ASUS’ G73SW: Now with Sandy Bridge Last month was a little rough on our laptop reviews team, as we had a whole slew of planned Sandy Bridge notebooks evaporate with Intel’s chipset bug announcement. Even today, we have yet to receive a Sandy Bridge system with the revised B3 stepping chipset, but at least vendors are ready to ship us preview/review hardware again. MSI let us post a preview of their GT680R a couple weeks ago. (Actually, they asked us to send it back but since we had finished benchmarking we wanted to post the numbers; they then agreed to let us tell you it was their notebook.) Now, we’ve got the ASUS G73SW in hand, with very similar hardware specs and the same G73 chassis that wowed us early last year. Unfortunately, things have changed a bit over the past year, and what was new and exciting isn’t quite so likely to catch our eye these days. If you love the G73 “stealth bomber” design, there’s nothing to complain about; however, if you think it looks huge, tacky, boring, [insert your own derogatory adjective], then there’s likewise nothing to praise.

What has changed since the G73JW we looked at in November amounts to one thing: Sandy Bridge. o3 backpack diaperOkay, that means a new chipset and CPU, which also necessitates an updated motherboard, but as far as appearances go you won’t be able to tell them apart. orchill backpackYou can check out the above gallery of the G73SW if you missed the earlier systems, or if you just need a refresh.awp backpack tool bag The good things about the design remain: the wedge shape gives plenty of room for cooling the CPU and GPU, and compared to similarly specced laptops (i.e. the MSI GT680R) it runs pretty quiet. cr7 backpack ebayThat’s impressive considering the quad-core CPU and 460M GPU, and for good measure ASUS includes 8GB (4x2GB) RAM.

ASUS continues to use a pair of 500GB hard drives, without RAID 0, but we wish they would offer a moderate SSD as the OS/app drive as an alternative (maybe an X2 variant can go that route?). All told, performance is quite good. Matte surfaces abound, with a rubberized coating that feels nice, though it tends to show greasy spots if your hands secrete a lot of oils. There’s keyboard backlighting and the LCD is a high-contrast model (though it’s sadly still limited to a maximum brightness of around 160 nits). The standard connection options are here: three USB 2.0 ports, one USB 3.0 port, HDMI 1.4, VGA, and a flash memory reader. You also get a Blu-ray combo drive, gigabit Ethernet port, 802.11n networking (150Mbps capable), and Bluetooth. On the not so great side of the fence, there’s no FireWire, eSATA, ExpressCard, or DisplayPort, and this is a very large 17.3”-screen chassis—it almost feels like an 18.4”-screen chassis at first contact, and the LCD bezels are large enough that you could come very close to fitting in such a panel.

The GTX 460M is also feeling a little bit like yesterday’s news—we’d love to see a faster 470M or even the shiny new 485M, though it appears ASUS hasn’t qualified the G73 chassis for such chips. And speaking of the chassis, while it may be good for cooling, the wedge shape isn’t going to please everyone. Perhaps the biggest complain, however, is that pricing has gone up yet again. The G73JH-A1 came with a blow-out starting price of just $1500 at launch (though some retailers marked it up closer to $1575). The G73JW-A1 added USB 3.0 and switched to a GTX 460M GPU, with an updated i7-740QM to replace the i7-720QM, and the starting price moved to $1600. Now we’re looking at the same GPU with a Sandy Bridge i7-2630QM (which ostensibly should be priced the same as the outgoing i7-740QM), and the MSRP is up to $1700 (possibly more). So I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but: You’re going the wrong way, ASUS! Other gaming notebooks like the MSI GT680R (going for $1475 online) offer nearly identical specs, so unless you want the larger display/chassis, backpack, and mouse or prefer some of the other ASUS elements (like a higher contrast LCD and keyboard backlighting), this is no longer the bargain gaming system that the G73JH was.

Besides the core hardware, readers will occasionally want to know about other areas like sound quality. Dell’s XPS 15/17 are still the high-water mark in my book, with clear highs, mids, and lows. The G73 chassis can put out a decent amount of sound, but it’s a lot more boomy than the XPS 15. Some sort of equalizer would be of great service for tweaking sound levels, as the built-in subwoofer just feels mushy and overpowering. Battery life, as we’ll show later, has gone up a bit relative to the G73JW. This is expected, as quad-core Sandy Bridge should use far less power than the old quad-core Clarksfield. With the same 75Wh battery, the G73SW can now reach over 3.5 hours of battery life in our best-case testing, and in general should last close to three hours for light use. For other comments on the design and build quality, we’ll defer to our previous G73JW and G73JH reviews, as nothing else has changed that I can see. In short, this is a very evolutionary design.

It’s still good, still fast, and still reasonably priced relative to other gaming notebooks. You can get about 60% of the gaming performance of the GTX 485M-equipped Clevo P170HM and (with similar components) you’re paying about 70% of the price. Or if you prefer, the Clevo P170HM with the same i7-2630QM, GTX 460M, 2x500GB HDD, 8GB RAM, and Blu-ray combo drive will cost about $1950 (at AVADirect). But that means that if performance is your primary consideration, you’ll be better off opting for a laptop with a GTX 485M (or an HD 6970M). Personally, I’m more interested in testing the slightly smaller G53SW… but then I’ve already got a Clevo P150HM (with HD 6970M) in hand, and outside of the pricing that could very well be the 15.6” laptop to beat. You’ll have to wait until next week to get the P150HM review; for now, let’s look at the performance of the G73SW compared to our other high-end gaming notebooks.Now that Pascal graphics cards have officially begun the steady process of flooding the market with new laptops and desktops, MSI has updated their GE line of laptops with the release of the comfortably portable and highly adaptable GE62VR Pro Apache gaming laptop.

This has always been a line of devices that tries to live in the middle of the happy-medium between portability and power, but will the lack of a large battery be too much to keep the Apache running for more than a few minutes at a time? Read on in my MSI GE62VR Apache Pro gaming laptop review to find out. Price: $1,599 on Amazon Model #: GE62VR Apache Pro-001 Summary: The MSI GE62VR Pro Apache is a super-light laptop (by gaming standards) that doesn’t change a whole lot from the last generation, save for the inclusion of one big upgrade underneath the hood: its new Pascal Nvidia GTX 1060 GPU. Although I’d love to take credit for being able to write a whole new review on the design of the MSI GE62VR Pro Apache, unfortunately there’s not a whole lot that could be added to what’s already been said about its predecessor, the GS60 Ghost Pro 4K. Read More: MSI GT80S 980M SLI Gaming Laptop Review From the MSI logo emblazoned in a deep red on the back to the SteelSeries LED-lit keyboard, nearly every detail is in the same place as it was before, save for a bit of extra chunkiness around the edges in order to accommodate the laptop’s new Nvidia GTX 1060 graphics card.

I’ll layer just as much praise as I had for that machine onto this one, of course, specifically in reverence of its brushed black plastic that may come off cheap to some, but feels just right in my hand whether typing or stuffing it into a bag. Fan ports are found on nearly ever side of the laptop, including two on the back, two on front, and four on the bottom. This helps to keep the GTX 1060 cool under pressure, but might prove to be an issue if you use your “laptop” in the most literal sense of the word while you do your daily gaming. Although ASUS currently holds the title when it comes to the worst offenders in bloatware, MSI isn’t that far behind in second place. In total from the first boot I counted a total of eight useless programs installed on the machine at stock, all covering one task or another that Windows 10 could (and does) already handle on its own without any extra help. That said, I’m still glad to see MSI’s own set of apps making a reappearance here, giving a special nod to their Dragon Gaming Center which lets you control how the system performs under stress, the LED configuration, and monitor your system’s vitals all from one main dashboard.

The SteelSeries Engine 3 also had some surprising tricks up its sleeve, most notably the option to customize the keyboard so the backlit LEDs could correspond to in-game events, like flashing red when your health was low or blinking blue when you need more ammo. Other helpful software of note is the Killer Network Manager, the usefulness of which can’t be overestimated if you’re trying to get the lowest lag possible while gaming online. As for the rest of the apps like the XSplit Gamecaster and CyberLink PowerDVD however, they fall squarely into the category of “apps I could download in thirty seconds if I wanted to, so I don’t need them pre-installed on my machine thank you very much”. The MSI GE62VR is one of the first of what is likely to be a flood of new laptops coming out from MSI to support Nvidia’s new line of GTX 10XX Pascal-based video cards. The model we tested is starting things out on the lower end of the GPU scale, with a 6GB GDDR5 GTX 1060, backed up by the standard quad-core 6th-gen 2.6GHz Intel Core i7-6700HQ processor, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, a 256GB SSD/1TB SSD combo, and a 15.6″ 1920 x 1080 display.

Connectivity options on the portability-centric, 5.4lb MSI GE62VR Pro Apache were just about standard for what you’d hope to see on a gaming laptop these days, including two USB 3.0 slots, one USB 3.0, one audio headphone out/mic in combo, one HDMI 1.4 out, one mini-DP out, a single RJ45 port, one Thunderbolt 3.0 port, and an SD card reader. Read More: Best Gaming Laptop for the Money 2017 Like the GE62VR’s design, the laptop’s keyboard and trackpad are essentially identical to what we first encountered on the GS60 Ghost Pro. The membrane board has around 2mm of travel time which is plenty responsive for most gamers, though the technology is still limited when compared directly to the kind of response that can be had from mechanical keyboards. Thanks to that same brushed-plastic design we spoke of earlier, the trackpad has a grippier, tactile feel to it that reduces inaccurate clicks and gives you an overall greater feeling of control once you’ve eventually dialed it in.

It took some doing, but after a bit of fine tuning in the included Nahimic2, we were able to get some relatively decent sound out of the 4W onboard speakers and 3W subwoofer that didn’t come out like what we’ve heard from other garbled, tinny speakers on previously tested laptops. In summary, they’ll be fine for movies or TV, but probably a bit underpowered/muddled for general music listening for longer than you absolutely have to. On the whole, the improvements that the Pascal architecture makes to Nvidia cards comes down to three factors: more performance, better efficiency, and less heat. All of these factors add up in layman’s to mean that you’ll be able to run more games for longer on a single charge, while still getting a longer battery life overall without sacrificing any one aspect throughout. In our 3DMark II tests it was clear that the GTX 1060 in the GE62VR makes some marked improvements over the GTX 960M we saw in the GS60; around a 30% improvement over that chip and even a solid 10% boost over the 980M we saw in the Acer Predator 17.

Geekbench results were actually just a bit slower than we would have liked, somehow even trailing behind the original GS60. We expect this is due to the GTX 1060 asking for more of the cooling potential that would normally be subverted to the CPU, though even after five runs through the benchmark with all other software turned off we couldn’t figure out what was causing the lag behind in stats. The MSI GE62VR comes with a 15.6″ 1920 x 1080 display running at 60Hz, although the company’s spec sheet says a 4K model is on the way shortly (no price announced just yet). Overall, both the brightness and picture quality were pretty standard for what you see on gaming laptops these days, along with the color representation to match. If you want a display that’s great for watching movies or doing extensive photo editing on, the 91% sRGB 72% AdobeRGB results should tell you everything you need to know about how that’s going to go. If you’re only in it for games though, it’s still serviceable enough and was plenty bright even during gaming sessions in direct sunlight.

Due to the aforementioned focus on portability first, it wasn’t surprising that the battery on the MSI GE62VR Pro Apache only reached the mid-range of what we’ve come to expect from gaming laptops in this day and age. All the added efficiency from the upgraded Pascal GPU still can’t account for trying to lighten up the laptop’s load on your arm while you’re lugging it around the office or your college campus, and at only 5.4lbs, the MSI doesn’t concern itself as much with battery longevity as it does going pretty much anywhere you do in a snap. Of course, you won’t be able to get very far without plugging in a few times throughout the day, as in idle we only were only able to max the battery at 2hrs and 43mins of uptime (and that was just in idle). At load the results got a whole lot harder to swallow, averaging only 1hr 39min before flattening out to 0%. As a light, lean gaming laptop, the MSI GE62VR Apache Pro should be at the top of the list for anyone who is looking to hit the perfect balance between portability and decent gaming power that can run most AAA titles at high-to-ultra settings above 60FPS.