MSI GS60 Ghost Pro 3K Review
by Jarred Walton on August 21, 2014 6:00 AM ESTMSI GS60 Ghost Pro 3K Battery Life
As I mentioned already, battery life is the one area where the GS60 doesn't do well. I keep waiting for someone to deliver a Haswell gaming notebook with a GTX class GPU that can still reach 8+ hours of battery life for light workloads, but I have yet to encounter such a system. The GE60 also had pretty mediocre battery life, and the GS60 with the 3K display does even worse. The finer dot pitch of HiDPI displays means you need a more powerful backlight to push the same level of light through, if nothing else, and it's possible that running at a higher resolution with 150% scaling is also playing a role. Regardless, battery life for a modern laptop is pretty weak, even for one with a 52Wh battery.
In our Light test, the GS60 manages just over 3.5 hours, while in the Heavy test it drops down to around 2.5 hours. That's enough to get you through most extended length movies, but it won't make it through a longer flight or a full day of use, no matter how hard you try. Normalized things look a bit better, but that doesn't help much when the GS60 has one of the smaller batteries in the above list.
Power draw in the Light test is ~14.4W (give or take), which is about 4W more than the GE60 in the same test. I'm not sure how much of the power difference is coming from the 3K display, but it's worth noting that AC power measured at the wall drops to 11W when the display is off and the system is idle. Dell's XPS 15 still manages to support a QHD+ touchscreen LCD and only consumes 9.9W in the same test, so whatever the cause there's room for improvement. And if you're wondering, in our Heavy battery life test the power draw jumps to ~19.1W – that's less than the GT70's result of 20.95W, but neither one is going to win an award for long battery life.
As you might expect, gaming battery life (with or without Battery Boost) is not very good. In a modern 3D game with medium to high 1080p settings, you're looking at around 40-45 minutes. You might get more than an hour with further tweaking and running Battery Boost with a 30FPS frame rate limit, but if you're hoping for 2+ hours of unplugged gaming you're going to need to look elsewhere.
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nathanddrews - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
Figuring that a 256GB OS drive is included, a 1TB upgrade could be $400 and they would make plenty of profit. Depending on how much it costs them, they could make the upgrade $300 or $350 and still get some margin.I'm still waiting for 2TB SSDs to get under $500. I think that will spark a major boom in SSD adoption beyond just boot drives. 3-D TLC should get us there.
falc0ne - Saturday, August 23, 2014 - link
this is a gaming laptop and don't tell me you want to use play Starcraft while commuting and hope the battery will last the whole day. Lets be reasonablelimitedaccess - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
No pictures with the back cover off?Also regarding notebook reviews in general I think size/weight measurements for the power brick would be useful information. Some review sites do include this already. Especially in a case like this where you'd in many (if not all cases) have to take that with you as well due to the battery life combined with one the core usage scenarios (gaming).
limitedaccess - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
Just to add something else that would be nice to see commented more on in reviews is wireless connectivity which it seems like quite a few laptops have issues with (and differing performance).Another common related issue is running off wifi and having a bluetooth device connected.
JarredWalton - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
I did list WiFi throughput in the general performance benchmarks (the last chart before 3DMark). I didn't experience any unusual WiFi issues with the GS60; it lost connectivity a few times but that happens to nearly every laptop I've tested and it wasn't a constant problem. (It could have been my router as well -- the nature of the 802.11ac beast.)Arbie - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
I would much rather have an SSD than the super high res, which I doubt will be much use on a screen that size. And on any laptop over $1K I would expect an SSD. This one is $2K.ZeDestructor - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
It has two SSDs alongside the harddrive.GreenMeters - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
I was late to the party for the last MSI gaming laptop review, so I'll ask again here: can the tacky badge on the back of the display be removed?JarredWalton - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
Nope -- it gets lit by the LCD backlight, so it actually would leave a hole through the metal cover.sheh - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
I hate stupid keyboard layouts. If the WinKey only on the right wasn't bad enough, there's an extra backslash key to the right of the spacebar. What's the point of two backslash keys?