Review: msi gt72 dominator pro

This laptop comes loaded with some of the best components available on the market today, an i7 4710MQ, 16GB of RAM, an impressive nVidia gtx 970M with 6GB, Intel 7260 (AC 2 × 2) wireless network card, backlit steelseries keyboard, two hard drives, a 256GB SSD and a 1TB mechanical drive for storage, and a number of extras that are not far behind. Without further delay we go with the review.

Technical characteristics

CPU The 4th generation Intel® Core ™ i7 Processor OS Windows 8.1 Chipset Intel HM87 Memory DDR3L, up to 1600 MHz, slot * 4, max 32GB LCD Size 17.3 ″ Full HD (1920 × 1080), Anti-glare Graphics GeForce GTX 970M Graphics VRAM GDDR5 6GB Storage Up to 1024GB Super RAID 3 + 1TB HDD 7200rpm Optical Drive BD Writer / DVD Super Multi Audio Sound by Dynaudio 2.1 channel with 1 Woofer

Support 7.1 channel SPDIF output

Exclusive Audio Boost 2 technology

Creative Sound Blaster Cinema 2 Webcam Full HD type (30fps @ 1080p) Card Reader SD (XC / HC) LAN Killer DoubleShot Pro Gb LAN Wireless LAN Killer DoubleShot Pro 11ac Bluetooth Bluetooth 4.0 HDMI 1 (v1.4), Support 4Kx2K Output USB 2.0 port USB 3.0 port 6 Mini-DisplayPort 2 (v1.2), Support 4Kx2K Output Mic-in / Headphone-out 1/1 Line-in 1 Keyboard Full-color backlight SteelSeries keyboard AC Adapter 230W Battery 9-Cell Lithium Ion (83wHr) Dimension 428 (W) x 294 (D) x 48 (H) mm Weight (KG) 3.78Kg (w / Battery)

MSI GT72 2QD-255ES

The packaging is a fairly large box, following the tradition of 17-inch models. The decoration follows the line of the MSI gaming series

Detail of the technical specifications of the received model

Of the two large boxes, one carries the laptop, perfectly protected as we will see, while the other brings all the accessories, which are not few

Notebook packing detail

Detail of the accessories, a keyboard protector, along with the highlights: some Steelseries SiberiaV2 helmets and a Steelseries Kinzu mouse, both quite high-end peripherals are included with the laptop. A black envelope / folder is included, we assume that it will include documentation in the models for sale to the public, in our sample for reviews it was empty.

The laptop comes in a cloth bag to avoid scratches (the aluminum is delicate, and very dirty in terms of fingerprints), which will serve to transport it in the future:

With this in mind, we are dealing with a very solid laptop, in a very friendly format such as 17.3 inches, ideal for devices that do not move too much but which are going to require good performance and a good screen in games. This laptop is an excellent companion for partys and travel.

The laptop is well designed, it is a fairly thick model with almost 5cm in the back, but in return the air vents are generous and the number of ports impressive, with 6 USB3.0, two miniDP and an HDMI 1.4, along with the typical card reader and network port, very well located at the back

The bottom does not detract from anything, with a black and red grid following the style of the rest of the laptop and contributing to a cooling that as we will see is excellent.

The upper part does not detract from anything either, with very good details such as the MSI logo illuminated by the screen's own backlight.

Open laptop detail

The finishes are very good, and the quality of materials remarkable. They stand out the outer cover in aluminum, and the base of the keyboard in the same material. The lower body is plastic but robust enough not to detract from the whole. The MSI dragon logo illuminates taking advantage of the backlight on the screen, without spending extra battery for it, similar to the macbook with the apple. The keyboard design is simply spectacular, with fully configurable RGB lighting, both in rainbows and seen in commercial images as monocolor or changing.

Detail of the bottom right, where we see some of its outstanding features reflected, such as the XSplit license, the support for 3 screens and the Super RAID3 (which is the RAID0 of SSDs that we will comment on), along with the processor and graphics

Detail of the side buttons, along with the Dynaudio logo, those busy making the speakers of this excellent laptop, which we must say is close to a very good level even for listening to music, with quite solid speakers and a lower subwoofer, it is easy to forget that we are facing a laptop

Equipment detail from the side

The status LEDs are camouflaged in the illumination of the front red lines, discreet and quite beautiful.

One thing I personally appreciate very much in a laptop is the ease of disassembling it in order to change parts and make extensions. With this model you could not be happier in that aspect, since it is designed precisely so that it is easy to open, all the screws are in the cover and are accessible at a glance, in 1-2 minutes any user with skill will have the laptop open.

The distribution is very good, with a fan for the graphics and another for the CPU (connected by heatpipes to take advantage of both in case of low load on one of the two components). We have two RAM slots available to further expand the capacity of this laptop, in the rare case that the included 16gb falls short. There is an extra room for a 2.5 ″ hard drive, though unfortunately no connections available.

Detail of the mechanical hard drive, as we see a Hitachi model of 7200rpm and 1Tb, which has shown really good performance for a 2.5 ″ drive

Detail of the other hard drive, as we see it is a RAID0 of SSDs from Kingston manufacturing with 128Gb each (in total 256Gb), mounted on a board that connects it to the corresponding port

Finally, detail of the subwoofer, on the right, quite generous to be a laptop

Detail of the right fan, the one that takes care of the CPU. Just below is the wireless network card, dual band and AC 2 × 2, the best available in laptops.

We finished with the interior and went on to detail the components and peripherals.

Starting with the keyboard, the touch of the keys is very good, we cannot forget that we are dealing with a chiclet-type membrane keyboard, but the Steelseries hand is noticeable, the keys respond very well and are durable. As a small complaint, the size of the Ç key seems excessive to me, taking up the entire top of the intro for a character that is used sporadically, while the <and> characters are missing. Of course, this does not remove a great result from the keyboard, of course in Spanish layout (as indicated by the -ES of the model number).

The laptop is quite quiet in charge for the usual, well-designed and perfectly compliant cooling is appreciated, thanks in part to the thickness of the base and the size of the laptop. At rest, on the other hand, without being annoying at all, it is not one of the quietest I have ever tried, in fact the fan never stops.

As for the processor, we find the smallest of the really powerful intel processors, an i7 4710MQ, with 4 cores and 8 threads, and haswell architecture. Even though it is the most discreet in frequencies of its series, it has everything its older brothers, and it is certainly the right choice for a gaming laptop. The suffix -MQ means that it is an FCPGA socket processor (946 in this case) , which indicates that it is mounted on socket and not soldered, a great advantage if we need to expand the processor in the future. Unfortunately, we don't have any more processors from this socket to test, but any processor we see on another GT72 series laptop is very likely compatible.

Although this processor starts with a modest frequency of 2.5Ghz, it has a turbo frequency of 3.5Ghz, almost like desktop processors, so in correct thermal conditions it should not be far from them, as we will see in the testing section performance.

In RAM memory they have opted for a 16GB kit, in two 8GB modules at 1600mhz CL11-11-11-28 1T configured in dual channel, a generous amount to go several years left over and nothing out of the ordinary in these ranges. They are modules manufactured by Kingston, DDR3L (1.35V) as haswell demands, considering that, the latencies are not especially high.

The laptop is very agile in terms of startup and use, with just five seconds between pressing the button and reaching the desktop, and it's not for less, since MSI has chosen to mount two 128GB disks in RAID0, achieving performance in sequential read / write that comes out of the graphics, reaching 1000MB / s under ideal conditions, as we will see in the tests. The hard drives are manufactured by Kingston, they belong to a medium range in terms of performance separately. The model number of the same is Kingston-RBU-SNS8100S3128GD1, which according to the passmark falls somewhat below the commercial HyperX of similar size.

The main hard drive is a 1TB, 7200rpm Hitachi. No surprise in this part, it is a capable and spacious disk to store our data. The performance is quite remarkable, without of course reaching the heights of an SSD, we find 140MB / s of sequential read and write.

In the graphics section it is probably where it stands out the most, since it mounts an nVidia GTX 970M, a real beast that even exceeds the excellent performance of the 880M. Based on the GM204 chip, Maxwell architecture, it is a really efficient chip, with much less power consumption than the aforementioned 880M, which not only has this impressive performance, but also a reasonable overclocking margin. This chart features 1280 CUDA cores and 6GB of GDDR5 memory mounted on a 192bit bus. Even with the impressive value of the memory, I personally consider that they could have opted for the 3GB model without any loss, since for the resolution of the screen it is not necessary any more, and for 4K the chip will be somewhat scarce as well. Be that as it may, in the price range of this laptop, it is understandable that they have preferred to heal in health. We see below the information of the GPU-Z. Of the missing values, we can at least confirm that it is made at 28nm, like the rest of Maxwell.

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The laptop includes a button to switch between the dedicated and the integrated graphics, a great functionality, although unfortunately we will have to restart to apply the change. Consumption is reduced slightly with this practice, although the Optimus system of nVidia also works, and we have not found a particularly bad autonomy even with the dedicated graphics active, standing around 4 hours of light use (navigation, videos, office automation), which will be drastically reduced in case of playing demanding games, as in all similar laptops.

With the components that this laptop mounts, we trust that any benchmark that occurs to us will pass with good marks, rivaling even many high-end desktop computers. We will see below.

Test of performance

The first test we'll look at is Cinebench, which is a fairly objective measure to see at a glance the performance of the processor. Since we have no more laptop processors to compare, we will compare it to desktop models. And even so, we see a very good result, leaving the Pentium G3258 (which is a dual core, but very capable for games) with more than twice the power, and being quite close to a real beast like the 4790K, a result certainly excellent for a laptop processor.

The temperatures we liked a lot, if before we said that the laptop is heavy and bulky, we see that here the advantage is evident, we have very low temperatures and a very good overclock margin for the graphics. The fan is not particularly noisy, but one thing we did not like is that it can be heard even with the laptop at rest, which, seeing the temperatures, could have been perfectly avoided

The results in games are equally impressive, as we see it is equated in power with a desktop gtx680, surpassing it even in some fields, as we see in the 3DMark Fire Strike, which despite having a processor with two less cores (which is left note in the physics test) gets better score, simply spectacular. In Tomb Raider we are not so lucky, with a slightly lower result, but we remember that we are comparing the graphics of this laptop with a high-end desktop, the result is already very good.

We note that after reviewing benchmarks from other publications with access to more laptop configurations to test, we can say that this 970M is around 10% more powerful, on average, than a desktop gtx 680. Enough to play with high settings to practically all video games, and those to come in very good condition as well.

The performance of the SSD is, as we expected, exceptional, with small blocks they are not the best values we have seen, but with large blocks RAID0 is noted, reaching values that exceed 1000MB / s. Little more can be asked of the hard drive of this laptop

conclusion

This MSI GT72 2QD is positioned as one of the strongest alternatives in its range. We really liked its overall material quality, SSDs RAID0 performance, super-cool cooling, and easy disassembly to clean and replace components.

By cons, we must note that the price is quite high, and the competition are models of the same brand, being able to find the most basic GT72 2QD (specifically the 609XES submodel) for € 1, 600, it is difficult not to notice the latter before. In exchange for the price, this laptop brings us Windows 8.1 license included, the RAID0 of solid state storage, and high-end peripherals steelseries, but without a doubt the area of the 2000 € where this laptop enters begins to have very tempting alternatives.

Likewise, given the quality of this laptop, the price seems very justifiable. The screen is very generous and comfortable to play with 17.3 ″, although unfortunately we are not facing an IPS panel, but TN.

Everything that doesn't come out in the brochures has been taken care of in detail too, with an AC wireless network card, a cable Killer card, and plenty of USB3.0 ports. If you want a laptop entering the enthusiastic range without leaving your pocket in a 980M, this should be one of your first options.

ADVANTAGE	DISADVANTAGES
+ EXCELLENT PROCESSOR PERFORMANCE AND GRAPHIC. 16GB RAM	- VERY HIGH PRICE, MODELS WITH LESS EXTRAS AND WITHOUT SO AS THE MORE AFFORDABLE MSI GT72 2QD-609XES
+ 256GB SSD, 128 + 128 IN RAID0, 1TB FOR DATA, VERY FAST AND QUANTITY STORAGE	- APPARATUS AND ENOUGH HEAVY, ALTHOUGH IN EXCHANGE VERY WELL VENTILATED
+ VERY GOOD QUALITY BACKLIGHT KEYBOARD. ALSO EXCELLENT AUDIO, WITH INTEGRATED SUBWOOFER	- TN SCREEN, SOMETHING BETTER VIEWING ANGLES. VERY GOOD RESPONSE AND RESOLUTION TIME
+ VERY LOOSE REFRIGERATION, OC MARGIN IN GRAPHIC
+ IMPECCABLE AESTHETICS
+ RED INALÁMBRICA AC