Powernotebooks sell a tweaked 680m version of a better version of this case that scores around 8000 in 3dmark 11 ;) so you can get 780m performance today.
Or just get an MSI GT70, which is what this, and the iBuyPower's chassis are based off of, as well as it's internals. I got one last October with a GTX680M in it, and it's great.
@darkhawk I think it's important to note that the keyboard on the msi gt70 is utter crap and after two months of my palm moving the trackpad mouse inadvertently and registering clicks elsewhere on the screen that would cause my typing to become garbled and fragmented I was so frustrated with this pc that I sent it back and absorbed the restocking fee!
Have you tested the cooling? Notebookcheck measures quite server throtteling issues onder prime95 and furmark, with the CPU throtteling to 1.2Ghz and shutdown due to undersized power supply. Whereas the M17x keeps the temperature under 85° without throttling.
Since this chassis is based off the older MSI GT70, the most likely cause is that it has the same problems the GT70 did in production, and that the heatsink compound and heatsinks were not done properly, do you were not getting efficient cooling. After re-applying compound and remounting the heatsinks, it should be better. Atleast, if this is based on the GT70 as much as it looks like. They could have skimped on the heatsink more than MSI did, which might help explain the heat issues.
I'd rather have the MSI GX60 for $1200. It boasts a 7970m and is overall a nicer laptop. TH did a review on it yesterday and while it lacked the raw cpu horsepower of some of the intel models the review proved that when it came to games it really did not make that big of an impact and it could still play everything at max settings on 1920x1080. It also had pretty decent battery life.
That's actually a very interesting gaming laptop. I love the tear down pics of the cooling design. CPU performance obviously isn't earth shattering but about the only intensive thing I do on my laptop these days is playing the occasional game anyway. I wish they made a more subtle looking version. Also, I checked the usual places and the versions they are selling lack the dual mSATA RAID 0 array. It's still a good deal of gaming performance for the money, but the SSDs would make it a pretty phenomenal piece of gaming kit for the money.
Consumer SSD raid0 is a benchmark chasers/suckers gimmick only. You won't notice the performance difference vs a single larger drive any more than you will the difference between a cheap and high performance SSD.
You will however have doubled your risk of losing data to a drive failure.
Understood, and I don't really care that it's set up as a RAID 0 array. What I'm really after is just mSATA (or NGFF now) + 9.5mm HDD. I'll gladly give up a few millimeters in any laptop for a full height HDD. Newegg had the HGST 1TB drives for $65 for quite a while. That plus a 256GB mSATA is an ideal setup for me. Unfortunately Lenovo seems to be the only manufacturer including mSATA/NGFF support into most of their lineup. And I wouldn't really care if they throw two mSATA drives in RAID 0. I have sysprep'd OS images set up how I want them, and anything important goes to a home server with 2 disk redundancy, with the stuff I really care about in the cloud as well. I screw around with my hardware enough that wiping the system drives on any of them isn't going to make me lose any sleep. If one of the mSATA drives died I'd just replace it and restore from the last daily backup.
I was pretty dissapointed in the MSI GX60... The video card did not switch as advertised for some of my games, and was quite a hassle to deal with. Would have rather they just put in the 7970m as a dedicated card than do all the switching based on program. I returned my laptop in less than a week I was so dissatisfied.
The a10 bottlenecks quite badly. It can be seen in the toms hardware review or the notebookcheck review. Even looking at the bf3 singleplayer benchmarks we see a cpu problem at lower settings (and looking at other bf3 reviews practically any cpu will not bottleneck bf3 singleplayer). BF3 multiplayer is going to kill this thing. Hitman is flat out unplayable. You can see a lot in that review that in a lot of games you are limited to only 40-50fps in current and old games, as hardware requirements rise you are going to be cpu limited to 30 fps or below. In my opinion gpu bottleneck is much preferable to cpu bottleneck. You can always work around a gpu bottleneck but a cpu bottleneck is much harder. Its better to have a laptop than can play all games on average settings than one that can play 75% of games on high and 25% not at all.
I think this is the first Anandtech article I've been unable to finish. This laptop is so atrocious I literally didn't care about the specs or price point.
When I looked at the customization page a month ago I thought they had a 680M for about $250 and they had a dozen different keyboard options. I never did buy it just because that lid is so ugly. Call me shallow but looks matter when they are that ugly.
Reminds me of my first Compaq Armada Pentium II size wize. Of course the Compaq wasn't nearly as ugly. Looks like it was designed by a bunch of boy racer wannabees. The only thing missing is some carbon finer inlays?
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blackmagnum - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 - link
Fall CPU and GPU updates are so near. A gaming laptop >$1,500 is a tough decision. Maybe if they run a trade-in program...Meaker10 - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 - link
Powernotebooks sell a tweaked 680m version of a better version of this case that scores around 8000 in 3dmark 11 ;) so you can get 780m performance today.darkhawk1980 - Friday, May 3, 2013 - link
Or just get an MSI GT70, which is what this, and the iBuyPower's chassis are based off of, as well as it's internals. I got one last October with a GTX680M in it, and it's great.MoneyLoo - Saturday, May 4, 2013 - link
@darkhawk I think it's important to note that the keyboard on the msi gt70 is utter crap and after two months of my palm moving the trackpad mouse inadvertently and registering clicks elsewhere on the screen that would cause my typing to become garbled and fragmented I was so frustrated with this pc that I sent it back and absorbed the restocking fee!StormyParis - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 - link
FangBook. That sounds like an awkward name for something targeted at teens.Friendly0Fire - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 - link
It also looks like it's straight out of what teens were thought to like in the 80s...a1strank - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 - link
Man this thing looks like my 1998 Compaq Pentium 3...dakishimesan - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 - link
this looks like my 1998 toyota camry.l_d_allan - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 - link
or an angry kitchen appliance?Darkstone - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 - link
Is that thing really 3.1 Kg???Have you tested the cooling? Notebookcheck measures quite server throtteling issues onder prime95 and furmark, with the CPU throtteling to 1.2Ghz and shutdown due to undersized power supply. Whereas the M17x keeps the temperature under 85° without throttling.
kjohio - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 - link
Excellent observation. Heat is definitely a big issue while playing games. Would love to have any updates on this topic. Thanks,darkhawk1980 - Friday, May 3, 2013 - link
Since this chassis is based off the older MSI GT70, the most likely cause is that it has the same problems the GT70 did in production, and that the heatsink compound and heatsinks were not done properly, do you were not getting efficient cooling. After re-applying compound and remounting the heatsinks, it should be better. Atleast, if this is based on the GT70 as much as it looks like. They could have skimped on the heatsink more than MSI did, which might help explain the heat issues.whyso - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 - link
Does the 7950m even exist? I've never seen it.cknobman - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 - link
I'd rather have the MSI GX60 for $1200.It boasts a 7970m and is overall a nicer laptop.
TH did a review on it yesterday and while it lacked the raw cpu horsepower of some of the intel models the review proved that when it came to games it really did not make that big of an impact and it could still play everything at max settings on 1920x1080. It also had pretty decent battery life.
Bob Todd - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 - link
That's actually a very interesting gaming laptop. I love the tear down pics of the cooling design. CPU performance obviously isn't earth shattering but about the only intensive thing I do on my laptop these days is playing the occasional game anyway. I wish they made a more subtle looking version. Also, I checked the usual places and the versions they are selling lack the dual mSATA RAID 0 array. It's still a good deal of gaming performance for the money, but the SSDs would make it a pretty phenomenal piece of gaming kit for the money.DanNeely - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 - link
Consumer SSD raid0 is a benchmark chasers/suckers gimmick only. You won't notice the performance difference vs a single larger drive any more than you will the difference between a cheap and high performance SSD.You will however have doubled your risk of losing data to a drive failure.
Bob Todd - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 - link
Understood, and I don't really care that it's set up as a RAID 0 array. What I'm really after is just mSATA (or NGFF now) + 9.5mm HDD. I'll gladly give up a few millimeters in any laptop for a full height HDD. Newegg had the HGST 1TB drives for $65 for quite a while. That plus a 256GB mSATA is an ideal setup for me. Unfortunately Lenovo seems to be the only manufacturer including mSATA/NGFF support into most of their lineup. And I wouldn't really care if they throw two mSATA drives in RAID 0. I have sysprep'd OS images set up how I want them, and anything important goes to a home server with 2 disk redundancy, with the stuff I really care about in the cloud as well. I screw around with my hardware enough that wiping the system drives on any of them isn't going to make me lose any sleep. If one of the mSATA drives died I'd just replace it and restore from the last daily backup.Majes - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 - link
I was pretty dissapointed in the MSI GX60... The video card did not switch as advertised for some of my games, and was quite a hassle to deal with. Would have rather they just put in the 7970m as a dedicated card than do all the switching based on program. I returned my laptop in less than a week I was so dissatisfied.My two cents anyway :-/
will54 - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 - link
notebookcheck reviewed the GX60 a while back and the CPU bottlenecked the GPU so bad that some games were below the 660M and 3630QM.whyso - Thursday, May 2, 2013 - link
The a10 bottlenecks quite badly. It can be seen in the toms hardware review or the notebookcheck review. Even looking at the bf3 singleplayer benchmarks we see a cpu problem at lower settings (and looking at other bf3 reviews practically any cpu will not bottleneck bf3 singleplayer). BF3 multiplayer is going to kill this thing. Hitman is flat out unplayable. You can see a lot in that review that in a lot of games you are limited to only 40-50fps in current and old games, as hardware requirements rise you are going to be cpu limited to 30 fps or below.In my opinion gpu bottleneck is much preferable to cpu bottleneck. You can always work around a gpu bottleneck but a cpu bottleneck is much harder. Its better to have a laptop than can play all games on average settings than one that can play 75% of games on high and 25% not at all.
Freeseus - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 - link
I think this is the first Anandtech article I've been unable to finish. This laptop is so atrocious I literally didn't care about the specs or price point.will54 - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 - link
When I looked at the customization page a month ago I thought they had a 680M for about $250 and they had a dozen different keyboard options. I never did buy it just because that lid is so ugly. Call me shallow but looks matter when they are that ugly.Madn3ss795 - Thursday, May 2, 2013 - link
This and the MSI GT70 come from the same factory?superflex - Friday, May 3, 2013 - link
Reminds me of my first Compaq Armada Pentium II size wize. Of course the Compaq wasn't nearly as ugly.Looks like it was designed by a bunch of boy racer wannabees.
The only thing missing is some carbon finer inlays?