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
Sorry -- I reuse the HTML table from article to article, and I apparently missed updating the "matte" label. It's glossy.larspehrsson - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
What a shame. I was really hoping that it was matte. Why would anyone want a glossy screen? Sure its colors are more "vibrant" but you can't see them anyway if the room is a little bright.larspehrsson - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
PC Pro did a survey in 2011 where they asked if their users wanted matte or glossy screens. Unfortunately the did not write how many that did respond, but a majority wanted matte screens. At the same time, none of the ultra-value laptops came with matte screens. http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2011/05/23/glossy-vs-...There are HD matte screens available, but all UHD/QHD+ I could find are with glossy screens.
Morawka - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
all apple's Entire product line is glossy LCD. It can be done, you just have to use anti reflective coatings.Solandri - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
I had the 1080p version of this laptop for a week (returned it because moving the Windows key meant I kept hitting space instead of alt when I tried to use alt-key combos).- Are you sure it's 2x mSATA SSDs? The disassembly videos I've seen of the 1080p version of this laptop shows two M.2 ports. Unfortunately they are the SATA type M.2, not the PCIe type, so no speed advantage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raFVNWVkDbE#t=12m1...
- You didn't comment on the size. While it's thin, its length and width are almost as big as a 17" notebook. This was my secondary reason for returning it - it didn't fit in my bag designed for 15.6" notebooks. For such a large case, you'd think they could've squeezed in a bigger battery, which makes the poor battery life all the more painful.
Right now, I am waiting to see how the Asus GX500 does in the reviews. It's expected out in late September, 4k display, 100% NTSC color space, Maxwell 860M GPU, and 96 Wh battery.
JarredWalton - Friday, August 22, 2014 - link
You're right -- SATA-based M.2. That's my main gripe: PCIe-based M.2 offers substantially more throughput potential. I've updated the text to clarify this.Death666Angel - Friday, August 22, 2014 - link
The first picture made me go "dat bezel".... it seems huge!