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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mlambert890 - Sunday, April 16, 2017 - link
"Mostly the same functionality"?You dont get 1080 SLI.
You get an even uglier even *less* portable form factor.
You dont get a premium CPU given mini-ITX and the poor cooling design.
This crazy post takes the tired "but build doe!!!!!" argument against a premium laptop to an insane new dimension
lazarpandar - Saturday, April 15, 2017 - link
No reason to strap all that shit to the back of a monitor........... would not buy or ever recommend.Dug - Thursday, April 13, 2017 - link
Why? I can't imagine they will sell more than 1 of these.And that's probably because the designer's grandma felt sorry for him and bought one to make him feel better.
wapac - Thursday, April 13, 2017 - link
On the GPU Performance page it has "Shadow or Mordor"Brett Howse - Thursday, April 13, 2017 - link
fixed thanks!CoreLogicCom - Thursday, April 13, 2017 - link
You have to be kidding me. I'd rather get a Sager/Clevo based laptop (ie OriginPC or System76) that can take a 4k 17" panel, desktop class 7700K cpu, up to dual 1080 in SLI, and the rest of the storage and connectivity items, etc and still be cheaper. Sure I'd like the keyboard here on the Sager but not enough to compromise and buy this MSI. I really wish Killer would go away, too. I'll take an Intel NIC and WLAN card.sonicmerlin - Thursday, April 13, 2017 - link
Kai o Ken... times four!!!digiguy - Friday, April 14, 2017 - link
even the crazy Acer Predator 21x makes more sense than this...Flux0r - Friday, April 14, 2017 - link
I bought my last MSI laptop in 2014, a GS30 shadow with dock for $1700.By 2016 it was a paperweight, cracked screen and cpu fan ball bearing failure.
No parts available anywhere. MSI refused to support.
I can only imagine the rage from the owner of a $5200 paperweight.
Shadowmaster625 - Friday, April 14, 2017 - link
This is retarded. The original GT80 Titan already overpowered that display. $5000 for a 1080p notebook is for teh dumb.