iBuyPower Battalion M1771 (MSI GS70) Gaming Notebook Review
by Dustin Sklavos on December 30, 2013 2:45 PM ESTThe iBuyPower Battalion M1771 isn't going to have the absolute best performance, but given its relative form factor, the fast Intel i7 quad core processor and solid GeForce GTX 765M should allow it to at least throw some of its modest weight around.
Before we get into gaming testing, though, it's worth at least seeing how it stacks up in relation to other current generation (and a couple of older generation) gaming machines in most basic disciplines. The Razer Blade 14 can exist as a reality check in games excepting the CPU which is the slightly slower i7-4702HQ; the Blade 14 has basically the same hardware as the Blade Pro, which is in turn almost identical to the M1771 (MSI GS70) internally.
The M1771 has the fastest storage subsystem of the lot but only just barely; despite the two SSDs in RAID 0, its theoretical performance advantage proves to be academic in practice. Meanwhile it bounces a bit over the map in PCMark 8, posting a slightly anemic performance in the Home test. It's not horrible and exists essentially as an oddball outlier.
PCMark 7 is kinder, and the M1771 posts a strong performance bolstered by its CPU and fast SSD storage subsystem.
Meanwhile, performance in the 3DMarks is excellent. The 765M is a strong piece of kit, able to use raw clockspeed to essentially make up most of the difference in CUDA core count between it and the powerful GTX 675MX. The Blade 14 trails it slightly, probably owing to the 200MHz difference in base clocks and reduced turbo bins of the i7-4702HQ. Meanwhile, check out the lead in 3DMark 11 over the former heavyweight GTX 580M.
The 4700HQ is modestly generationally faster than the 3630QM, in line with the difference in IPC as the two have identical clocks and turbo bins. It's also notably faster than the 2720QM, but Ivy proved to be a much bigger boost to mobile performance over Sandy than Haswell is over Ivy. The M1771 is essentially where it needs to be, performance-wise.
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xTRICKYxx - Monday, December 30, 2013 - link
Is NVIDIA Optimus disabled? The battery life seems unusually bad.InvderSkoodge - Monday, January 6, 2014 - link
I can confirm when I got my Battalion-m1771, that the Nvidia card was set to run everything, it is indicated by the power button glowing white when the Nvidia card is not being used, and red/orange when it is.I also wondered why battery was so bad when I got mine, but I fixed the problem, and yesterday got about 4-5 hours of moderate usage, low screen brightness wifi on.
lukedaly - Thursday, October 9, 2014 - link
It can be fixed. But either way, for a gaming laptop it stands no chance to ASUS ROG G750JM-DS71. /Luke from http://www.consumertop.com/best-laptop-guide/IMMrLame - Monday, November 24, 2014 - link
Yes but you can't really compare a backbreaking 4.2kg asus gaming laptop to a featherweight 2.5kg msi gaming laptop that honestly should have fallen under the ultrabook category with almost high-end gaming specs.skiboysteve - Monday, December 30, 2013 - link
Xps 15 review in the pipeline?SavingPvtBryan - Monday, December 30, 2013 - link
Seriously, are they ever going to review the Dell XPS 15?Try-Catch-Me - Tuesday, December 31, 2013 - link
Also the 2013 rMBP. It's been way too long. These two devices seem to be very similar, so I want an in-depth comparison.nportelli - Tuesday, December 31, 2013 - link
I have one and have been playing Batman games and Skyrim at highest detail and it plays great. Mind you I've not played a pc games in years before hand. But size, power and resolution, I have nothing to complain about.jwetmore - Monday, December 30, 2013 - link
I've had the MSI version of this notebook for two months and for the most part couldn't be happier.That battery life does seem somewhat short of what I'm able to achieve. Is it possible you were stuck on the 765M while you were doing the battery life calculations? The power button should be amber when on the nVidia chip, and white when on the integrated Intel chip.
On the Intel chip I can get about 4 hours if i lower the brightness a bit and just do light web browsing.
nunomoreira10 - Monday, December 30, 2013 - link
The gtx 765m should consume about the same as the i7 yet the cpu is 30º hotter with similar heatsinks.Intel sould also focus on increasing heat transfer efficiency from the cpu to the heatsink, its practically impossible to have the cpu under 80º nowadays, since in reality the heatsink needs to be around 50s