MSI GT70 Review: GTX 880M Edition

MSI GT70 General Performance

I don’t want to dwell on the general performance of the GT70 too much, mostly because the use of a pure HDD storage solution in our test unit means it can feel very sluggish at times. I simply would not want to use a computer – desktop or laptop – that doesn’t have an SSD as the primary storage device. I’ve been “spoiled” over the past few years, and when I go back to conventional storage it can be unbearable. Basically, my usage habits have shifted thanks to SSDs, and so now I “require” one in order to function. PCMark 7 and 8 both have a storage test, and that’s as good a place to start as any:

With storage being such a bottleneck, it’s pretty much pointless to discuss the other PCMark scores as all of them (except for Computation in PCMark 7) place any SSD equipped laptops ahead of the HDD-equipped GT70. The scores are in Mobile Bench, but we won't bother listing them here as they basically just reiterate the point that an SSD scores much better than an HDD in PCMark.

For CPU and GPU testing, we do have a few things we can run, but we’ve covered this ground before and the i7-4800MQ is a known quantity. It’s faster than any other mobile CPU with the exception of the i7-4900MQ and i7-4930MX, just as you’d expect. 3DMarks also illustrate what we’ve already shown with our gaming benchmarks: the GTX 880M is the fastest mobile GPU around right now.