MSI GT80 Titan It’s certainly epic, but is this ‘titan’ really god-like, or closer to the ill-fated Titanic

Any way you slice it, it’s hard to call MSI’s GT80 anything but utterly ridiculous — though not in a derogatory sense. MSI calls this the world’s ‘slimmest 18.4-inch gaming notebook’ — but at 4.9cm thick and weighing 4.5kg, that claim doesn’t really add up to much. It’s hard to call it a ‘lap top’, let alone portable. This is a gaming machine through and through, with a brightlybacklit keyboard, blackand- red colour scheme with giant dragon decals and twin GeForce GTX 980Ms under the hood, this one’s got plenty of l33t gaming cred (if you’re looking for that sort of thing). While the mechanical keyboard (with brown Cherry MX switches) is the most-obviously ostentatious feature pretty much everything else is over the top, too. Even a little experimental in places. The whole keyboard deck, for example, is oddly designed. It Performance on this machine is, as you’d expect, top notch. CPU performance, driven by a Core i7-4820HQ is almost at desktop levels, and the four-drive RAID 0 storage system gives you a fantastically-responsive experience, with very fast loading times. (There’s also a secondary 1TB mechanical drive for storage duties.) And those two 980M GPUs deliver some of the fastest framerates we’ve seen on a portable. While SLI doesn’t always deliver twice the performance — sometimes there’s no increase — it does mean you’re getting 100fps+ framerates in most games at Ultra settings. Battery life was better than expected around 2 hours for typical day-to-day tasks and watching video. The GT80’s thermals were better than we’ve seen in other gaming laptops, but there’s still room for improvement. The GPUs peaked at 70ºC and 84ºC respectively. The hotter GPU sits closer to the CPU, which itself can get up to 92ºC. So puts the mechanical keys right at the front and wedges a portrait orientation trackpad next to it. That trackpad can also switch to a backlit numpad, so you’ve essentially got a full-sized keyboard. Also of note is that there’s no left Windows key — potentially great if you’re a gamer, not so much if you’re used to keyboard shortcuts. The tall trackpad is a bit problematic in use. It’s so narrow the sensitivity needs to be up quite high in Windows 8. We constantly found ourselves accidentally swiping open the charms menu. But then, with this behemoth, the assumption is that you’ll probably have a mouse plugged in anyway. The GT80’s display is a 1080p matte-fi nish job (you can’t get higher-res laptop panels at this size yet) and it’s quite good for gaming, keeping refl ections to a minimum and delivering great contrast. Colours on our test unit were good — fairly neutral, with a very slight yellow/green cast. where does that leave us, on the whole? At $5,500 and over 5kg including charger, it has a narrow potential market (children of onepercenters?). It largely lives up to its on-paper potential, however, and MSI’s about to refresh this model with a 5th-gen Core i chip (the i7-5950), double the SSD storage and upgrading the DVD writer to a Blu-ray one. Those additions make for a much-more well-rounded offering, one we’d recommend waiting for.