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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JarredWalton - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
You can remap nearly every key... except Fn. :(sheh - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
Remapping is a partial solution. There's also the tactile issue: part of my typing is based around the feel of key edges and where keys are relative to other keys. And there's nothing you can do about the missing left WinKey.Yet, this is probably not as bad as some layouts like the UK one.
JarredWalton - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
I've harped on MSI's keyboard layout a lot over the years, but they don't want to change it and apparently some users like having the Win key on the right. Having played with a lot of keyboards, what I've found is that if you consistently use any single keyboard (or two keyboards, say home and work systems), you generally adapt to most things. But all things considered, yes, I would like a Windows key on the left -- take that bottom backslash, move the spacebar to the right, and put the key to the left. This has the added effect of moving the spacebar a bit more towards the center, which in turn can move the touchpad towards the center.sheh - Friday, August 22, 2014 - link
I vote for industry-wide standardized keyboard/faceplate sets for notebooks.jameskatt - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
Why are you guys complaining about the price? This is a premium laptop with premium hardware. It is low priced for a premium laptop. Apple is like BMW and Mercedes Benz. MSI is like Hyundai. Dell and HP are like Volkswagen.Legellan - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
Did anyone notice there are 2 HDMI ports on this thing. One on each side?is one HDMI in so you could use it as a monitor? Kind of weird to have 2 HDMI out and a mini DP as well no?
limitedaccess - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
It's for multiple external displays including support for multimonitor gaming.JarredWalton - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
Sorry -- I apparently left a fragment in the "Left Side" portion of the HTML tablet. You can see on the pictures, but there's only one HDMI and it's on the right side. There's also no USB 2.0 port on the left (another fragment in the table), but I have fixed the data in the table now.xenol - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
Why in the holy mother of engineering do they keep putting the hottest parts of the cooling system on the LEFT side? Do they not realize that for a gaming PC that the left side is where important controls live?ZeDestructor - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
Your mouse hand is usually on the right when you're using a mouse. Personally, I'd rather the left side of my desk melt than have a burnt mouse hand.What they should really do is solve the problem properly by exhausting out back instead of on the sides.