I'm living in a place where space is a premium. I have a high end desktop, a work laptop, and a personal laptop. I bought this to consolidate all three, and it works incredibly well for that. I virtualized my work laptop, and run it as a VM under this MSI. With 16GB of memory, and the I7 processor, it's noticeably faster than it was before it was virtualized. It plays everything I throw at it with high quality settings ..Skyrim, Eve, COD2.. all play really well on it. When I have it at home, I have two displays.. the built in laptop display, and extended out to a 1080p TV. Work runs on the little one, games/netflix/etc run on the big one.The big difference between this one and the slightly cheaper 492 version is that this one has the super raid. Which is essentially just two 64gb drives in a raid 0 config. The advantage of raid 0 is that it's REALLY fast. The disadvantage is if you lose either drive, the raid fails. With the super raid config, windows boots incredibly fast... just a few seconds. Anything installed on it is very speedy as well. There's not a lot of space left over after the OS on this drive, but a couple of things you can do are move the swap file to the 750G D: drive, and disable hiberbnation. (the hibernation file has to stay on the boot drive..).
The sound was advertised to be groundbreaking for a laptop .. I dunno. Maybe it's just be, but I'm really not that impressed. It's decent for a laptop, but don't expect it to compete with most computer speakers. The "sub" adds a little depth, but it didn't live up to the advertising. Decent sound for a laptop is about it.
Some people complain about the keyboard.. I don't have a problem with it. The lighting angle is what I would expect (and the same as my Toshiba laptop), the space bar works, and the keyboard is comfortable and normal to type on. I do unix stuff for a living, and I'm pretty sensitive to badly laid out keyboards. This one is fine for me. The ability to change the keyboard colors in zones is pretty neat.. can set it to pulse, wave, etc.. in the end, I set it to a darker solid color, but to each their own.
One super annoying thing, more to do with windows 8 and synaptics touch pads. Swipe gestures were enabled, and there's no option (that I could find after a ton of research) to disable them. So if you swipe from the right side to the middle, it's brings up that search bar thing on the right. Super annoying, as it happens a ton by accident. How that passed by without an option to disable, I have no clue. But if you search google for "disable synaptics swipe windows 8", there's a registry tweak you can do to disable it. Remember, unlike a lot of registry settings, you need to reboot in order to for the changes to take effect.
Also do NOT update your video drivers from the nvidia site. It will cause the laptop to only use the intel on board controller for 3d stuff. I ran in to that, and had to download the driver from the MSI site. It was a trick to find it there, too. I ended up using their driver update software. But due to some .net bug, I needed to uninstall it again after I updated my drivers. (it was throwing an error on startup). There was an updated intel driver, nvidia driver, and sound driver. The annoying thing is, after you update the nvidia driver from their site, it will notify you that there's an updated nvidia driver on the nvidia site. Don't download and install it. It won't work.
In conclusion, it's a very fast, very beefy, tank of laptop.. Not for super portability, but as someone else wrote about a similar model, it's a great portable desktop. Everything worked out of the box, no issues, I don't regret the purchase at all.
Laptop locked up after first login, after which the NVidia video adapter would not be recognized properly and appears dead. LED's on the right side of keyboard not connected properly either. Flickers between desired color and red.
2nd laptop (from another source even) video card was again dysfunctional, but in a new crashy way. Driver support from NVidia was a no-go with the custom OEM part and MSI driver was ancient. No support from either company for updated drivers!
Contacting MSI was slightly more helpful than smashing my face with a hammer.
Never again MSI, never again.
Buy MSI Computer Corp. Notebook GT70 0ND-491US;9S7-17212-491 17.3-Inch Laptop Now
The computer is exactly what I was expecting. A very good price for the package. The only thing I changed was to upgrade Windows 8 to the PRO version.Read Best Reviews of MSI Computer Corp. Notebook GT70 0ND-491US;9S7-17212-491 17.3-Inch Laptop Here
Arrived with the w, s, x, e, d, c, r, 3, and 4 keys not working unless you supply 10 lbs of force. Also, counted nearly a dozen dead pixels. Make sure you set up a light colored background upon setup and check for black, dead spots. I am not going to wait to find out what else is wrong with this one: Will return and exchange, and edit review in the futureWant MSI Computer Corp. Notebook GT70 0ND-491US;9S7-17212-491 17.3-Inch Laptop Discount?
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