MSI GE40 Review: a Slim Gaming Notebook
by Jarred Walton on July 16, 2013 3:00 AM ESTMSI GE40 Closing Thoughts: Give and Take
We’ve frequently discussed the balancing act that needs to take place when manufacturers are designing a laptop, and that balancing act gets even more difficult when you’re creating a thin and light gaming notebook. If you simply throw caution to the wind, it’s definitely possible to create an awesome notebook that runs fast, performs well, and looks great—but it’s going to cost you. The Razer Blade notebooks are perfect example of this, except that the Razer Blade 14 basically drops the ball when it comes to the LCD. MSI tries to pick up the fumble with their GE40, but unfortunately their display happens to be even worse than the Razer Blade 14 panel! Here’s the thing: a somewhat mediocre display with a reasonable resolution isn’t the end of the world. If you’re able to overlook the LCD and its poor contrast ratio, the GE40 hits a lot of the right notes.
For starters, the CPU and GPU pairing are just about ideal. The 37W i7-4702MQ isn’t the fastest CPU on the block, but it’s generally fast enough to keep the GTX 760M happy. The GTX 760M is also a good pairing for the 1600x900 LCD resolution—it might be able to handle 1080p without antialiasing in some titles, but there are also going to be instances where you’ll need to drop down to high or even medium detail levels to get acceptable performance (e.g. Metro Last Light and Company of Heroes 2). NVIDIA’s top-of-the-line GTX 780M in some cases offers nearly three times the performance of the GTX 760M, at least at our Enthusiast settings; at our Mainstream settings, in quite a few titles we don’t even see a 2X performance increase. Finally, in light use we were able to hit nearly nine hours of battery life with the GE40, and if you’re willing to lower the LCD brightness further you should be able to exceed that mark.
It’s not just about performance either; I won’t say that the GE40 is the greatest looking notebook I’ve ever seen, but it also seen worse. Get rid of the black glossy plastic, and perhaps switch to a neutral silver color instead of black, and aesthetically the design would move up from a middle-of-the-road six out of 10 to a solid eight. The keyboard on the other hand is definitely better than average these days, with the only real omission being keyboard backlighting. I like the inclusion of dedicated document navigation keys on a 14-inch laptop, and having those keys in a column on the right is my preferred layout. Frankly, I’m still a little baffled why most modern 13.3-inch and 14-inch laptops have abandoned this layout. The touchpad also has actual buttons rather than integrating those into the touchpad surface; I know some people prefer the latter, but I’d rather have buttons.
Take all of the above and slap on a $1270 price tag and we’re talking about a viable and reasonably priced slim gaming notebook. (The model without an SSD costs about $100 less, but that’s not a compromise I’d recommend.) Without jacking up the price, about the closest alternatives I can come up with that offer a similar or perhaps slightly better gaming experience are much bulkier: ASUS G75VW (last-gen IVB CPU and 670M GPU), MSI GX60 (faster GPU, much slower CPU), the Lenovo IdeaPad Y500 series (i7-4700MQ with SLI GT 750M), or MSI’s own GE60. Depending on what you’re after, one or more of those might be a better choice, but they’re not clearly better in every area.
What it really boils down to is this: are you willing to turn down detail levels a bit in order to get acceptable gaming performance, are temperatures in the 80s and 90s “safe”, and can you live with the mediocre LCD? It’s a shame you’re forced to make that kind of decision, but at least the price is more palatable than the Razer Blade 14. Hopefully MSI can release a revised model that fixes some of the oversights: give us better cooling, keyboard backlighting, a silver chassis (or at least something less prone to collecting smudges and fingerprints), and a good LCD and this would be a winner.
The truth is, we’re probably still a couple years away from seeing this level of performance in a laptop this size that runs truly cool and quiet (<75C and <40dB); physics can be such a drag that way. But the Razer Blade 14 runs a bit cooler and quieter while boasting better performance, and slightly larger notebooks are faster, cooler, and quieter. The GE40 ends up being reasonably fast with temperatures that are a bit higher than we'd like but still technically within spec, and the price is quite reasonable. Fixing the LCD would go a long way towards earning an outright recommendation; as it stands, we can only sigh and think about what might have been.
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hfm - Wednesday, July 17, 2013 - link
Also, the Razer 14 DOES NOT throttle on battery. You can get around 1.5-2 hours of gaming on the Razer 14 from what i've heard.JarredWalton - Thursday, July 18, 2013 - link
I would be very surprised if the Razer doesn't do something similar to the GE40 on battery power. It's basically the GPU not running at full speed because it doesn't need to in order to hit 30FPS -- so in games like Metro, it will actually run at full speed but in others it won't. Anyway, I did't test the Razer so I can't say for certain, but I've yet to see a GTX notebook that doesn't adjust the GPU clocks/performance down on battery power.Jon Tseng - Tuesday, July 16, 2013 - link
Cheers for the response - much appreciated. Sorry for sounding a bit grumpy earlier!The reason I ask is I've been getting wildly different estimates of gaming battery life for the Razor 14 all over the web - some websites say 1 hour, some websites say 2-3. It would be good to have some definitely numbers.
I don't think gaming battery life is /always/ that bad. I can get 2-ish hours gaming on my m11x on battery power. Definitely for classic "gaming laptop luggages" where the battery is effectively a 2 kilo UPS system you're lucky to get beyond 45 mins, but for smaller form factor gaming laptops I think you can do better than that.
1 hour isn't really sufficient because as soon as you boot up you have a lurking paranoia about the batt meter going down. 1.5+ is where you can have a proper "session" between destinations...
noeldillabough - Tuesday, July 16, 2013 - link
I can play casual games (think world of warcraft, portal etc) on my X230 for about 2.5h. I'm expecting the haswell version to do slightly better. Note its on a low res screen, hopefully these are a dying breed but every laptop seems to continue to come out with them. Higher res screen is going to use more GPU and battery so it might be a wash.JarredWalton - Tuesday, July 16, 2013 - link
That was sort of the point I was trying to make: if you have more than just a CPU with iGPU (or an APU in the AMD world), you can't get reasonable gaming performance and great battery life. Games will max out the TDP of both the CPU and GPU, generally speaking -- though it's possible to throttle the GPUs to help reduce the load, which both AMD and NVIDIA do by default. If you have a 70Wh battery and a CPU/APU that has a 17W-35W TDP, though, you can get 2+ hours. You just won't be running at high detail and 1600x900.adityarjun - Tuesday, July 16, 2013 - link
Jarred, please do a review of the Alienware 14 and 17. I think they have started to offer some decent IPS screens with matte options and I would love to read Anandtech’s take on these laptops before making a purchase.realjetavenger - Tuesday, July 16, 2013 - link
+1. Would love to see how the Alienware 14 stacks up against the Razer 14 and this ge40.hfm - Wednesday, July 17, 2013 - link
Here's how it stacks up to the Razer 14.1. 768p panel is too far the other direction and it's not high quality, but performance at that res is great.
2. 1080p panel will be slower than the Razer 14. If you ask me 1080p for gaming on a 765M is not going to give much longevity. The panel itself is above average so if you are planning on doing work on it and gaming is secondary it's probably a better overall option.
3. I've read the Alienware 14 is hot and loud. Razer 14 is hot, but not that loud.
4. Alienware 14 is much bigger and 2 lbs heavier.
5. Alienware 14 can be cheaper or about the same price as the razer depending on config. The razer is only configurable storage size.
I don't think it's fair to include the ge40 in that discussion as it's outclassed by both of them from a gaming standpoint.
wrkingclass_hero - Tuesday, July 16, 2013 - link
Typo on closing thoughts page:MSI tries to pick up the fumble with their GE40, but unfortunately there display happens to be even worse than the Razer Blade 14 panel!
"there" should be their
Darkstone - Tuesday, July 16, 2013 - link
I think anandtech needs to give more information about the cooling in notebooks reviews.For starters, only the temperatures are reported. But i think the temperatures are actually largely irrelevant. It doesn't matter to me if the CPU is hitting 70° or 95° as long it does not throttle down.
I usually load up prime95 and take a close look at the 'package power' meter in HWinfo. If it ever drops below the TDP, the cooling will get in trouble when running basic CPU-only simulations.
Stressing the GPU in a controlled enthronement is a bit harder to do. I like RTHDBIBL, but the scene complexity is a bit low for modern GPU's. Maybe try one of unigine's older tests. Im not sure if they support benchmark looping.
If it can't run prime95 and a GPU stress test at the same time without throtteling on the CPU part, it's probably not up to the task of playing games all day long. That's valuable information, much more valuable than the temperature of the CPU. The GE40 reaches 98° unload load. But at what clock speed is it running? 800 Mhz? 2.x Mhz?