The MSI GT83VR Titan Review: 1080 Times 3
by Brett Howse on April 13, 2017 8:00 AM ESTBattery Life
Most notebooks are designed to be used on the go, whether just in your house, or out and about in the world. Desktop replacement laptops like the GT83VR Titan are more like desk to desk. You can’t really use this in your lap effectively, especially with the keyboard configuration, and the power requirements of the SLI graphics would chew through any size battery. Still, to cover all aspects, the GT83VR Titan was run through our battery life tests.
The GT83VR Titan has just a 75 Wh battery, which is only slightly more than a Microsoft Surface Book, but that’s fine, since this really needs to be plugged in to take advantage of the performance.
Battery Life 2013 – Light
The older 2013 web browsing test cycles through four web pages every minute, and is not very demanding especially on with the quad-core CPU in the Titan. The poor result is somewhat surprising, considering the GT80 Titan managed about 1.5 hours longer in this test, but the GT83VR Titan has even more powerful GPUs and a slightly smaller battery.
Battery Life 2016 – Web
Although this test is more demanding than the 2013 version, on high-performance notebooks the base power draw is generally enough to mask the extra CPU draw required, and that’s certainly the case here again, with this result within a few minutes of the older, less demanding test.
Normalized
By removing the battery capacity from the battery life scores, we can get a look at the overall efficiency of the package, and it’s not pretty for the GT83VR Titan. Only the Clevo P750ZM with a Core i7-4790K desktop CPU does worse. It’s not pretty, but SLI GTX 1080s, even at idle, take their toll.
Movie Playback
Surprisingly the movie playback regresses a bit even compared to the web browsing, with a result just a hair under two hours. This means the GT83VR Titan can’t even complete a single loop of The Avengers, resulting in a score under 1.0 on the Tesseract results.
Battery Life Conclusion
Luckily, buyers of the GT83VR Titan are likely not holding battery life very high on their list of needs, because the Titan has pretty terrible battery life. But, despite this, it’s not really a requirement of this type of machine, so it’s not a huge detriment to the experience.
Charge Time
MSI only includes a 75 Wh battery, which isn’t very large compared to more portable machines. For power, the GT83VR Titan uses not one, but two 300 Watt power supplies, which tee together. Although that may seem like overkill, if you try to game on just one of the adapters, the single power adapter quickly overheats and shuts off, so dual GTX 1080s are a lot more power draw than dual GTX 980M which got by with just a single adapter on the GT80 Titan.
Despite the huge amount of power available, and a relatively small battery, MSI is very conservative on their charge rates, so it takes an entire three hours to refill when you do run out of battery.
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lunarmit - Thursday, April 13, 2017 - link
There is a 780W adapter available now from EurocomDanNeely - Thursday, April 13, 2017 - link
I think Ryan Smith needs to buy you a 4k monitor so you can properly test high end mobile GPUs in the future.rtho782 - Thursday, April 13, 2017 - link
No, for the sake of future proofing I think Ian needs one of those 8k screens.DanNeely - Thursday, April 13, 2017 - link
He told Ian no on getting an 8k a few weeks ago. 4k isa lot easier to justify in the budget.Brett Howse - Thursday, April 13, 2017 - link
Hi Dan. I can't disregard the display on a notebook like this. While it could be docked, it's a full desktop replacement system, with a mechanical keyboard. It's not meant to be docked with the lid closed. Yes, it could do this, as could any laptop, but it needs to be tested as it is configured.Also, this laptop costs over $5000. It would be a big ask to tell readers that it would be great if they only spent another $500-$1000 on a good UHD display.
MSI pushes this for VR, and it would be excellent for that, but we can't pretend it's not stuck with a FHD display. If someone bought this to use as is, it's complete overkill.
DanNeely - Friday, April 14, 2017 - link
I'm not saying don't test at 1080p or don't point out that at 1080p its GPU isn't stupidly overpowered. My comment was in reaction to your commenting that the only game you were able to test at 4k too was Shadow of Mordar because it would let you run above native resolution. An external screen would've let you do the same with the rest of them.munim - Thursday, April 13, 2017 - link
I wonder who buys these types of laptops. You have to be a hardcore gamer, and also be very wealthy, and you have to have a need to game while travelling. Must be a super small market.BrokenCrayons - Thursday, April 13, 2017 - link
The market must be big enough to justify the expense of making a laptop to serve it. In fact, I think it's probably pretty profitable on a per sale basis since these sorts of systems command a high premium and there is little competitive pressure to drive down prices. It means that just showing up to the proverbial party with a product that appeals means MSI is going to land enough sales to make it worthwhile.Meteor2 - Thursday, April 13, 2017 - link
I kinda imagine that they're in the kids' bedrooms on super yachts in Monanco.BrokenCrayons - Thursday, April 13, 2017 - link
Yeah, that's true. I bought four GT80 versions for my kids to use on the yacht when the nanny is on break so mommy and daddy aren't disturbed during the nightly cocktail party.