Good: Brilliant performance in games, latest hardware inside, SSDs are incredibly fast, impressive keyboard and speakers, Killer E2200 LAN card and 3x USB 3.0 ports.
Bad: Graphics card is just an overclocked version of last year's GTX 570M, a proper (Kepler based) GTX 680M is due in a few months and 47% of the SSDs are filled with bloatware.
Price: AED 8,999
* The price is the Suggested Retail Price at the time of review. Please call a retailer to confirm the latest price for this product.
Gaming Benchmarks
Before we begin the gaming tests, let’s have a look at the settings used for each benchmark. The below settings have been used for consistency among all tests. Given that 1680×1050 doesn’t look too bad, and indeed looks acceptable in many games, I have used that resolution in addition to the native 1920×1080 for benchmarks.
Now it’s time to see how much of an improvement in real world does the overclocked GTX 570M, i.e. the GTX 670M does.
On average the GTX 670M has a 27% lead over the GTX 560M, albeit that’s mainly due to the beefier specs on the GTX 670M versus the GTX 560M; CUDA cores alone on the GTX 670M outnumber the GTX 560M by 75%! Of course the SSD (on which I had installed all benchmarks) plus the faster Ivy Bridge processor also helped. But it’s good to see that in nearly all benchmarks the GT70 produces roughly 10fps more than the GT780R, allowing room for higher AntiAliasing effects to be used.
Conclusion
It’s clear that the new hardware in the GT70 is a significant improvement over last year’s GT780R models. While the graphics card may remain a generation old, the higher clock speeds most certainly help improve performance. Combine this with the new Ivy Bridge processor and SSDs in RAID, and you have a supremely capable gaming laptop. Heck, even Windows boots in 11 seconds flat! My only major complaint is that MSI have bundles this with so much unnecessary software that out of 111GB of the RAIDed SSDs, you’re only left with 58.8GB free. May as well just reinstall Windows 7.
The Killer E2200 LAN card and Dynaudio speakers are just extra features that enhance the value of this machine. My only concern is that a few months down the line a revised GT70 (or maybe GT80) is going to be released with the GTX 680M GPU, with Kepler architecture whose performance is supposed to be a major leap from the two year old Fermi architecture used by the GTX 670M in the GT70.
If you’re spending close to AED 10k, may as well wait a few more months for the “ultimate” gaming laptop which will undoubtedly have the GTX 680M, otherwise the GTX 670M is pretty decent.
