iBuyPower Battalion M1771 (MSI GS70) Gaming Notebook Review
by Dustin Sklavos on December 30, 2013 2:45 PM ESTDisplay Quality
I'm happy to be at the point where I can actually be critical of a 1080p matte display on a notebook instead of merely being thankful that it even exists. The Chi Mei TN panel that MSI employs for the iBuyPower Battalion M1771 has a slightly high amount of grain in the coating, but it's actually pretty stellar for a non-IPS display, at least in objective measurement.
Color reproduction is good, but not great. Where the panel excels is in its overall contrast ratio and brightness. Most users should be very happy with the panel in the M1771.
Battery Life
I'm mystified as to why this is the case, but nonetheless: the Battalion M1771's battery life is, in a word, horrible. I can't pin down exactly what the efficiency issue is, but whatever it is, it's absolutely killing running time off of the mains.
Normalize the battery life and it doesn't look as bad, but it's hard to ignore that the M1771 is both using a battery that's probably too small for it and is just plain lousy on running time. This is half the efficiency of the Razer Blade 14, or worse, despite a substantially smaller gulf in overall performance.
Heat and Noise
Despite the thin chassis, the M1771 is actually a pretty good citizen where noise is concerned. Unfortunately, there does seem to be some cost exacted for that.
While the GTX 765M doesn't get especially hot, the i7-4700HQ gets extremely toasty. Haswell runs hot in general and it's pretty evident here. MSI could probably tune the fan profile to be more aggressive on the CPU side, but part of Haswell's problem is the same thing that plagued Ivy Bridge, I suspect: high heat density. The 765M is a healthy sized chip that draws a lot of power, but that also means there's a much larger surface area to dissipate all that heat. Integrating the voltage regulation on the 4700HQ is really only going to amplify the heat density issue. Performance is fine, but those thermals would give anyone pause.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
37 Comments
View All Comments
BillyONeal - Monday, December 30, 2013 - link
Why does that matter? The CPU is designed for 105 C -- and will (via Turbo) attempt to get itself there. If you're overclocking I can see some point but in a notebook you're not doing that.Egg - Monday, December 30, 2013 - link
That's pretty misleading - the chip will only stop turboing if it goes above 105 C. It won't raise clock speeds until it reaches 105 C. It should never, in normal usage, reach 105 C...nunomoreira10 - Monday, December 30, 2013 - link
The thing is the fan and heatsunk could be much smaller or make much less noise to keep the cpu at the same temperature and thus we could have much powerfull laptop half the size.Flunk - Monday, December 30, 2013 - link
You might not overclock your laptop, but some of use do. I've got my GPU overclocked 295Mhz/1600Mhz .. and the CPU underclocked to bring the temperatures to a reasonable level. Sometimes unified cooling is helpful, but not often.erple2 - Tuesday, December 31, 2013 - link
Dustin touched on that in the article. I think that it has a lot to do with heat density. The 765 is physically a larger chip (more transistors and larger process node) and it !makes sense.Egg - Monday, December 30, 2013 - link
Did you run into the issue where Chrome says that it's conflicting with one of the Killer Networks dlls?hfm - Monday, December 30, 2013 - link
You guys just glossed over the noise levels of the cooling system under gaming load. Could you elaborate more on what "a good citizen" means as far as noise levels? Noise of the cooling system while gaming is my #1 concern as there is no shortage of 765M or 770M (gigabyte p25w) systems to choose from.nevertell - Monday, December 30, 2013 - link
This is not the review I was looking for.blzd - Monday, December 30, 2013 - link
Is it just me or is the keyboard tiny? There's a lot of extra room around around the chassis I don't see why they had to squish the keys into such a small area.Connoisseur - Tuesday, December 31, 2013 - link
Wish they'd make a viable alternative to the blade 14 that fixes the screen. I'd be all over it. 17 is just too big for me to carry around with a work laptop.