MSI GT683R-242US 15.6-Inch Laptop (Black )

This laptop is fantastic. It's a full blown desktop replacement powerhouse of a laptop, yet its still small enough to carry around. If you are reading this you probably already know that the video card and processor are among the best available right now, the impressive part about that is that the laptop is managing over 3 hours of battery life without even lowering the brightness of the screen. The hard drives in raid are notably faster then a solo laptop drive. They are not as snappy as an SSD, but the transfer rate is very good. USB 3.0 is great, I've sustained 180mb a second copying onto the laptop from my external drive, but typically average about 140. The webcam is nice and clear, the wifi is only 150megabits in wireless N mode but that's plenty for me, it holds a great signal and is usually at full speed from my router (you have to enable wide channels in the driver to get it to go over 72mbps). It's nice having a full keyboard, though it is taking some getting used to. The touch sensitive buttons are nice, and the extra features of the turbo mode, full fan button, eco mode, and lighting options are nice.

The audio on this laptop is probably the best sound from a laptop I've ever heard. I was very unimpressed at first, after reading reviews on how good it was supposed to be.....then I turned it up. Unlike a normal laptop where sound starts sounding worse as you turn it up, this laptop it just gets better. You never get distortion, and you can certainly tell there is a subwoofer. You don't hear bass like you would a real sound system, but you have solid mids in all of your music so everything sounds complete. The LEDs dancing the the sound looks sweet, but the sound has to be all the way up for them to react properly, and only the ones of the side of the screen react to the music, the others just blink and are kind of annoying in the "music mode".

I got the 12gb model for 1400 something, I couldn't be any happier. The build of this laptop isn't as professional looking as a dell, but the quality is similar. If this laptop proves to be reliable, I will only buy MSI from now on. Most of the main brands won't even let you spec out a laptop this nice, and if they do it costs 2x as much!

The only cons I can think of are

fan never turns off, isn't loud at idle but is audible and the 2630 idles at about 50c in my warm bedroom

no display port

esata port doesn't work as a usb 3.0 port as well

Phenomenal Features

Amazing speakers for a notebook

Dual Hard Drive Bays

Only $1499 when purchased

Up to 3hrs battery life (with screen dimmed)

Quiet

No overheating

Relatively light considering the internals

Easy to access hard drive bays and ram

Stock hard drives are a pair of 500GB Western Digital Scorpio Black

-Motherboard supports SATA III 6GB/s interface

-Built in ESATA and dual USB 3.0 ports

-Video out and charging ports are located in the rear of the notebook

Other great features

Quad Core i7 Sandy Bridge

Complete overkill with 12GB of RAM

Nvidia GTX 560M is currently unmatched in mobile graphic in price and performance, and battery consumption (also blows away the GTX 555m)

FULL HD 1080p LED Backlit 15.6" screen, which is gorgeous

Unfortunately no backlit keyboard

Mouse touchpad is not multi-touch and scrolling takes some getting used to

Mouse left and right click is a single bar, although not that bad

No express slot

No s-video

DVD drive is not slot loading

Other Thoughts: I replaced the dual 500GB hard drives with a 128GB Crucial M4 SSD and a Seagate 750GB 7200rpm hard drive. I reinstalled Windows 7 to the SSD and then modified the registry to have all my Documents, Music, Videos, and Photos on the HDD.

Let me tell you, having Windows 7 boot from and SSD makes a world of difference. It took this laptop from exception to absolutely phenomenal. Nothing compares to this laptops boot speeds and speed of daily functions. Even my desktop which has a superior CPU and GPU (Core i7 930, GTX 470, 6GB RAM, 1TB 7200rpm WD Scorpio Black) cannot keep up with the performance of this laptop with the SSD.

The hard drive truely is the slowest component of modern computers and spending $100 to $200 on a new SSD truly is a worthwhile upgrade for any computer

Buy MSI GT683R-242US 15.6-Inch Laptop (Black ) Now

I own this laptop now for a month and I have to say that it works like a dream.

As usual with those gaming-laptops it's packed with a few (demo-)games and some manuals. First thing I noticed was that the charger is huge! It's about 1,5 times the size of a regular laptop-charger, so make sure you buy a big laptop-case to fit both the laptop and charger + some additional equipment like a mouse.

I play World of Tanks quite often and get on Full HD settings with all graphics settings on max. an average of 48 fps!

Pro's:

Fast laptop; both CPU + GPU are working like a dream. With active cooling on, the CPU temp will be around 94 F / 34 C idle and about 115 F / 46 C stressed.

Large, fast HD (RAID 0)

Superb sound! I've never heard a laptop that produces better sounds than this one. You can play music at high volume and you still barely hear any distortions.

Great laptop-battery life. While using it in the office you can last up to about 4 hours on 1 battery charge!

If you are like me and take your laptop often with you to LAN-parties, this laptop is easy to take with you due to its screensize of 15,6"

Great design with nice looking LED-strips that you can turn on or off whenever you want.

Con's:

Well, it's obvious that a gaming-laptop consumes more power than a regular laptop, but the charger is quite big which means that it's not easy to store in a regular laptop-case.

The screen is very shiny and reflective.

Why is it that gaming-laptops always come with a bunch of games, but there's never one that I actually like...! Come on guys; I want some WW2 FPS or flight simulation games with my brandnew laptop! ;)

Final thought: If you want a good gaming laptop and don't care about having a laptop that can handle Bluray this is the one to go for. I personally think this one is better than the ASUS G73SW. Especially the graphics (GTX 460M vs GTX 560M) are better. The looks of this laptop are gorgeous! The LED-strips make sure your laptop won't stay unnoticed. This laptop is worth every penny!

Read Best Reviews of MSI GT683R-242US 15.6-Inch Laptop (Black ) Here

This laptop from MSI is a real power house. I have checked out a lot of reviews before making this purchase. All reviews were favorable, and so i went on with the purchase with a lot of confidence. The laptop lives up to the reviews.

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this thing rocks, I am very happy with it, and it is a very very solid laptop. got all the features you need, I play BF3 at 1080 on it on high settings when in turbo mode! Simply awesome! Plows through anything you throw at it and will have room for more.