MSI GT72S 6QF Dominator Pro G 29th Anniversary Edition
STREET PRICE$ 3542.00
PROS
Latest Intel Core i7 processor and Nvidia GeForce GTX graphics. Lots of connection options and room for upgrades. G-Sync displays smooth 3D graphics.CONS
Big and bulky. No touch screen.BOTTOM LINE
The MSI GT72S 6QF Dominator Pro G 29th Anniversary Edition gaming laptop improves 3D-animation speed and quality with the combo of a sixth-generation Intel Core i7 CPU and Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 graphics with G-Sync.
Some gaming laptops aim for hitting the highest frame rate, but animation and rendering quality are just as important. The MSI GT72S 6QF Dominator Pro G 29th Anniversary Edition cannot only play high-end games smoothly at full 1080p HD resolution, it adds Nvidia's G-Sync technology to help improve the quality of a game's animation.
And the big 17.3-inch screen puts those visuals front and center, glitch-free. This gaming laptop was one of the first to use Nvidia's G-Sync technology to improve graphics quality. The mantra "never use V-Sync" is a familiar one to hardcore gamers. V-Sync tries to limit the rendered frames to the native rate of the panel, but the panel and the GPU are never completely in sync.
V-Sync can therefore cause stuttering and slows down overall frame rates and game inputs. The problem is that when you disable V-Sync, the GPU sometimes gets ahead of what is being displayed on the screen. That results in tearing, the visual glitch you see when part of the frame (usually a horizontal band) doesn't match the rest of the screen.
It can make it look like the head of your character is floating three feet to the right of its body, for example. Tearing may only show for a split second, but that's enough to, say, make you turn left when you need to go straight in the game, or worse yet take you out of the gaming experience entirely.
G-Sync matches what's being displayed to what's actually being rendered by the GPU (an Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 in this case), giving you smooth, clear visuals, with much less glitching than before.
The MSI GT72S 6QF Dominator Pro G 29th Anniversary Edition certainly has the looks of a gaming laptop. Its black, aluminum chassis has red accents, including the MSI G series dragon logo on its lid. It's huge, measuring about 1.89 by 17 by 11.75 inches (HWD), and weighs about 3.85-kgs. The large, 17.3-inch, 1,920-by-1,080-resolution display is your window to the online and virtual worlds.
The screen has an anti-glare coating, yet still produces bright, vibrant colors, particularly when you boost the brightness to near maximum. The system doesn't have a touch screen. The SteelSeries, chiclet-style keyboard should appeal to gamers, since it has customized backlighting and anti-ghosting technology. The default rainbow backlight effect is certainly eye-catching, but you can change that to various solid colors with an included utility.
The new touchpad is flush with the rest of the palm rest. The truly flat surface of the touchpad is a lot easier to drag your finger across than the recessed lip around the ones on other gaming systems, like the Digital Storm Triton, the Maingear Pulse 15, and the MSI Ghost Pro 3K. A lit outline around the touchpad lets you easily find it in the dark.
The two physical mouse buttons below the touchpad are an improvement as well, since they are easier to find by touch in the heat of battle. Connectivity is excellent. A set of surround-sound audio jacks, a SD card reader, two USB 3.0 ports and two USB 3.1 ports are on the left side of the laptop. The USB 3.1 ports use Type-A jacks, so they're not compatible with USB-C devices without an adapter, but if you use them you'll have the potential to transfer data at 10Gbps.
A pair of mini DisplayPorts, an Ethernet jack, an HDMI port, and the Power jack are in the back. This means you can hook up three more external monitors to the MSI GT72S 6QF Dominator Pro G 29th Anniversary Edition. On the right, you'll find a BD-RE Blu-ray rewritable drive, along with two additional USB 3.0 ports. Both the wired gigabit Ethernet and the 802.11ac Wi-Fi feature Killer DoubleShot anti-lag technology.
The gaming laptop comes with 32GB of system memory. There's a 1TB hard drive for data storage and a 256GB M.2 solid-state drive for fast bootup and loading of your programs. The sixth-generation Intel Core i7-6820HK processor and Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 GPU work together well on the game grid. They helped the system produce smoothly playable frame rates of 54 frames per second (fps) on the Heaven test and 59fps on the Valley test, even when pushed to Ultra-quality settings at the display's native 1080p resolution.
The MSI GT72S 6QF Dominator Pro G 29th Anniversary Edition was also the winner among the midrange gaming laptops on the 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme test, with a score of 4,382 points. To beat the MSI GT72S 6QF Dominator Pro G 29th Anniversary Edition in this test, you'll need to shell out more money for a high-end gaming laptop.
The laptop's 3D animation quality is excellent. We viewed our 3D tests with G-Sync toggled on and off. Details like repeated horizontal and diagonal lines showed distracting shimmering with G-Sync off. For example, the ropes tying down ships looked smoother and more detailed in motion when G-Sync was enabled.
We can see it really making a difference in third-person games, where the camera may be over your character's shoulder. The improvement is much more evident when elements on the screen are moving at various speeds. Turning both G-Sync and V-Sync off introduces tearing that just can't be unseen after you realize what G-Sync can do.
The laptop's score of 3 hours 25 minutes on our battery rundown test was really good. You'll still need to carry the power supply for extended gaming sessions on the MSI system. In this case, it's not such a big deal, since the system is too bulky for all but the largest laps.
The MSI GT72S 6QF Dominator Pro G 29th Anniversary Edition is a midrange gaming laptop that performs like a high-end gaming laptop. While it does come with a lot of bloatware, and its C: drive is a little on the small side, you can't argue with its best-in-class 3D gaming performance and its gamer-friendly features, like the separate mouse buttons and G-Sync optimisations. With so much to offer, the MSI GT72S 6DF Pro G 29th Anniversary Edition wins PC Magazine's Editors' Choice award.
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