I’ve said before that gaming laptops are starting to make a lot of sense once again, but that’s only if the companies that manufacturer these products take advantage of breakthrough technologies from partners like AMD, Nvidia, and Intel.
That brings us to the $1,800 MSI GT62VR, which straddles some of the lines that separate old gaming laptops from the new crop, but the end result is still a machine that never struggles to play modern games and should easily last for the next four to five years.
What you’ll like
It’s a multitasking beast
MSI has packed in the latest chips from Intel and Nvidia into this laptop, and that makes it smart enough to handle all kinds of tools at once. Here’s a look at the specs of the system I used:
- Intel Core i7-7700HQ @ 2.8GHz
- 15.6-inch IPS display 1080p (it also comes in 2160p)
- Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 with 8GB GDDR5 memory
- 16GB of RAM
- 1TB HDD storage
- 264GB SSD storage
- SteelSeries backlit keyboard
- 2 Dynadio speakers and 1 subwoofer
Above: It’s a blazing machine for gaming and work.
Image Credit: MSI
As an example of an extreme situation where the laptop excels, I run a weekly podcast that I livestream and record simultaneously. To do this, I need to have Chrome and Xsplit open simultaneously, and I have both programs slam the CPU and GPU with requests for video rendering, Google docs, and a million tabs. It’s often too much for the old 4th-generation i5 and the new GTX 1080 Ti that I have in my desktop right now.
As a work machine, this notebook is clearly capable of handling just about anything you’ll throw at it. And if you’re doing any video, photography, or audio processing, that seventh-gen Kaby Lake processor is nearly a must-have for anyone who does their work on the go or someone who wants desktop power in a form factor that can easily leave the desk.
It’s a VR and gaming powerhouse
At the same time, this is clearly a gaming laptop first. And where some of the GeForce GTX 1060-based notebooks were mostly hitting 60 frames per second at Ultra settings and a 1080p resolution, the 1070 is enough to get you over the hump for games like Watch Dogs 2.
Here’s a test I run to see whether or not the system can handle some of the more demanding games at 1080P60, and it easily surpassed that marker:
And here’s how the GT62VR compares to the MSI GS43VR, which illustrates how much more performance you get from the 1070 and the Kaby Lake processor: