MSI GS60 2PE Ghost Pro 15.6 inch Laptop Review

Today we have a very special review for our readers, a look at the world's slimmest and lightest 15.6 inch Gaming Notebook. The MSI GS60 2PE Ghost Pro is currently available in 3 different flavours - one will ship with a 3K screen, another with Nvidia GTX860M discrete graphics. The model we are looking at today however is the most interesting. It ships with a Core i7 4700HQ CPU, a powerful Nvidia GTX870M GPU, 256GB Solid State Storage in 'Super Raid' and a more usable 1080p Anti-Glare eDP Wide View angle panel. MSI pack in 8GB of fast DDR3 memory and another 1TB of mechanical storage to sweeten the deal. At only £1,399 is this one of the most portable, but powerful gaming laptops money can buy? There is no doubt that the MSI GS60 2PE Ghost Pro is a beauty. MSI have placed a primary focus on ensuring the build quality is at the highest standards - after all they are targeting the discerning audience who have found the Razer Blade a tempting proposition. Today we put the MSI GS60 2PE Ghost Pro 15.6 inch Laptop through a series of paces to evaluate its worth as an all around super portable laptop. This is the first gaming laptop to use Magnesium-Lithium Alloy (Mg-Li). Magnesium-Lithium alloy was first used by NASA on Saturn-V – known as the most powerful rocket that had ever flown successfully in 1960. Later, It was popular use on rockets, military and aircraft. MSI GS60 2PE Ghost Pro: Processor: Intel Core i7 4700HQ. Panel: 15.6 FHD Anti Glare (1920x1080) eDP Wide View Angle. Graphics: Nvidia Geforce GTX870M, 3GB GDDR5. Wireless: KILLER LAN+ Intel 7260 Wilkins Peak 2 (2x2 802.11ac) + BT 4.0 M.2 type. Memory: 8GB DDR3 Operating system: Windows 8.1 64 bit. Storage: 256GB SSD (M2 SATA) and 1TB SATA 7,200 rpm. Battery: 6 Cell Warranty: 2 Years Retail price: £1,399 inc vat. KitGuru has recently invested in enhancing our photographic studio - the MSI GS60 2PE Ghost Pro is our first system review using the new equipment so we hope you will notice the improvement in the quality of the images in this article. MSI ' Top Player - Top Choice'. A plain simple black box with pale lettering. Elegant. The laptop is protected inside the thick box, wrapped inside a clear cover and felt bag. We will look at the laptop shortly, so let's move it out of the way for the time being. Underneath the laptop, are two boxes containing the accessories. One box has all the literature and the software disc, alongside a UK power cable. In the other box is the power adapter. This is quite thin, but long. Many people may not look at the power adapter, but this is actually made by DELTA, one of the best power supply companies on the planet. It is rated 150W at 19.5V, 7.7A. First impressions are extremely positive. The MSI GS60 2PE Ghost Pro is incredibly thin, measuring only 19.95mm at the thickest point. It is 390 mm x 266 mm in weight and length. It weighs around 1.96 kg. The design is quite beautiful. No fancy lights or grilled edges. Just the MSI name and the iconic Dragon badge. Classy. The rear of the laptop is vented - MSI are clearly working in a very restricted physical space, so air circulation is very important. The left side of the laptop has a headphone and microphone jack, two USB 3.0 ports, the power connector, security port and a cooling vent. The right side of the laptop has another USB 3.0 port, card reader, HDMI port, Mini DisplayPort connector and LAN connector. Another vent is positioned at the rear - probably close to a cooling heatsink. We will look at the insides shortly. There are some vents close to the rear of the chassis, underneath. The MSI GS60 2PE Ghost Pro is very stable on all surfaces, thanks to four thick rubber feet in every corner. MSI ship the GS60 2PE Ghost Pro with a soft cover between screen and keyboard - always a good idea to protect the panel from rough handling during shipping. The screen is not IPS, however the viewing angles are excellent, colours are vibrant and sharpness is very good for the class. I found the brightness and contrast levels to be well above average, although I did tend to use it plugged in at the highest brightness setting. It won't be the best choice for using in direct sunlight outdoors, however we would imagine this would only concern a small audience. MSI have opted for a pleasant middle ground between a glossy and matte screen surface. It won't mirror everything behind you in a bright room, which we like. There is no doubt the GS60 2PE Ghost Pro is a looker. From every angle it looks paper thin, yet it is surprisingly rigid. MSI have incorporated a high grade Steelseries keyboard which I found it a pleasure to use over the course of the last week. My only real issue was the inclusion of a 'single height' return key. My typing style tends to position my little finger close to the top of a double height key. Obviously when a single height key is used this can cause some issues. There is dedicated Steelseries software installed which gives the end user quite a lot of control over the settings, including the ability to change colours. The keyboard lighting is very even and its one of the better laptop implementations we have seen. The trackpad is oversized and also very good to use. I am not a big fan of trackpads, only using them when I have no option - such as when on a plane or train. It is quite sensitive and tracks movement well. On board audio is surprisingly good, especially considering the small dimensions of the chassis. It goes without saying that if you take audio seriously then a dedicated pair of speakers or headphones is a good move - onboard audio systems struggle to produce any kind of serious bass response. The screen is rigid and it won't wobble out of position under use. We have to say, the MSI GS60 2PE Ghost Pro is exceptionally well built in all areas. The hinges are heavy duty, and the sides of the panel have rubber mounts to protect the screen against the keyboard when it is closed. The MSI GS60 2PE Ghost Pro doesn't quite open to a full 180 degrees - its closer to 150 degrees. Still for most people this will be more than enough. The internal layout of the MSI GS60 2PE Ghost Pro is exceptional. There are two heatsinks and fans positioned at the rear of the chassis to cool both the GPU and CPU. The only thing that may annoy some people is that the 6-cell battery is not removable - like the current generation Apple Macintosh laptops. To be fair to MSI, this is really the only way they can cram all these components into such a diminutive chassis design. Two small speakers are installed bottom left and right of the chassis, shown in the top image above. On this page we present some high resolution images of the product taken in our professional studio. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source. The install isn't the best we have seen. We appreciate all the drivers have to be installed, but to see a default install featuring Norton's Anti Theft, Internet Security and Online Backup isn't appealing. We know this will be very much a personal taste issue, but Norton's software is well known to be a resource hog and it certainly wouldn't be our choice. We deinstalled all this software before testing the system as we have found minor performance degradation with it running in the background. An overview of the system via CPUz online validation tool. You can see it over here. More observant readers will notice that the memory in this system is running in Single Channel. While this may raise a red flag, we honestly have seen very little real world impact due to this in the past. The system arrived with us with the 337.50 driver installed, we upgraded to the latest 340.43 driver. This is a very beefy mobile graphics solution, with 24 ROPS, 112 Texture units and 1344 Cuda Cores. We expect great gaming performance at 1080p with high image quality settings. More on this later in the review. The core clock is 941mhz and will boost to 967mhz. The 3GB of GDDR5 memory runs at 1,250mhz (5Gbps effective) and is connected via a 192 bit memory interface. Comparison Systems (for specific synthetic test compares): MSI GT70 2OC (Intel Core i7 4700MQ) MSI GS70 2OD Stealth (Intel Core i7 4700HQ) MSI GE40-20C Dragon Eyes (Intel Core i7 4702MQ) PCSpecialist Inferno 11.6 inch (Intel Core i7 3630QM) MSI GX60 (AMD A10 4600M) Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (featuring Core i5 3427U) Lenovo ThinkPad Edge S430 (featuring Core i5 3210M) PC Specialist Vortex III HD72 (featuring Core i7 3610QM). Asus G74SX-91013Z (featuring Core i7 2360QM). Dell XPS 14z (featuring Core i7 2640M). AlienWare M18X (featuring Core i7 2960XM Extreme Edition). MSI CX640 (featuring Core i5 2410M). Intel Core i7 2600k desktop processor. Intel Core i5 2500k desktop processor. Software: 3DMark 3DMark 11 Cinebench 11.5 64 bit FRAPS Professional Unigine Heaven Benchmark Unigine Valley SiSoft Sandra CrystalDiskMark ATTO Disk Benchmark Cyberlink PowerDVD Ultra 12 Cyberlink MediaEspresso GRID 2 (Direct X 11) Tomb Raider (Direct X 11) Watchdogs (Direct X 11) Wolfenstein The New Order (Direct X 11) Technical Monitoring and Test Equipment: Asus USB BluRay Drive Thermal Diodes Raytek Laser Temp Gun 3i LSRC/MT4 Mini Temp Extech digital sound level meter & SkyTronic DSL 2 Digital Sound Level Meter Fuji XT-1 with 18-50mm lens, Nikon DF with 50mm f1.4 lens and Sony RX100. Game descriptions are taken with courtesy from Wikipedia. SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software. Sandra is a (girl’s) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting. It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc. Native ports for all major operating systems are available: Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86) Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64) Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64) Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01) Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02) All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of: SMP – Multi-Processor MC – Multi-Core SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86 IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit As we mentioned earlier in the review, this laptop is running the memory in single channel, which is the reason for the low scores in the Sandra Memory Bandwidth test. It is unlikely to have much of an impact in our real world tests however, based on previous results. The Core i7 processor performance is excellent, as it should be. CINEBENCH R11.5 64 Bit is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer’s performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON’s award-winning animation software CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Spider-Man, Star Wars, The Chronicles of Narnia and many more. CINEBENCH is the perfect tool to compare CPU and graphics performance across various systems and platforms (Windows and Mac OS X). And best of all: It’s completely free. Excellent performance from the Intel Core i7 4700HQ processor, claiming a position right at the top of the chart. Even though the MSI GS60 2PE Ghost Pro could be classed as a super portable - it has the processing power to handle semi-serious 3D rendering. CINEBENCH 15 is a cross-platform testing suite that measures hardware performance and is the de facto standard benchmarking tool for leading companies and trade journals for conducting real-world hardware performance tests. With the new Release 15, systems with up to 256 threads can be tested. CINEBENCH is available for both Windows and OS X and is used by almost all hardware manufacturers and trade journals for comparing CPUs and graphics cards. Results are exactly as we would expect compared to the last test on the MSI GT70 2OC Gaming Notebook which we reviewed some time ago. Valley Benchmark is a new GPU stress-testing tool from the developers of the very popular and highly acclaimed Heaven Benchmark.The forest-covered valley surrounded by vast mountains amazes with its scale from a bird’s-eye view and is extremely detailed down to every leaf and flower petal. This non-synthetic benchmark powered by the state-of-the art UNIGINE Engine showcases a comprehensive set of cutting-edge graphics technologies with a dynamic environment and fully interactive modes available to the end user. Excellent performance at the native resolution of the panel - hitting just over 56 frames per second. 3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista the benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads. If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page. An excellent result, and a good first indication of potential strong performance with Direct X 11 titles. 3DMark is an essential tool used by millions of gamers, hundreds of hardware review sites and many of the world’s leading manufacturers to measure PC gaming performance.Futuremark say “Use it to test your PC’s limits and measure the impact of overclocking and tweaking your system. Search our massive results database and see how your PC compares or just admire the graphics and wonder why all PC games don’t look this good. To get more out of your PC, put 3DMark in your PC.” We are already seeing based on the synthetic scores that the MSI GS60 2PE Ghost Pro is going to be a very capable laptop for Direct X 11 gaming. The MSI GS60 2PE Ghost Pro ships with Solid State Drives configured in RAID 0 for ultimate performance. There is also a 1TB Mechanical drive installed. The Raid 0 SSD configuration works extremely well, hitting 962 MB/s and 799MB/s in the sequential read and write tests, respectively. The mechanical drive is much slower, however for a 7,200 rpm 2.5 inch drive these results are about as good as we would expect - peaking between 130-140 MB/s. The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. The SSD Raid 0 configuration hits around 1000 MB/s in the read test, and the mechanical hard drive hits a limit around 136 MB/s. We test the USB 3.0 performance on the MSI system with one of our fastest portable flash drives – the Patriot SuperSonic Magnum 256GB. We reviewed this back in February, check it out over here. Excellent performance from all three of the USB 3.0 ports on the MSI GS60 2PE Ghost Pro - the performance peaked at 310 MB/s. The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. ATTO never scores as highly with USB 3.0 drives. The Patriot SuperSonic Magnum peaks at around 270 MB/s in the read test, displaying much lesser write test results. Grid 2 is the sequel to the racing video game Race Driver: Grid. It was developed and published by Codemasters. The game includes numerous real world locations such as Paris, numerous United States locations, and many more, and also includes motor vehicles spanning four decades. In addition, it includes a new handling system that developer Codemasters has dubbed ‘TrueFeel’, which aims to hit a sweet spot between realism and accessibility. We aren't taking it easy on the MSI GS60 2PE Ghost Pro. We crank the image quality settings at 1080p to the ULTRA preset and enabled 8 x QCSAA. Great results, holding the frame rate above 40 at all times. The anti aliasing could be reduced a little to increase frame rates further. We know some people like more consistent 60fps+ when playing racing games. Tomb Raider received much acclaim from critics, who praised the graphics, the gameplay and Camilla Luddington’s performance as Lara with many critics agreeing that the game is a solid and much needed reboot of the franchise. Much criticism went to the addition of the multiplayer which many felt was unnecessary. Tomb Raider went on to sell one million copies in forty-eight hours of its release, and has sold 3.4 million copies worldwide so far. We use the ULTIMATE profile, as shown above. We really want to push the image quality as high as possible when testing this laptop. This is still a very demanding engine and one that looks great at ULTIMATE settings. The MSI GS60 2PE Ghost Pro proves up to the task, maintaining a smooth frame rate throughout. Watch Dogs is an action-adventure game played from a third-person perspective. Players complete missions—linear scenarios with set objectives—to progress through the story. Outside of missions, players can freely roam the open world of Chicago. The world may be fully explored from the beginning of the game without restrictions, although story progress unlocks more gameplay content. We haven't been that impressed with the PC version of this game - especially not when it comes to frame rate optimisation. That said, we know this is one of the most popular games out right now and we wanted to give it a thorough play through on the MSI GS60 2PE Ghost Pro. We selected high resolution settings shown above - we want the game to look as good as possible while maintaining playable frame rates. Again the Nvidia GTX870M powers through this game, maintaining good frame rates with the latest patch as of the 19th June 2014. Wolfenstein: The New Order is the ninth installment in the Wolfenstein series and was released on May 20, 2014 for the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One and Microsoft Windows. It was developed by MachineGames and published by Bethesda Softworks. It is the sequel to 2009's Wolfenstein and utilizes id Software's proprietary game engine id Tech 5. We love this game and it runs well on even mid range hardware. We opted for good image quality settings, while placing a focus on maintaining smooth frame rates. Excellent performance, holding above 30 frames per second at all times. The test were performed in an air conditioned room, holding temperatures at a constant 23c. This is a comfortable environment for most people reading. Idle temperatures were measured after 30 minutes from initial boot up with the system inactive. Load temperatures were measured when playing Tomb Raider - a Direct X 11 game that taxes both CPU and GPU extensively. All fan settings were left on BIOS defaults. There are some downsides with cramming in all this high end hardware into such a small chassis. It does run hot under extended load. A lot of the airflow enters and is expelled through the sides of the chassis, but the underside gets very warm to the touch. We never recorded any thermal throttling or performance loss however, but it is worth pointing out that blocking any of the rear vents will be enough to cause overheating. We attached five diodes to the back of the chassis and measured the temperature (Celcius) after one hour of intensive work and gaming. The underside of the chassis does get very hot under load. If you want to game with this laptop on your knee then we suggest you invest in a cooling pad or an ultra quiet cooler such as Zalman model, available from Amazon for around £13. We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with almost completely passive cooling and it means we can measure noise of just the graphics card inside the system when we run looped 3DMark tests. We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the closed chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation. Ambient noise in the room measures close to the limits of our sound meter at 28dBa. Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the video card. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635. KitGuru noise guide 10dBA - Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves 20-25dBA – Whisper 30dBA - High Quality Computer fan 40dBA - A Bubbling Brook, or a Refrigerator 50dBA - Normal Conversation 60dBA - Laughter 70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer 80dBA - City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal 90dBA - Motorcycle or Lawnmower 100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output 110dBA - Orchestra 120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine 130dBA – Threshold of Pain 140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range) 160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum When idle, or when surfing the internet, working in Microsoft Office for example - the MSI GS60 2PE Ghost Pro is relatively quiet. Both fans spin at low spin circulating modest air across the motherboard, and through the two rear mounted heatsinks cooling the CPU and GPU. Under load, the dual fans will spin up significantly, forcing hot air out of the chassis as quickly as possible. The fan noise is quite loud, although there really is very little MSI can do about this, considering the tiny dimensions of the case. It is a great gaming laptop, but you will need to put up with a reasonable level of noise under load. Those gamers who wear headphones will not really care.To test today, we are putting the machine through a variety of ‘real world’ situations, mirroring the real world usage of a potential customer. One as a media movie lover on the move (wearing headphones), a person wanting to watch high definition media on a train journey or bus with screen brightness two notches from maximum. Second as a businessman, with screen brightness around half way. Wireless was enabled. A mixture of checking, answering emails using Microsoft Office and editing pictures in Adobe Photoshop. Lastly as a gamer, playing Watchdogs until the machine turned itself off. The 6 cell battery has to power some seriously high end mobile hardware. Under general, light use you will get between 2 hours and 30 minutes and 3 hours use. Watching HD movies will drain the battery quicker, and we recorded around 1 hour and 45 minutes. Intensive gaming duties will drain the battery quickly - in around 1 hours time going on our tests. You really will want access to a wall socket to get the most from this machine, although it is ideal for LAN gaming at a friends house for instance. We spend considerable time with a wide selection of laptops in the KitGuru labs, every month. After a while we will be honest, it is easy to become rather disinterested in the somewhat generalised, run of the mill designs we see all the time. The MSI GS60 2PE Ghost Pro however has really grabbed our attention - it is quite honestly one of the most beautiful looking laptops we have seen. Super thin, and super sexy. It is clear that MSI are targeting the audience interested in the much hyped Razer Blade - those in the market for a light weight, slim, yet powerful PC to game with, on the move. We believe that the MSI GS60 2PE Ghost Pro is a better and more diverse machine than the Razer model we last looked at during a recent event. The MSI GS60 2PE Ghost Pro is very thin, measuring only 2cm when it is closed. The Magnesium-Lithium Alloy finish is very solid and feels like it will last many years with some care and attention. The only negative is that it does attract fingerprints rather easily, especially if you are prone to perspiring. The Anti-Glare eDP Wide View Angle screen is excellent. Viewing angles are very impressive, and it is bright enough to be viewed outdoors, although not in direct sunlight. Colour saturation is well above average, as is screen linearity and sharpness. The backlit keyboard by Steelseries is truly excellent and one of the best laptop keyboards we have used. It still can't quite match the business keyboards equipped on the high end Lenovo ThinkPad machines, but it is a close second. The dedicated software which is included, will allow you to change and tweak various settings, including the backlighting. Onboard audio is also surprisingly good, with decent levels of volume when factoring in the small size. Stereo speakers are positioned on either side of the internal design, although those who take audio more seriously would be advised to invest some money into a quality pair of speakers or headphones. We already know the Intel i7 4700HQ is a powerhouse mobile processor - verified by the results achieved with 3D rendering benchmarks. If you need to render some complex scenes on the move, this machine will deliver the goods. The MSI GS60 2PE Ghost Pro struts its prowess as a gaming machine, generating some fantastic frame rates with the latest Direct X 11 games at the native 1080p panel resolution. The inclusion of Nvidia's Geforce GTX870M is inspired, and rather daring when considering the diminutive dimensions of the wafer thin chassis. The system boots up and reacts very quickly to the most demanding situations thanks to the adoption of two Solid State Drives configured in RAID 0. Performance is rated around the 1000 MB/s mark and in real world terms, you are never waiting on the machine to catch up with your commands. It is true, the machine does run rather warm, and it emits a fair level of noise under heavy, sustained load. There is absolutely nothing MSI can do about this - apart from add in more fans and increase noise levels well past 40dBA. MSI have clearly spent some time in the R&D department, balancing the heat against noise emissions. Even though the machine does get very warm under load it never suffered from throttling during our tests. If you pick one up however, we do advise that you keep the rear vents clear from any obstructions. MSI are selling several versions of the MSI GS60 2PE Ghost Pro 15.6 inch Laptop. This particular model we reviewed today, is available from Overclockers UK for £1,399.99 inc vat, although it has just sold out as we went to press. MSI did tell us that this is one of their more popular models, and it isn't difficult to see why. Discuss on our Facebook page, over HERE. Pros: Super thin and very portable. weighs less than 2kg. backlit Steelseries keyboard. great screen. decent onboard sound. very powerful CPU and GPU. RAID 0 Solid State Drive configuration - hitting 1000MB/s. very competitively priced. Cons: Gets hot. a little loud under load. battery runs out of juice quickly if you want to game on the move. Kitguru says: The MSI GS60 2PE Ghost Pro is a powerful, well designed, super thin gaming laptop. It really doesn't get any better than this. A perfect partner for LAN gaming events.