iBuyPower Battalion M1771 (MSI GS70) Gaming Notebook Review
by Dustin Sklavos on December 30, 2013 2:45 PM ESTThe iBuyPower Battalion M1771 isn't going to have the absolute best performance, but given its relative form factor, the fast Intel i7 quad core processor and solid GeForce GTX 765M should allow it to at least throw some of its modest weight around.
Before we get into gaming testing, though, it's worth at least seeing how it stacks up in relation to other current generation (and a couple of older generation) gaming machines in most basic disciplines. The Razer Blade 14 can exist as a reality check in games excepting the CPU which is the slightly slower i7-4702HQ; the Blade 14 has basically the same hardware as the Blade Pro, which is in turn almost identical to the M1771 (MSI GS70) internally.
The M1771 has the fastest storage subsystem of the lot but only just barely; despite the two SSDs in RAID 0, its theoretical performance advantage proves to be academic in practice. Meanwhile it bounces a bit over the map in PCMark 8, posting a slightly anemic performance in the Home test. It's not horrible and exists essentially as an oddball outlier.
PCMark 7 is kinder, and the M1771 posts a strong performance bolstered by its CPU and fast SSD storage subsystem.
Meanwhile, performance in the 3DMarks is excellent. The 765M is a strong piece of kit, able to use raw clockspeed to essentially make up most of the difference in CUDA core count between it and the powerful GTX 675MX. The Blade 14 trails it slightly, probably owing to the 200MHz difference in base clocks and reduced turbo bins of the i7-4702HQ. Meanwhile, check out the lead in 3DMark 11 over the former heavyweight GTX 580M.
The 4700HQ is modestly generationally faster than the 3630QM, in line with the difference in IPC as the two have identical clocks and turbo bins. It's also notably faster than the 2720QM, but Ivy proved to be a much bigger boost to mobile performance over Sandy than Haswell is over Ivy. The M1771 is essentially where it needs to be, performance-wise.
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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.