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
This system exhausts out both the back and sides, and I suspect it would run much hotter if they omitted the side vents. Thin designs are not cooling friendly, sadly.henkhilti - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
Nice notebook review.One small remark.
In your conclusion you compared it to the Lenovo Y50 which links to Amazon.
That is a unit with 4K display for $1500 (not $1300) but please also note that is has a 256GB SSHD (=Hard disk drive + Nand flash cache) not an SSD (scroll down on the amazon page).
It also has a GTX860M instead of a GTX870M (if you compare it to the MSI's or Razer).
limitedaccess - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
Something to keep in mind regarding the Y50 4k display is that it is supposedly a TN display that is locked to 48hz. Also the other characteristics are supposedly poor.In general it seems Lenovo's gaming oriented Ideapad series all have rather poor displays. Also to be honest in general for the entire Lenovo notebook line there doesn't seem to be a strong emphasis on display quality.
The configuration he linked to though should be one with a 256gb SSD and not the configuration with a 1tb HD with 8gb nand cache.
nathanddrews - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
The Lenovo Y50 is $1300 with a 4K screen and 256GB SSD.It's a mistake to use Amazon as a source for validating information. Not only do the frequently get their specs wrong, they also blend reviews of similar models together and the pricing can change within hours due to allowing purchases through other vendors.
Newegg, $1249:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
Either way, it doesn't matter. Lenovo officially discontinued the 4K option Y50.
JarredWalton - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
Hold on... where are you getting that Lenovo discontinued the 4K Y50? I can't seem to find anything on that matter. As for the Amazon pricing, it changes regularly, just like Newegg. There's a reasonable chance the model I linked went out of stock between yesterday and now, leaving places that charge more.nathanddrews - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
I just read last week, but when I go to official Y50 UHD website, it says "temporarily unavailable". I'm either totally full of crap or just misread it.http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/lenovo/y-seri...
JarredWalton - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
Yeah, that "temporarily unavailable" is what I saw. I thought it was new enough that maintaining stock was the issue, but who knows -- and a lot of people were complaining about backlight bleed on the 4K panel. If they're using a TN panel, though, that's the first I've heard of any 3K/4K LCD going the TN route; it would make me very sad if that's true.creed3020 - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
The stress testing graphs are missing labels for the duration of time along the x axis. Possible to add this in so we can get an idea of time elapsed in the test against temps?JarredWalton - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
The stress test charts are for one hour -- I had to hand-make the charts in Excel, and the data is actually at ~2.5 second intervals, so I figured it was best to just leave off units. I'll see if I can clarify this in the text.larspehrsson - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
Matte or glossy? all other reviews I have read of the 3k version state that it has a glossy display but now Anandtech say that it is matte? Which is it?