MSI GT72 Dominator Pro Review: GTX 980M Reigns Supreme
by Jarred Walton on November 11, 2014 8:00 AM ESTMSI GT72 Dominator Pro Battery Life
Battery life is one area where the GT72 isn’t going to be the best notebook on the planet, but hopefully you knew that going into the review. Seriously: when was the last time a true gaming notebook could also last all day between charging? Anyway, the GT72 as I mentioned earlier is interesting in that MSI has decided to forego Optimus support and instead use muxes with a software switch to enable/disable the discrete GPU (with a reboot required for the change to take effect). We’ve tested with both the GTX 980M as well as the HD 4600, and of course turning off the dedicated GPU improves battery life… but perhaps not quite as much as you might at first guess.
First things first, the MSI GT72 with the GTX 980M enabled managed to last as long in our Light battery test as the MSI GS60 with Optimus support. I’m not sure it’s praise of the GT72 so much as a further indictment of the poor battery optimizations on the GS60, and frankly the GE60 and GT70 aren’t winning any awards for battery life either. What’s really important however is that MSI seems to have made more of an effort to provide decent battery life with the new GT72, and when we switch to the Intel HD 4600 we even manage to reach nearly six hours of mobility. This is all with the same capacity battery as the GT70, though I should note that at one point MSI had a BIOS update on the GTX 780M variant of the GT70 that achieved around six hours of battery life as well.
Switching over to estimations of power draw, in the Light test the GT72 uses ~14.8W (give or take) with the HD 4600 compared to ~22.1W with the GTX 980M, so having the discrete GPU active appears to result in a constant power drain of around 7W. That’s as much as some Ultrabooks use in light workloads, but that’s the price you pay for high performance (and 8GB of GDDR5 memory). The Heavy testing basically confirms those numbers: power draw with the HD 4600 active ends up being ~18.7W while turning on the GTX 980M the GT72 uses ~29.2W. (The Heavy workload involves H.264 video playback, so the GPU is going to be more active.)
We already did an in-depth look at BatteryBoost on the GT72, so I’m not going to get into it too much here. Gaming without BatteryBoost will generally mean less than an hour of battery life, while dropping to a 30FPS target will in some cases allow you to break two hours of mobility. The trick of course is that by targeting 30FPS you’re effectively turning the GTX 980M into something a lot more like a GT 750M in terms of performance, but it’s nice to have options. Also note that with the battery being behind the chassis cover on the bottom, there’s no way to swap batteries to extend your mobile time, so carrying the AC adapter with you is pretty much a requirement.
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frodbonzi - Tuesday, November 11, 2014 - link
Alienware gives you the same hardware....it's only the 980m that is different...and I'm sure it will be offered soon. Someone on the Alienware 18 owner's thread on a different forum has said it was late November...Anyways, as I posted earlier, once you are going the gaming laptop route, I don't see the reason for going "half way"... Yes, the 18" laptops are heavier - but it's not like you're going to be taking this one with your everywhere either... they're both "portable desktops".
The Alienware 18, even with "only" dual 880m, will beat this laptop (and any other single GPU laptop) handily... the benchmarks Jarred included were from dual 780m... and they STILL beat the 980m! Alienware can give you an IPS screen and 4 SSDs (although I prefer 3 SSDs and a blu-ray drive myself) for just a bit more cash...
Lastly, I have to say that once you are in this price range, cost ceases to be a large factor. Yes, when buying a $500 laptop, an extra $200 is a big deal... But when buying a $3000+ laptop, a few hundred dollars no longer really matters...
CrazyElf - Tuesday, November 11, 2014 - link
We're not talking about a small difference in price here though. The Alienware 18 is a couple of thousand dollars more if you max it out. Price I'd argue still matters.I have no doubt that the top end Alienware and Clevo laptops will beat this thing, especially if they are running 980M SLI (when that comes out). The top end Clevo probably will run a desktop grade CPU, so it's even more potent in this regard. I believe Clevo P570WM3 is the 6 core Ivy Bridge E model. Not sure if they are coming with a Haswell E laptop that can support 8 core Haswell though.
The only other benefit I can see is this thing can support 4x M.2. Not sure how many the Alienware 18 can support, although they are probably using 2.5" SATA 3 drives. It's not a huge advantage though, as M.2 is faster, but not something you'd notice for gaming.
Agree on the Blu-Ray drive.
@Jarred Walton
Would it be possible to get the IPS GT72 tested out when it comes out? It should have a better quality screen overall.
frodbonzi - Thursday, November 13, 2014 - link
If you don't mind refurbished, we're only talking about $200-$300.... and Alienware 18s have 1 M.2, and 3 SATA slots (some models give u 3 hard drives and an optical drive, others give all 4 hard drives).As a point of pricing:
My Alienware 18 (purchased 2 months ago) has 32GB of RAM, dual 880m, and the i7 4940mx. I'm not a fan of RAID 0, so the "fast" M.2 is my boot drive (256gb) and the other 2 drives are 256gb sata SDDs... I replaced the DVD drive with a $50 Blu-Ray writer off of ebay (Panasonic UJ265)...
Cost: $3200 --> I've seen the same on ebay ranging from $3000 to $4000...
Aikouka - Tuesday, November 11, 2014 - link
I ended up picking up one of these a few weeks ago, and it's a nice laptop. I went with the "budget" 980M version that only has a single SSD, and I purchased a separate 512GB SSD to use in non-RAID. It works great as I leave the original SSD for the OS and use the other one for more important games/applications. That's the same approach that I take on my desktop as well.I also had the same problem with the bottom of the laptop. Honestly, I was afraid that I was going to break it! MSI uses a *ton* of tabs in addition to the screws to hold the bottom panel on, and it requires a bit of yanking to get it off. I also found it to be a bit more difficult than desired to put it back on.
I'm not the biggest fan of the trackpad though. I find that even at higher sensitivity, it just isn't all that sensitive and requires a lot more movement than some of my other laptops. The problem is that when making scrolling gestures and such, I really have to push down on it or else it doesn't register the gesture.
I was also pleasantly surprised by the Killer Wi-Fi card. I use Intel 7260-AC cards in my two NUCs, and honestly... they're downright awful. If they do connect, it will only last for a few days until it drops to unusable levels of performance, and I've never had one connect at full AC speed. My laptop connects to my router at full 2x AC speed.
As for the noise, I do wish that the laptop was a bit quieter during low usage, but I'm also the type that builds very quiet PCs. I highly doubt that any normal user would mind the noise.
jabber - Tuesday, November 11, 2014 - link
Nice hardware...shame it looks like a tacky toy.utferris - Tuesday, November 11, 2014 - link
I am a computer scientist, I just do not understand the design.4x128GB RAID 0, seriously? The failure rate will be incredibly high with RAID0 of four storages of any kind, though they can get some speed up.
I can understand gamers buy monsters, but I donot understand why they will pay for such stupid design.
DanNeely - Tuesday, November 11, 2014 - link
Agree, 1st thing I'd do would be to RAID10 it; but every time someone at Anandtech or elsewhere sends a "RAID0, WTF!" email to a gaming laptop representative, the answer they get back is some version of "Our customers are demanding RAID0." Assuming their market research is valid, there're a lot of idiots buying gaming laptops with no clue beyond benchmark numbers. I'm somewhat skeptical though because you don't see the same thing in pre built gaming desktops. I suspect that what happened was that they went RAID0 in the HDD era to try and compensate for the crapitude of 2.5" HDDs; and haven't checked to see if it's still a valid customer requirement.What surprises me is that they don't offer an alternative model with a single 2.5" SSD. The price premium on M.2 drives is high enough that they could still charge a large markup on it while being substantially less than the M.2 RAID0 model.
jabber - Wednesday, November 12, 2014 - link
I know a few friends that have bought such machines in the past. The truth is they spend more time going back for repairs/fixes than actually on the users desk. More trouble than they are worth in the long run.IgenIgen - Tuesday, November 11, 2014 - link
The new ASUS G751JT/JY actually use a redesigned chassis compared to the G750. It also comes with an IPS display as standard (at least in Europe).JarredWalton - Wednesday, November 12, 2014 - link
Is it a radical overhaul of the design, or just incremental tweaks of the previous iterations of the G7xx series? Judging by images, it's the latter:http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
Compared that with the GT70 vs. GT72 and it's a massive change. That's what I'm trying to get at.