A laptop with a desktop GPU? What voodoo is this?
There are laptop PCs, and there are desktop PCs. And never the twain shall meet. Or at least that’s how it’s traditionally been. This hasn’t, however, stopped the industry from trying to see if there’s any way to bash the two things together and see what sticks. The MSI GS30 2M Shadow, with its GPU-toting Gaming Dock, could be the closest we’ve come to seeing a marriage of these two disparate gaming houses.
The GS30 laptop itself is a 13.3-inch machine, with a 1080p IPS panel and a seriously slim ‘n’ light chassis. And just because it’s got the Gaming Dock to do most of the heavy lifting doesn’t mean MSI has skimped on what it’s put inside the laptop. The Intel Core i7-4870HQ is a full-fat quadcore, eight-thread processor, capable of turboing up to a heady 3.7GHz. Because it’s a top-end CPU it’s also got Intel’s fastest GPU, the Iris Pro, inside. Backing that up is a massive 16GB of DDR3 memory running at 1,600MHz. So yeah, it’s no slouch.
You’ll even get a modicum of gaming performance, so long as you drop the resolution and your penchant for postprocessing niceties. The battery isn’t going to offer much, however. We were unable to get it up to an hour of gaming, running down after just 56 minutes.
This is where the Gaming Dock comes in. Looking like an obese soundbar, it houses a 450W PSU and comes with an MSI GTX 980 Twin Frozr graphics card installed. Plug it into the wall, attach a monitor, keyboard and mouse, and you’re good to go. If you want proper gaming performance you simply shutdown the laptop, place it a top the Dock and pull the lever to lock and connect. The GS30 suddenly becomes a full desktop gaming PC with all the video coming direct from the Nvidia GPU.
The magic that connects with the desktop graphics card is a full x16 PCIe connector on the rear of the GS30. This is where all other external GPU designs have fallen down. The XG Station that Asus spent years trying to figure out used the old Express Card standard, which only supported a PCIe 1.1 connection at x1 speeds. The new Gaming Amplifier with the Alienware 13 laptop does use a PCIe 3.0 connection, but even that can only manage x4 speeds, hobbling any connected GPU.
MSI’s solution uses the full power of the desktop card, which is shown in our benchmark results. The numbers are only ever a few fps on average behind our Z97 test machine with a Core i7 and reference GTX 980. This is why the GS30 comes with a top-end mobile i7 in its make up.
The benefit of having this powerful a CPU is that it’s going to outlast even the GTX 980 in terms of gaming relevance. When you do come to plumbing a new desktop GPU into the Dock, the Core i7 will still have the necessary performance to keep up. The same goes for the 16GB DDR3 too – it’s going to be a long while before these become minimum requirements.
Hurrah then, we’ve finally got an external GPU adaptor for a laptop that just works. But there are teething problems. The cooling for the laptop CPU is loud and isn’t capable of maintaining the 3.7GHz peak it initially offers. When you’re gaming, the whole thing is certainly not quiet, no matter how chilled out MSI’s Twin Frozr cooling is on its GTX 980.
And that card is another issue. The fact you have to have the most expensive GPU that MSI offers is a bit of a problem for us. That will change though. We’ve learned Scan has ordered a load of empty units from MSI on the proviso it can only package it with MSI graphics cards; though that does include any MSI card. That will help ease back the currently sky-high price tag and make it potentially interesting for the upgraders. With an empty dock you could port over your existing GPU and storage from a desktop rig and have a powerful little notebook that can transform into a desktop PC at the drop of a hat.
MSI admits itself the GS30 is a very niche product and the Dock especially feels very first-gen. The biggest problem though is that it feels very much like the package has compromised both its ability to be a desktop PC as well as a decent notebook.
The lack of battery life on this otherwise lovely notebook is a cardinal sin. You’d want such a device to be able to run all day in general productivity terms, but you wouldn’t even be able to watch a feature film without plugging in. That four-cell battery isn’t enough to keep the top-end CPU running for long. And when combined with the dock, the volume of noise the system creates is incredibly distracting, especially as you’re likely to have it sat next to you on your desktop. Right now a cheaper gaming notebook, like the G751 over the page, will deliver a better docked experience, if not quite with the same fps.
Okay, you won’t have the luxury of a GPU upgrade down the line, but you’ll have a quieter, longer-lasting gaming session right now, for a lot less cash too. We’re glad MSI has made the GPU dock work, but now we need a little more refinement. – Dave James