TL;DR at bottom.
Let me start by saying I'm not the biggest MSI fan mainly due to two issues I had with a GT80 laptop. The "battery drain" feature which drained the battery when the power adapter couldn't supply enough power, so always draining and recharging during game play. Also the fact that even with a 330w power adapter the system would use well under 300w, so they weren't even using the full spec of the adapter they supplied, causing the "battery drain" feature that I also didn't like. I wrote the MSI engineers at that time and decided to sell the laptop and stayed away from MSI until now.
I'm glad to report the 280w supply appears to be plenty for even the highest benchmarking and gaming sessions, and I haven't noticed any battery drain. If it's doing it it's so small that I can't notice it.
The laptop will run ok out of the box for most users, but I must add that with a little tweaking you can get it to run a lot better (cooler and little to no throttling). The warehouse deal I got was excellent, and I have no idea if it was a return or was opened or something but it looked brand new.
I did not see any need to repaste after my tweaks. Basically I have undervolted the cpu using throttlestop (as I have every laptop the last few years) and tweaked some settings for various tasks. I have a quiet mode for battery (can be fanless depending on load), gaming mode with the CPU turbo lowered a little to reduce un-needed cpu power/heat, and a full CPU mode for benchmarking or when re-encoding videos where I want it as fast as possible.
This thing plays games better than my 15" laptop with a 8700k cpu and a full 1080, and is much quieter, is thinner, lighter, and cost a lot less. I like to do benchmarks for fun and it keeps right up there with the big dogs graphics wise which is amazing in itself if you don't really need that desktop cpu power (like with my previous laptop that had an 8700k).
My tweaked Firestrike graphics is 28,208 (overall score 21,112)
My tweaked TImespy graphics is 10,985 (overall score 10,059)
I cannot stress how quiet it is (realize that I've tweaked mine so out of the box maybe wasn't quite as good). I can play games sitting next to my girlfriend in the living room and she can hear the TV much better than any other gaming laptop I've had. If I want it even more silent than auto fans I can use nvidia whisper mode to limit fps and it gets even quieter! When by myself or at my desk I will use max fans and headphones. I've used the MSI silent fan mode too which means the fans will be off mostly when surfing. Very nice to have options, and a normal user could just use auto fans and likely be happy.
Battery life out of the box is not great, at about 2-3 hrs of light surfing it's not the worst I've had but also not the best. With more tweaking (mostly extreme limiting CPU power) I did a battery drain test over 5 hrs. That is with backlight at 25% and wifi on, so 4-5 hrs of surfing doesn't sound too bad to me. I don't use battery often so it wasn't a huge concern of mine.
Pros:
"Full" 2080 in such a small & light chassis
17" screen in basically a 15" chassis size (very thin bezels)
Three storage slot options (two M.2 and one 2.5")
Screen is 144hz, great quality color and no smearing/ghosting
RGB keyboard feels good and lighting options are exceptional
6 core/12 thread CPU, a "real" 45w is awesome in such a small chassis
Trackpad mouse works good for when you need to use it, real buttons to click on too
Texture/feel of case is good, doesn't feel cheap and not too heavy
It is thinner closed than just the base part of my 1 year old 15" laptop when open, same footprint size (width & depth)
Cons:
The laptop runs warm as most thin and light do, and thus out of the box you likely will experience some CPU throttling. I bet most users won't even notice this or have any issues under normal circumstance, it will play games great and do other tasks as expected. It might run a little hotter, fans be a little louder, and have slightly less performance than those that like to spend time tweaking.
TL:DR
This laptop does everything, and does most of it very well. May not be the fastest or lightest, but the features and form factor combine to make it one of the best gaming laptops out there in my opinion. Zero regrets even moving from a desktop 8700k cpu down to the lowly 8750H.
| Standing screen display size | 17.3 Inches |
|---|---|
| Screen Resolution | 1920 x 1080 pixels |
| Max Screen Resolution | 1920x1080 Pixels |
| Processor | 2.2 GHz core_i7 |
| RAM | 32 GB DDR4 |
| Memory Speed | 4.1 GHz |
| Hard Drive | 2000 GB Hybrid Drive |
| Graphics Coprocessor | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 |
| Chipset Brand | NVIDIA |
| Card Description | Dedicated |
| Graphics Card Ram Size | 8 GB |
| Number of USB 3.0 Ports | 4 |
