MSI GT70 laptop: Built for gaming

With a slate of new releases, by Microsoft and Sony among others, it seems this is the year for game consoles. However gaming on PC still has its fans who will swear by the power and precision of a keyboard and mouse. This is why we still see quite a few gaming computers and laptops available in the market.

The MSI GT70 is one such fierce beast. Its design is a little uninspiring; the laptop is entirely black with the back featuring a large MSI logo. On the front is the 17.3 inch screen and the keyboard designed especially for gaming by SteelSeries. The company has made certain tweaks, like increasing the size of keys most used by gamers, to deliver a better experience. Moreover the backlighting on the keyboard uses three colours for different sections of the keyboard, which not only provides visual guidance but also gives it a really stylish look.

For games, the keyboard becomes one half of the controller, the other half being the mouse. The gaming experience is tremendous because the keyboard gives excellent feedback on every press of the button. As a First Person Shooter fan, the extra space on the most used keys (around the WASD area) was much more comfortable for me.

Another standout feature was the sound on the GT70. Its speaker setup is pretty impressive and could give a few desktops a run for their money. Of course it can’t replace a high end or gaming specific speaker system, but it will do well in situations where you can’t drag your 5.1 setup.

On the inside, the GT70 runs a 2.30 GHz Intel Core i7 processor along with 16GB of RAM. This can also be upgraded up to 32GB RAM.

But the real power of the laptop lies in the graphics card; the Nvidia GeForce GTX 680M. This card really shines with just about any game and keeps your frame per second (FPS) rate comfortably high. Of course for the less intensive applications, the machine switches to the Intel HD Graphics 4000 chip that is far less power intensive and a lot more battery friendly. This will also run your full high definition movies quite comfortably. In fact with the Blu-Ray drive, the laptop can quite easily become your media centre.

The GT70 has all the necessary features - USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports, full HDMI port, Ethernet, VGA, E-SATA, and a memory card reader, among others - to connect to the internet and other devices.

The GT70 features a 17.3 inch screen with an anti-glare coating and 1080p resolution. Storage on the GT70 is on the high side as well; there’s space for two drives and the stock configuration comes with one 256GB SSD for the speed and performance; while the second 750GB HDD can be used for storing larger and less speed-critical files.

The laptop is on the heavy side though; weighing in at over 3 kilos it isn’t something you’ll be able to carry on your back every day. The MSI GT70 Gaming laptop and like many of its class barely qualifies as a portable computer. It does however do what it is meant to very well.

The writer is a marketing professional and an early adopter of all things digital