Monday 9 November 2015

MSI GS40 6QE Phantom

MSI GS40 6QE Phantom

MSI stitches up value mobile gaming

When it comes to gaming laptops, one company in particular seems to have the market stitched up. MSI has easily the widest range of gaming laptops in Australia, which is probably also why they tend to offer the best value. The new GS40 is a 14 incher that balances mobility with performance, and comes with the latest hardware from both Intel and NVIDIA.


Weighing in at 1.6kg, the GS40 isn’t going to require a visit to the chiropractor if it’s taken out and about for a day or two. Part of the reason it’s relatively light are the diminutive dimensions, dictated by the small-ish 14 inch display. Despite the screen’s small size, it’s still a full HD panel packing 1920 x 1080 pixels, and it’s of the favoured IPS variety. We found the image quality to be outstanding, with especially rich and vibrant colours, and viewing angles are nice and wide thanks to the IPS panel.

The chassis is made from plastic, helping to keep the weight and price down, but not exactly inspiring confidence when it comes to ruggedness. That’s the price of a ordability though. The backlit keyboard uses the usual island key design, and there’s just a little bit of fl ex in the middle when pressed forcefully. Overall though it feels like it’s fine to take out and about.

One nice feature found on the exterior of the chassis is the inclusion of a couple of USB 3.0 Type-A ports, along with a single Type-C USB 3.0 port. The latter is a welcome addition, as the more devices to use this, the more likely we’ll see this excellent symmetrical plug design take over from the asymmetrical Type-A controller. On the flipside, we’re not so enthusiastic about the use of Killer’s networking hardware, given its proclivity to add game-killing lag if it chooses not to play well with your favourite game.

Heading under the hood reveals cracking hardware for this price point. Intel’s brand new 6th Generation Core i7-6700HQ CPU is a potent quad-cored, Hyper-Threaded beast, with a top speed of 3.5GHz. It’s tied to 8GB of DDR3, which is a little on the light side but to be expected at this price point. What we didn’t expect was the generous hard drive solution. Along with a huge 1TB mechanical drive, MSI has wisely included a small 128GB SSD for the Operating System and favourite applications. It’s no mere SATA 3 SSD though, instead utilising the new NVMe interface over a PCIe 3.0 bus. No wonder it whipped through our productivity benchmark, PCMark’s Home Accelerated test, like a chainsaw through whipped cream. This is one of the best laptop results we’ve seen, very impressive considering the price point.

MSI has positioned this as a gaming laptop, and it’s all thanks to the Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M GPU included within. This has its own 3GB of GDDR5 memory, and is roughly equivalent to a desktop GTX 960. As such, don’t expect to crank The Witcher 3 to Ultra detail at 1080p, but it’ll handle most modern games with a mixture of high and medium settings. As our game benchmarks show, it easily bested the less demanding Grid Autosport at Ultra detail, while Shadow of Mordor proved that cutting-edge graphics are a tad optimistic for this machine.

While it’s no competition for laptops like the twin-GPU speed machines from Aorus, the use of a single GTX 970M brings one important benefit to the GS40 – this machine remained whisper quiet throughout our benchmarks, which is testimony to Nvidia’s low-heat emitting design.

MSI once again delivers an outstanding machine for the price, with an excellent mix of interior components combined with a classy display. The plastic build quality does feel a little cheap, but we can’t really complain when it’s possible to buy a truly game-ready laptop for less than two and a half grand. Bennett Ring

KEY SPECS
14” IPS 1920 x 1080 panel • Intel 6th Gen Core i7-6700HQ CPU (quad-cores, 3.5GHz) • 8GB DDR3 • 128GB NVMe SSD • 1TB HDD