clinthowards: MSI GT783 hands-on

Friday, 13 January 2012

MSI GT783 hands-on

A sub-three-pound laptop? Been there, done that -- at least if you're MSI. Three years after bringing netbooks and other cute things to CES, the company is focusing on more robust machines -- so much so that while other OEMs are launching me-too Ultrabooks, it's trotting out a gaming box instead. The latest addition to the family is the GT783, a 17-inch beast of a portable rig we saw while making the rounds at CES. Chief among the specs is NVIDIA's top-shelf GTX 580M GPU with 2GB of video memory, though your $2,300 will also buy you a quad-core Core i7 CPU, 16GB of RAM (upgradeable to 32GB) and a matte, 1080p display. Rounding out the list are dual drives: a 128GB SSD and 750GB 7,200RPM HDD. During our demo, we took a brief detour into Battlefield 3, and though we didn't have Fraps at the ready to monitor frame rates, we can tell you it ran smoothly, even at max settings. The programmable backlighting is alright too, though we're not convinced 35 colors will do it for you like a yellow chassis.

Gallery: MSI GT783 hands-on