MSI notebook order thread: post your orders here

Phoenix, First I'd like to thank you for your help !!

Planned Usage for Tweaks

I will mainly use this computer for audio and video editing, especially audio and CD production. I record live audio for a Ministry and create CD's and Videos for private distribution. I also use it to play a lot of YouTube videos to lead worship music and do a lot of projector work. Other programs include Cad, Photoshop etc... The files I work with usually run between 1.5 gig to 50 gig. I also need to install Dragon Professional voice recognition to work with. If using the internal mic makes the system less secure I can install external mic, but my preference would be internal.

I would like to start by changing the default location of C: for the folders desktop, documents, downloads, music, pictures, and videos to my storage Drive D: Data and correct any Icon problems. The reason for sharing this information with you is so that any changes we make should work well for these purposes. Again thank you very much.

Let's Tweak !!!! I should receive laptop Friday !!! How do I contact you ?

 

Phoenix, should I skip Windows Activation until after Tweaks and backup image?

 

you can't contact me. I will contact you.

 

What are you?... Some kind of secret agent???

 

If I open the door, my inbox would be filled with PMs

 

Oh, I'm sure you wouldn't have a chance to breathe. I was just attempting humor. Poorly executed humor.

 

NOT poorly executed humor...I said the same thing, and when you posted it, it CRACKED ME UP!

 

Phoenix My laptop has arrived I am ready at your convenience

 

just received my laptop! @Phoenix
thanks for the advice you gave me in getting this!!

 

Just had a great tweak time with phoenix. I would like to thank him publicly what a great person!

 

Adding my planned order for MSI GT73VR Titan-Pro 425. Any suggestions / changes within a ~$3300 budget?

Custom Built MSI GT73VR 7RF TITAN PRO-425 17.3" nVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080
Grand Total $3,389.00

Yes, display professionally calibrated w/ profile saved to USB drive - $50.00

30 Days Zero Defective Pixel Warranty (perfect panel guarantee) - $35.00

Coollaboratory Liquid Ultra 100% Metal Thermal Interface on CPU, IC Diamond on GPU - BEST PERFORMANCE - installed by HIDevolution - $50.00

32GB Dual Channel DDR4/2400MHz (4 x 8GB) - installed by HIDevolution - $140.00

Samsung 960 EVO 500GB M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe 3D-VNAND SSD - Up to 3,200 MB/s Read-1,900 MB/s Write - $215.00

1TB 7200 RPM SATA 6Gb/s Hard Drive

Killer™ Wireless-AC N1535 ac/a/g/n 2x2 NGFF - Bluetooth 4.1

1 Year MSI + HIDevolution Limited Global Warranty w/ 1 Year USA Accidental Damage "No Oops" Protection (Registration within 30 days of Ship Date Required) + LIFETIME HIDevolution Technical Support

Also would love to make use of Phoenix's knowledge to tweak this thing for great gaming session!

 

you got it bro, let me know when you get it so I can show you the magic. You will be stunned by what is possible

Here is what I will do:

1- Uninstallation of all the Windows Store Garbage Apps
2- Removing all Windows 10 Privacy Invasion stuff like Telemetry, sending your keystrokes to Microsoft, automatically installing suggested apps in the background, allowing Microsoft to conduct experiments on your laptop, disabling automatic driver updates through Windows updates, disabling Windows 10 ads, disabling cortana, etc.
3- Removal of nVIDIA and Intel Telemetry
4- Adjusting a lot of options in PC Settings like disabling Windows Tablet Mode (you have a laptop not a tablet), disabling suggestions appearing in the start menu, disabling automatically connecting to Paid WiFi Hotspots, disabling Game DVR which reduced performance in games, and a lot more.
5- Replacing Cortana with a much better search tool that finds results instantly
6- Restoring the classic Windows 7 Calculator and Windows Photo Viewer
7- Restoring the Classic Windows 7 Start Menu



also, don't forget to email [email protected] to get a small discount

 

@Phoenix Thanks much. I emailed @Donald@HIDevolution today about an EVOC P870KM1 instead of the GT73VR 425 in my last post. Man, I'm flip flopping like I'm HGTV. Seems like a common problem I've found on the forum though. Truthfully I like the design of the cool running MSI, but the CPU, 3k screen, and vapor chambered 1080 on the EVOC has swayed me that direction.

Gotta pull the trigger on Monday, maybe Donald can help me decide.

 

Donald doesn't work on Sunday, but I am sure he will reach out to you once they open on Monday

 

Very good choice

↑↑↑↑↑ THIS!! bruh

 

No worries, looking forward to Monday.

@Papusan Thanks for the vote of confidence on the Evoc!

 

@Phoenix - Out of curiosity, is this something that you do manually or is it scripted? My developer inner-child loves automating things

 

scripted? I wish it was that easy d00d!

You will be shocked at how many steps/tweaks I do just to make that filthy Windows 10 even useable

 

Hahaha. Well, one can try I suppose I used to do a lot of tweaks to images for a school district I worked for in the past. Anyhoot, I'll just be glad to have a clean running beast of a system by July 4th. Speaking of that, gotta call Donald and get this going.

 

<<< VintageGeek

 

That's me, 5 days a week

 

Hi there!
I got out of the loop recently regading the GT73VR 7RF.
Can someone please tell me if you are using liquid metal with your laptop? If yes, what are the temps?
With all the units from Amazon that I 'tested" with the stock paste the temps were like this after 1 Fire Strike run:

CPU (@4.0Ghz): 84C
GPU: 77C

How much better is CLU compared to the stock toothpaste ?

 

I initially ordered it with IC Diamond but after a month, I wasn't happy with the temps so I applied Liquid Ultra and boy what a difference it was. Liquid Ultra performs very well on this laptop due to the fact that the heatsink makes very good contact with the CPU. Mind you, those temps are with my 24/7 4.2 GHz overclock across all cores with 0 throttling.

you need to set the ICC Cache VR Current Limit to 400, which would appear as 100A in XTU since the value entered is divided by 4 in the BIOS

See this post: http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...eview-by-phoenix.801314/page-11#post-10517550

then see this when video encoding: http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...eview-by-phoenix.801314/page-14#post-10541023

 

Holy hell, that is at least -20C on the CPU! Thanks for the info !

 

And you barely hear the fans spinning up during normal usage even @ 4.2 GHz with a -50 to a -100mV undervolt on the CPU.

 

Or keep stock voltage and clock up. Always up, bruh

 

I still need to do this to mine. I'll try out some overclocking settings this weekend. Any other overclocking settings I should look at?

 

Hi there,

I am new here and i've seen a lot of threads and forums about getting a gaming laptop, so i come up with this thread and looking for some reviews about the MSI GT73VR, i live in Bahrain and i've seen @Phoenix from Dubai and his experience with HID Evolution. Im not a typical gamer, i just want to have a good performance for gaming and business work related. Firstly m main upgrade was the memory from 16gb to 32 and the SSD Samsung 960 EVO. So i ask @ Donald@HIDevolution about his suggestions to my choice here is what he suggest:

Custom Built MSI GT73VR 7RE TITAN-427 17.3" nVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070Free Game BundlesFor Honor OR Ghost Recon: Wildlands - Download through ...

Free Game BundlesFor Honor OR Ghost Recon: Wildlands - Download through NVIDIA GeForce Experience (Must have either nVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 or nVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 GPU installed)

17.3" Full HD (1920x1080) 120Hz 5ms 94%NTSC TN Mat ...

LCD Panel

30 Days Zero Defective Pixel Warranty (perfect panel gu ...

Display Warranty30 Days Zero Defective Pixel Warranty (perfect panel guarantee) - $35.00

Video CardNVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 w/ 8GB GDDR57th Generation Intel Core i7-7820HK Quad Core Processor ...

Processor

IC Diamond on CPU + GPU - installed by HIDevolution - $ ...

Thermal PasteIC Diamond on CPU + GPU - installed by HIDevolution - $35.00

no RAID (1st drive as primary boot drive, 2nd drive as ...

M.2 PCIe RAID Optionsno RAID (1st drive as primary boot drive, 2nd drive as storage drive)

HIDevolution Approved 512GB M.2 SATA 6Gb/s SSD - Instal...

M.2 PCIe / SATA Slot 1HIDevolution Approved 512GB M.2 SATA 6Gb/s SSD - Installed by HIDevolution - $169.00

1TB 7200 RPM SATA 6Gb/s Hard DriveIntel® Wireless-AC 8265 802.11 ac/a/b/g/n 2x2 NGFF - Bl ...

Wireless CardsIntel® Wireless-AC 8265 802.11 ac/a/b/g/n 2x2 NGFF - Bluetooth 4.2 - installed by HIDevolution - $20.00

Yes, Clean Install of Windows 10 including 32GB Clean I ...

Operating System Clean InstallYes, Clean Install of Windows 10 including 32GB Clean Install Flash Drive - $40.00

230W AC Power Adapter (supports 100-240V)Steel Series Gaming Backlit Color Changing Programmable...

Steelseries KeyboardSteel Series Gaming Backlit Color Changing Programmable 102 keys w/ Silver Lining Print - U.S. English

Warranty and Service1 Year HIDevolution Global Warranty with LIFETIME HIDev ...

Warranty and Service1 Year HIDevolution Global Warranty with LIFETIME HIDevolution Technical Support - $200.00

Please advise further appreciate your help. Thanks.

 

You left out my recommendation to only get 16GB DDR4/2400MHz, not 32GB. And, to be clear, only 1x 512GB SATA SSD.

Let's help @-=A.J.Hero=- out guys.

 

Get rid of that spinning 7200 1TB hard drive. Get the $30 back and upgrade to another SSD at another date (or go all in and get SSD from HIDevolution)

 

For me, I'd suggest not to do this unless you're prepared and failure enough to do this. It's not a difficult task, however the HDD sits under the m.2 SSD slots that's under a heat sync with a thermal pad. Get the best setup you can afford now leaving the easier upgrades for future. Unless you don't need the 1TB HDD but the 512 SSD for me would not be enough.

 

For me i need those 1TB HDD as i am squeezing my budget to set this up, so i'd rather keeping it, and for the 512 you suggest to upgrade that one up.

 

Oh yeah i didn't noticed that.

 

@Phoenix, any suggestions? About the thermal paste is the ICU diamond is fine or the liquid ultra 100% metal. Also the warranty is it a right choice the additional $200 or rather the free 1 Year MSI + HIDevolution Limited Global Warranty w/ 1 Year USA Accidental Damage "No Oops" Protection (Registration within 30 days of Ship Date Required) + LIFETIME HIDevolution TechnicalSupport. Also the memory is 16gb enough or upgrade to 32gb instead? Please advise. Thanks.

 

For now, nothing uses more than 16gb of ram with exception of professional level production software with big assets.

Stick with the 16gb of ram.

Warranty, how savvy are you with computer hardware? If you don't know one end of a optical drive from your m.2... better get some warranty for piece of mind.
How long for warranty? As much as you either expect to keep the laptop for, or as much as you can afford.
Tech support... They look after their customers quite well, as you can see on the forums. However if you really don't know your way around a word document, their technical support may save you some frustration and grief.

Thermal paste... are you going to overclock? Do you know what you're doing with overclocking? Not that it's limited to OC, but there is little incentive outside of GPU to worry as much. IC diamond is a good brand, with @Phoenix , he started to see temps raise under stress testing... and changed himself to liquid metal from memory. Again it comes down to your affordability and asking yourself... are you really going to use it?

Luckily, things like RAM from the underside is easy enough to upgrade. I do believe they leave these free and put the stock 16gb on the keyboard side, so if you ever did find yourself in need of more RAM, it's an easy process to upgrade.

while I have my cpu overclocked to 4.2 across all 4 cores, I don't use it like that most of the time. Even not during gaming unless it drops some frames for some reason. GTA V is the only game I've done this as frames dropped for some reason after a random period of playing then picked up again when I hit turbo mode and was fine. Temps fine and never raised any alarm bells.

So, how are you going to use the machine? set and forget or push it to the limits with production level software or highest benchmarking scores possible?

 

Thank you for that info. and suggestions, as ive said im not a typical gamer and i can say im just a little bit knowledgeable when it comes to hardware, basically i will just used it for games and business purposes and stuff. I might do overclocking sometimes but it still depends on the purpose.

Warranty of course i prefer to keep it as it is important, because they have a free option for warranty and the additional $200 for globally which stated for 2 instances if ever something happen. Appreciate your help here. Thank you

 

I have around 15 games and I don't play any of em, I just have them for when the time comes that I do feel like playing they're there, so I'm like you. Regardless, see how Liquid Ultra dropped my temps by 15-20C over IC Diamond on the GT73VR Titan Pro here = http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...eview-by-phoenix.801314/page-11#post-10517550

Liquid Ultra can be the best thermal paste in the world OR the worst, depending on how well the CPU heatsink make contact with the CPU. Luckily, on the MSI GT73VR Titan Pro, it makes excellent contact so it is the best solution here.

I would definitely get more warranty and stick to 16GB RAM, you can always add the RAM yourself later on if needed

512GB SATA SSD + 1TB 7,200 RPM SATA III Hard Drive is plenty...no need to upgrade the 512GB SATA to something larger, or to an NVMe.

 

Completely agree. 16GB is plenty for gaming. You can still get away with 8GB truthfully as long as it's dual-channel.

I'd stick with 16GB RAM, dump the 7200GB drive, don't upgrade to PCIe SSD, keep the cheaper SATA SSD. You won't notice the difference between the two in general usage outside of benchmarks.

How much more expensive is the 1080 version? If you do those three above things can you get close to affording a 1080?

• The jump from 1070 to 1080 will be the single most important thing you can do if you just want to play games.
• The CPU is 2nd fiddle I run my 7700K at 7700T (think 7700HQ) levels and games still fly like butter. Sure 3DMark scores are lower, but I notice ZERO affect in games due to nearly all of them being GPU dependent. If there was the odd game that needed the juice and I noticed suboptimal performance I'd just switch XTU profiles temporarily and deal with louder fans. I let my eyes and gameplay feel be my benchmarks not irrelevant scores.
• The memory upgrade 3rd, you don't need 32GB, It's easily upgraded later anyway.
• SATA to PCIe down near the bottom of the list. You don't need PCIe, SATA is plenty fast to load games and stream assets quickly enough.

I'm not sure how much the 1080 version is configured with 16G, SATA, no 7200RPM but if it's CLOSE to the upgraded 1070 version you owe it to yourself to reconsider.

 

Thats great, i'd rather stick to 16gb and 512gb SSD thanks for this.

 

@hfm i agree with you to keep the 16gb ram instead of 32gb im totally convince to all of you, but i would prefer to keep the 7200GB as well plus 512gb SSD.

For 1080 it will cost me more around $300, which over my budget and i can't afford thst much, so i'll stay at 1070. Appreciate your suggestion.

 

Ordered EVOC 16L-G-1080 on 7/5/17

Don't usually post in these kind of threads (especially not before having system in hand). But can't contain my excitement for this one

Iv'e had my eye on this system for a while

Thanks @Ted@HIDevolution. Hopefully this one won't take so long (not having to wait for Dell's BS will help a lot here)

Also thanks @Mr. Fox @Prema @Rage Set @woodzstack @Huniken @hfm @Diversion and everone else for thier work on the system and spreading the word



Second purchase from HID (probably will sell the 1st AW 13... but will miss OLED, thankfully the VAIO comes close in contrast and screen quality)

 

just ordered an MSI GT73VR 7RF TITAN PRO-425 from HIDevolution! thanks @Donald@HIDevolution for your help!

 

Super cool! I hope you have lots of fun with it!

 

Awesome man! Congrats! that's the same laptop that I have. It's the best laptop I've ever owned. Beautiful screen, performance, keyboard, and just works out of the box.

Let me know if you want me to tweak your Windows for you when you get it just tag me.

 

Thank you! Your review really helped me. To be honest, I don't think I would've gotten this laptop if it wasn't for your in-depth review; Thank you for taking the time to post that review!

Ok, thanks! I will definitely let you know!

 

off topic but I just got my laptop! @Phoenix can you help me tweak my Windows? whenever you have time of course.
Thanks in advance

 

PM Sent

 

Just order a P870km1 for HIDevolution. Now just a waiting game.

 

Specs?