The Official MSI GS73VR Owners' Lounge

I bought one of these the other day, although unfortunately it's had to go back to MSI as DOA... However, I did get to have a bit of a play with it. Thought others might like to hear some actual impressions, given the amount of confusing marketing material out there at the moment.

First impressions, coming from a 4-5 year old Asus gaming laptop but primarily using a fairly beefy desktop gaming system:

• The screen is glorious. This was the 1080p 120Hz model. The response time and refresh rate make it noticeably more responsive, even (in my entirely subjective opinion) on the desktop. I only had the chance to install one game (Dirty Bomb) but it was silky smooth. No idea if it is IPS (I don't think so). Viewing angles were not great, but colour was nice. Reds were especially nice compared to most laptops I've used, and I was surprised to see that MSI's out of the box calibration was much closer to correct than most laptops, which typically have a really strong blue cast to them. I have a calibrated Panasonic plasma TV, and the MSI was pretty close to it right from the get go.
• The 5400rpm (?) hard disk is a total disgrace. Why the hell would you put this POS in such a high end machine? It means that you have an uber-responsive unit which then slows to a crawl when you run anything off the secondary disk. E.g. Dirty Bomb, which is a last generation, fairly lightweight Unreal Engine game, took a solid 30-40 seconds to load before a round, and this was all because of the hard disk thrashing wildly (I installed it on the secondary HDD as an experiment). You would definitely have to swap this out for an SSD to get the most out of this thing.
• The build quality was overall very impressive. Pretty much all brushed metal, IMHO subtle enough for professional/study use. It's ludicrously thin, but the 17" form factor means it's still a big unit. You wouldn't want to use it on a plane, for example, and it doesn't fit comfortably in my current work satchel.
• The power brick appears to be made of uranium and is very heavy.
• The touchpad is a million times better than my ASUS.
• The keyboard is quite nice for a laptop, although I used a mechanical keyboard on my desktop so all laptops feel like crap compared to that. Still, fairly nice. No Windows key on the left which is annoying and weird, and the delete key is in a weird spot. The lighting is hilariously ridiculous. I expect I would end up turning it down to almost nothing pretty quickly.
• It comes pre-installed with a whole lot of crapware. Like, about 12-15 little programs start when it starts. Most of them seem lightweight and actually have some purpose, but still, it needs a good clean up. The m2 masks the extent to which it is loaded with crap, it loads very, very quickly from a cold boot.
• It also comes with Norton. God dammit, MSI. Why? Do you want to punish people for buying your hardware?
• The sound is ok, but pretty typical for a laptop (a bit tinny/muffled compared to real speakers or headphones). Headphones sounded very good, no idea if the fancy sound processing it allegedly has was doing anything though.
• In a game, it is quite loud. My older laptop was also a bit noisy, but had a bigger/fatter chassis. You can really tell that the GS73VR is trying very hard to push air out of a small space. The GPU fan in particular really makes some noise when it fires up. There are fan controls, which I had a bit of a play with, and I believe it will be possible to get this down to a reasonable level for most games without the temps getting too bad.
• In terms of temps, it did get noticeably hot while gaming. But I was able to have it on my lap. It's winter/early spring here (Australia). This thing would be uncomfortable on your lap in summer while gaming. The heat was worst on the underside, but pretty severe on top too. That said, internal temps were quite good (hovering in the 60-70 degree range).
  

Now, the problem I had. It had a weird, crackly, electronic noise. Sort of a combination of scraping, electronic chirping, and that sound that a small electrical short makes. Not present all the time, but certainly present after the machine warms up. Oddly, it was not present during gaming for the most part, but was very noticeable when doing ordinary desktop tasks. My perception was that it was linked to the secondary HDD doing stuff, but it wasn't a normal hard disk noise. The trackpad also seemed to cause problems. So, sadly, I had to immediately take my new toy back to the shop. Thankfully they were very good about the problem, and MSI (Australia) were also very good and agreed to treat it as DOA - so there was no attempt by MSI to suggest that this noise was normal. Their suggestion was that it sounds like a bad solder point causing something to generate electrical interference.

So - overall, a very nice unit, but a bit bigger/heavier than expected and so not particularly mobile. A+ build quality other than the minor issue of something shorting out or causing an odd noise inside the unit(!). I now have to decide whether to stick with a new GS73VR, or switch to something else. I'm tempted by the GS63VR, but I don't want to give up the lovely 120Hz screen and I am concerned about the cooling situation where essentially identical hardware will be crammed into a much smaller space.

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The Official MSI GS73VR Owners' Lounge