MSI notebook order thread: post your orders here

XXX?

 

Since it's shipping from southern California, you're not going to be affected by this, unless for some reason the plane makes a stopover at the FedEx mothership in Memphis.

 

Thanks for answering my curiosity! I hope the Samsung panel's colors will be fine for you!

 

Yup. That banner has been on their site all week - I think it shows for everyone, regardless of where you are. I even had packages routed through Memphis make it on time during this time. I think you're good man!

 

FWIW, I have found git to be extremely useful for synchronizing my tooling scripts (i.e., contents of /usr/local/bin) and various projects:

• Across multiple laptops
• Between host o.s. and guest o.s. on the same physical machine

I don't know how strict the moderators are about this sort of thing, but it's my thread, and I don't mind at all, because Linux interoperability will be important to me on the machine that is the subject of this thread.

 

Ha!

10 seconds of video produced RAW for my commercial work can take up as much as 4 GB

 

Shipment went from California to Memphis!

5:26 am In transit MEMPHIS, TN

 

MEM is their hub, I think you won't have any issues. The weather is clear there today and it will ship out quickly, out of curiosity where it it go from there?

 

The excitement builds up as the tracking game continues lol

 

it goes to Paris usually as I remember then to Dubai

 

indeed bro! Can't wait~

Still didn't sell my P870DM3 though

 

You guys are cracking me up with this play by play shipping game.

 

The best is to use the FedEx app so at every update you get a text.

 

They are not the only ones that have an app. And we ship world wide as well.

 

I'll be keeping an eye on the Linux talk in here since you will likely get yours before me. I prefer to use Linux and FreeBSD on bare metal so I hope compatibility is pretty good out of the box.

 

At minimum, I intend to boot my machine up with a thumb drive distro and do some quick testing. I'm hoping Windows is a temporary boot choice for me, but right now a couple of my 3D tools require DX11.

 

Cool, interested in hearing your results. I'm probly gonna just use Ubuntu because years ago I got tired of distro hopping and it's easy for me to setup everything, but otherwise I like Arch a lot.

 

I'm a Debian guy, but Ubuntu is okay as second choice.

 

Yeah I used to run Debian a lot too, I just like to run newer stuff out of the box and I've used every distro under the sun at this point, starting back in the 90s with Mandrake 5.3. Ubuntu/Canonical get a lot of bad press by Linux enthusiasts but when I want something that is going to have repos and driver support I stick with it. For servers I also love FreeBSD.

 

The laptop flew straight from Memphis to Dubai unlike before where it had to go through Paris! I was waiting and waiting and now I see it has arrived at the Dubai Sort Facility so hopefully I'll get it by Sunday (in a few more hours)!

Super excited and this shipment speed has exceeded my expectations

 

I keep meaning to try Ubuntu on my backup Tornado F5.

I was actually doing 90% of my work in Linux up until getting my current project back in August. While the project primarily uses Java / Python / Node / MySQL which is easy to setup in Linux, I have to use an l2tp/ipsec vpn to connect to the deployed stacks. The vpn client packages have undergone some major changes from Ubuntu 16.04 Ubuntu 14.04, so I was having issues getting a stable connection. After spending 20-30 hours on it I just had to give up.

However, it would be great to try 16.10, and get my work projects back on Linux again if possible!

 

I had a project last year where the customer forced us to use Windows 7 on an underpowered laptop. I was doing data analysis, and my solution was to install VMware and build a Debian Linux instance. I installed MySQL and my programming tools and did the whole project in Linux, only popping my head out long enough to use the customer-mandated Microsoft Outhouse mail client.

Even under the best of circumstances, IPsec is IMO a nightmare to provision, in any o.s. Yech!!!

 

I'm honestly pretty excited to see what temps you get idle, in stress tests, games, etc since you take your temps more seriously than most people.

 

Yeah I am looking forward to Phoenix's testing and bench marking as well !

 

Will @Phoenix manage +43x all cores 24/7?

 

Laptop received. I am setting it up but man~ The build quality is night and day better than the Clevos, all magnesium metallic

The keyboard...........oh the keyboard...I feel like I'm heaven typing on this thing

I got a free MSI Back back in the box, that was a nice surprise also!

I also got 2 USB Flash Disks, one with the Windows 10 Clean Install ISO and another one for the ICC Profile of my calibrated screen

stay tuned

@HardCoreGamer4Life

 

I would love to see them side by side comparison

 

Yeah for sure, the MSI's quality are much better than Clevos.

Clevos feels.... cheap.

 

I was able to get UbuntuGNOME 16.10 booting on my backup Tornado F5 (6700K / GTX 1070).

Modesetting was working with Nouveau under kernel 4.8, but the mouse cursor has some glitches which makes usage a little complicated. After installation, and a couple rounds of updates, I was able to get nvidia-375 working (you have to install the xserver-xorg-legacy package to get around some gnome-shell segfaults). Brightness controls didn't work. I may try and grab the phoronix test suite and see where it stands in terms of performance. I also want to try my Thunderbolt 3 dock and see how well it works if at all.

 

Although to be fair , Clevo's highest end systems always seemed to have better build quality than the rest of their line-up. Still no where near as good as Alienware was or the high end MSI's of course.

But I've owned P570WM and P870DM1/3 and they're alright.

Best laptop build quality wise for me still is the Alienware M18x series.

 

Excellent news! My machine is about 3 weeks away, so unfortunately I can't be much help. Please do continue posting, though.

 

I am also dont agree then msi looks better, I own GT73VR 7RF for 10 days and want to say - the design is sucks, it look like "made in china"

I own p775dm3 for 3 weeks, it is have good design and quality build.

I am waiting for Phoenix review of laptop also.
What I like in this laptop is keyboard, it is simply perfect !
But bad quality of sound, much worse than in aw17r4(own)
also dont like TN screen a lot, it is only TN...
dont like mix of aluminium and plastic

 

So far the experience has been pretty good.

The Thunderbolt 3 dock doesn't work for now. There is a userspace Thunderbolt 3 application which I am guessing is going to be required for it to work. There was also a post that the Thunderbolt 3 security level must be set to legacy mode, which cannot be done in the Tornado F5 bios (maybe an unlocked bios can). Luckily the controller still works fine in USB 3.1 mode, so I was able to use USB-C devices and adapters just fine.

The Keyboard Backlights work (white only) and you can adjust the brightness level of the keys if desired. The "Max Fans" button works just fine, and I didn't have any issues using suspend / resume.

I am running it through the phoronix test suite. So far it seems like GPU performance is on par with the desktop GTX 1070. This laptop is pretty good temperature wise in Windows, so I think it should not be throttling in Linux.

 

So @Phoenix What happens if your laptop gets stolen with all your life's work on those drives and no back?

 

that won't happen anymore I'm very careful

PS: Life is too short, take a chance will ya? *said George Carlin*

 

It makes me happy that it's been a smooth experience. I am going to be messing around with machine learning for school soon and can't wait to have a portable machine like this capable of crushing simulations. How do the auto fans work?

 

http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1701302-TA-1701270RI69

My results are the 6700K column. So in certain cases, even 7600K is faster than the 6700K. I guess there could be throttling going on, but mine is also clocked at stock speeds which are a bit slower than both the 7600K and 7700K. I suppose I should have done that test on the same distro, too. Oh well.

Oh, and auto fans seem to work fine. They spin up when the system is under load, then slow down when its not. It runs just like it does in Windows if you do not load any fan control software.

 

Sweet, thanks for that. I've had bad experiences with fan control on previous laptops in Linux. I have the same problem with Boot Camp on my Macs, where it will randomly just kick up the fans up for no reason. Sounds like pretty much everything works out of the box.

 

If you finally have the machine lemme know because I'm also a big fan of Skyrim modding, would like to know how a GTX 1080 can handle 4k textures, ENB, and other graphical settings to its limit.

 

I'm also stuck with MSI GT73VR Titan or the Evoc 16L (still waiting for a 120hz w/GYSNC)

 

Here is the beast, I received it within 34 hours of it being shipped :

 

During the time I had my Razer Blade Pro (see top of thread for details on that...), I briefly tested Skyrim Special Edition with maxed-out graphics on the RBP. It delivered 60 FPS or better for me in most areas at 4K. I didn't have time to install mods or ENB while I had the machine, but the baseline SSE ran just fine at 4K. (Disclaimer: I'm not one of those who craves 100 FPS because I'm not playing competitive shooter games -- if an RPG, my preferred genre, gives me 50+ FPS even during combat or large levels, I find this perfectly acceptable. YMMV.)

By all accounts I've seen, this 16L-G-1080 should blow the doors off the RBP. I'm eager to try it!

 

As an aside, even on the RBP with a GTX 1080 and 32 GB RAM, the Skyrim Creation Kit still had lousy performance in the render window. Blech! The Oblivion Construction Set ran like a dream, though, once I used Win10 compatibility settings to work around the high DPI scaling problem.

 

@Phoenix , I'm thinking of buying the same rig, just with less storage, as for me it's too expensivo!

Anyways, what are your first thoughts of using the machine for the couple of days? (Can't wait for your video review to go out, must know more! )

 

First thoughts:

1) superb build quality
2) typing on this SteelSeries keyboard is like heaven
3) Awesome screen

 

Not a mechanical keyboard. Just a really nice chiclet one. Only the GT80 Titan has a genuine Cherry MX board.

 

It's not mechanical bro. That's the main reason I didn't go with the GT83VR

 

I think you mean the aesthetics are better? Because I guarantee you having to take the thing apart to access two RAM slots is worse build quality/design xD.

I'm kind of glad you're getting this now. This is going to give me a lot of information to influence my recommendations in the future.

 

Yep, the only thing that doesn't work is Thunderbolt 3 mode on the USB-C port.

A few other things I checked:

• Audio output works, but doesn't switch automatically
• Microphone works
• Webcam works (be sure to enable it via FN-F6 if its not detected)
• mDP output works, reports 4 lanes @ 2.7gbps
• brightness can be adjusted via xbacklight (this appears to not just be adjusting gamma, either) idle power usage was able to go down to close to Windows 10 levels

On another side note, I was able to get a stable VPN connection going with UbuntuGNOME 16.10 using strongswan/xl2tpd and the network-manager-l2tp project. I am tempted to go buy a 1TB M.2 SSD and put Linux on it now!

 

You rock, for doing all this testing! I'm seriously tempted to stuff a spare SSD into mine when I get it, and set up a dual boot.

For VPN, I'm using OpenVPN, which I find lots easier to set up and manage than IPsec. One drawback of OpenVPN is that the server end (assuming star topology) does not see "interface up/down" events, which can be an issue if you're using dyamic routing with Quagga and friends. It's not an issue otherwise. Set it up with UDP and not TCP unless you absolutely have no choice, because UDP will run faster and more reliably.

If you set up dual boot, please share how you partitioned. I've done dual boots before, but not yet with Windows 10, so I'm not sure how evil (or not evil) its boot loader is when Micros~1 pushes updates.