MSI released a new gaming laptop, a new Dominator Series with a whole new design, new specs, it's MSI GT72 Dominator, this MSI GT72 Dominator comes with the latest NVIDIA's graphics architecture. The GT72 take everything from it's predecessor and change it into a whole new package and the result is a powerful gaming rig and well-built notebook, this Dominator series has many variants, but in this post I will review one of the variants. So, here is some review about MSI GT72 Dominator, let's see are you fall in love this new Gaming laptop ?.
Build and Design
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| MSI GT72 Dominator |
MSI GT72 Dominator from conceptual level, isn't much different from its predecessor. It still has features larger 17-inch display and wide, as a 17-inch gaming laptop, the MSI GT72 Dominator is little smaller that the previous Dominator, this new design frame is 16.85 x 11.57 x 1.89 inch, which is thinner that its predecessor. The weight still solid 8.33 pounds (3.77 kg), on the left side of the frame we can found 4 USB 3.0 ports, audio jacks, and an SD card reader. On the right side there is 2 more USB ports and an optical drive, also there is all the other usual suspects : Ethernet Jack, power adapter, HDMI output, and two DisplayPort plugs (If you want to rock and roll and use three monitor setup).
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| Side View |
The design still with it's matte black aluminum and little visual decoration. On the front side and the top of the screen lid, comes a wide-pointed peak with red accents and a subtle crimson paint. The keyboard also has a LED lighting behind it.
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| Top Screen-lid |
MSI's GT72 Dominator control dock is simple, on the left edge of the keyboard there is five buttons and there are all useful. There are a power key, also a button to switches between discrete and integrated graphics, shortcut to launch the Dominator game-streaming software, keyboard backlight toggle, and a fan overdrive mode.
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| 5 Keys Control Dock |
Keyboard and Touchpad
For the keyboard, this GT72 still using StellSeries to power the backlit. The keyboard is included with the StellSeries Engine software suite to allows user to create custom macros and making it 100 percent reprogrammable keyboard. This keyboard is physically satisfying, with a simple and an island style caps. The keyboard will create statistical report and highlight for the keys that are used most frequently during a timed play session, also you can change the backlight colors.
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| MSI GT72 Dominator Keyboard |
Speaking of the touchpad, there is nothing wrong with the touchpad, with it smooth surface, it reads finger movements accurately and translate them into the exact location on the screen that I want to execute. On the pad boundaries it's definded by a LED glow that matches the color from the keyboard backlight, looks really sweet isn't it ?.
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| MSI GT72 Dominator Touchpad |
Display and Audio
GT72 with it's gorgeous large displays shows a sharp visual and vibrant colors, games looks really great, every time we watch a blue ray disc, it's always really joy to watch.
Like it's predecessor, the Dominator series has a history of offering a great audio and also with the latest Dominator GT72. This machine use Dynaudio speakers, it sounds great, loud and clear. Among the other laptops this is the best audio you can get without plugging any headphones on it. THe sound is augmented by Sound Blaster cinema, with variety of modes for gaming, cinema, voice, and music, also you don't need to touch anything, because GT72 equalizer will manages itself.
Performance and Battery Life
This powerful mobile gaming rig is built from Intel Core i7-4710HQ @ 2.5GHz (turbo boost until 3.5GHz), 32 GB DDR3L RAM, also latest GPU From NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M. For drive it has 128 GB boot drive and second 1TB drive where you can install games.
Do you want to play
Call of Duty Advanced Warfare ? Don't worry it will runs on extra detail with 2x supersampling enabled at steady 80-81 fps. More of a
Battefield 4 fans ? It will run on ultra high visual settings at over 100 FPS with V-Sync off. For
Titanfall it will run at 40-45 FPS, but if you tweak the anti alias settings the fps can be above 60 fps. Here is video that testing the MSI GT72 on WatchDogs by
HispaZone.com.
Usually if you run games or anything that load a lot resource for your laptop it will become into a PC Gaming hotplates, but the GT72 actually stays fairly cool. By turning the machine "cooler boost" features it will kick the drive temperature down a bit further. So it never reached the point where the heat makes you uncomfortable.
GT72 Dominator Pro seems to have short run time, with standard test the battery just drained out just from three hours. For a better battery life you can just press the Dominator GPU-switch button to change the GPU to integrated Intel HD Graphics 4600, with this integrated GPU, the machine could run over four and half hours. If you want to play games just switch back to the discrete NVIDIA GPU by pressing the button again.
Conclusion
MSI doing a great job, This $2.599 MSI GT72 Dominator is really a great gaming laptop, with it's super specification that given by this laptop you can run any games without any problem at all. Many laptop will become a hot plate when it put on a performance mode, but not with this GT72 it will stay cool. So what do you think about this latest gaming laptop ? do you have any recommendation ? just leave it on the comment !. Thank you !
