try to move cursor from top right corner to bottom left using the touch, the cursor moves in a zigzag trajectory instead of straight line. Do I have to play with settings to fix that?