MSI GE60 2PE Apache Pro 15.6in gaming notebook

1. Introduction2. Unboxing3. The MSI GE60 2PE Apache Pro4. Testing Methodology and Configuration5. Sisoft Sandra6. PCmark087. Cinebench R158. Unigine Heaven9. Unigine Valley10. 3Dmark Vantage11. 3Dmark 1112. 3Dmark13. SSD and HDD performance14. USB 3.0 Bandwidth Testing15. BluRay Playback16. MKV conversion17. Video Encoding18. Titanfall19. League of Legends20. Bioshock Infinite21. Tomb Raider22. GRID II23. Temperature24. Battery Life25. Closing Thoughts26. View All Pages

Laptops are rarely given much credit when it comes to gaming ability, but the GE60 2PE Apache Pro from MSI has the potential to turn that idea on its head. Packing the ‘hot-off-the-shelf' Nvidia GTX 860M, an Intel i7 4700 HQ CPU with 12GB of  DDR3 and a 128GB SSD – the specs, on paper, are impressive.

Read on to see how well this new MSI laptop does when we put it through some intensive testing.

Specifications

• CPU: The 4th generation Intel® Core™ i7 Processor
• OS: Windows 8.1
• Chipset: Intel® HM87
• Memory:12GB x 2 DIMMs
• LCD Size: 15.6″ Full HD (1920×1080), Anti-glare
• Graphics: GeForce GTX 860M
• Graphics memory: VRAM GDDR5 2GB
• Storage: 128GB SSD, 1TB HDD
• Optical Drive: BD Combo / DVD Super Multi
• Audio: Sound by Dynaudio, 2x 2.1 channel speakers + subwoofer
• Webcam: HD type (30fps@720p)
• Card Reader: SD (XC/HC)
• LAN: Killer™ E2200 Game Networking LAN
• Wireless LAN: 802.11 b/g/ n
• Bluetooth: Bluetooth v4.0
• Keyboard: Keyboard by SteelSeries 103 keys
• AC Adapter: 120W
• Battery: 6-Cell Li-Ion (4400mAh 49Wh)
• Dimension: 383 x 249.5 x 37.6~32.3mm
• Weight: (KG) 2.6Kg (w/ Battery)
• Warranty: 2 years

Ports

• D-Sub: (VGA)
• HDMI
• 2x USB 2.0
• 2x USB 3.0
• Mic-in/Headphone-out

The packaging for the GE60 2PE leaves no doubt in your mind, this is a piece of gamer gear. It features the red MSI dragon on a stark black background, with some of the main features listed on the front and back.

Inside, everything is neatly compartmentalised so that your documentation is kept separate from the cables and likewise from the laptop itself.

 
The power cable comes in the typical two part design, though the transformer block is very large, measuring six inches in length and three wide. It's not cumbersome, but it is noticeably bigger.

In terms of companion booklets, you get a quick set up guide, a driver CD (which you may need, as the drivers for the GPU aren't publicly available at the time of writing), a system reset guide, a Windows 8 quick usage guide and a warranty card.

To keep everything protected during transit, the laptop comes wrapped in a canvas bag with an MSI logo and has a thin sheet of canvas fitted between the screen and the body for added protection.

The GE60 2PE is an attractive laptop, with a black aluminium casing that features some minor contours and a central MSI G Series dragon logo to break up the black expanse. The only other bit of colour is the red band that runs all the way around the outside.

Along the sides are the major ports, air vents and the optical drive. Connectors include a single USB 2.0, HDMI, 2 x USB 3.0 and a headphone and mic jack on one side, and a USB 2.0, VGA and ethernet ports on the other. The Blu Ray drive sits almost completely flush with the frame, with only the indented open/close button really breaking rank.

The display connectors can all actually be utilised at once too, thanks to MSI's Matrix Display, which lets you output to two external monitors at once, allowing for a triple monitor multi-tasking experience.

The underside is a matt black, textured plastic.

The grills on the underside are located in specific places to help aid cooling and there's also a pair on the front lip of the notebook for the speakers to pump out the audio. Speaking of which, they were made by MSI in conjunction with Dynaudio over a long period of time and produce a nice sound. It's no 2.1 set up of external speakers, but you wouldn't expect it to be. It's got good volume however and the audio is pretty crisp at the top end. Bass is still a little lacking, but they do a good job overall. 

The battery is rather small, rated at 4,400 mAh. We therefore don't expect this laptop to have the greatest battery life.

With the lid open you get a first impression of the screen, with its nice anti-glare coating to keep down reflections to a minimum. We found it worked well, a well thought of feature for those that might like to game in a well lit room.

The screen folds back easily enough but it takes a little bit of force to do so, which should mean that it won't get knocked about too much by minor vibrations – something that can get very irritating if a flight or train decides it's going to shake around more than usual.

While I found the touchpad sensitive from the get go, it did seem a little flimsy. I'm not sure if it's because this is a review unit so others may not have treated it so well, but the touchpad actually felt a little loose, like the plate was moving around on the hardware behind it.

You'll notice too, there's no dedicated buttons for left and right click – or at least, they aren't obvious. They are there, you just have to press where they're supposed to be.

The bezel surrounding the screen is the same plastic as the underside, whereas the main body is made up of brushed aluminium. It's nice to look at, but does have the unfortunate downside of leaving awful fingerprints whenever you touch it. They do fade away, but over time I can see this becoming very messy.

In the top left, you'll notice a pair of buttons that let you cycle through backlighting options on the fly, including cross-fading from one colour to another and changing from multiple colours to one dominant colour. This can also be adjusted via the Steelseries Engine software, to give you more in-depth control of the colour options.

The button next to it customises the volume and power of the built in cooling, letting you up the ante if you feel the need, or scale if back if you think the internal fan is getting a bit too rambunctious.

On the function keys, you'll notice a few different options than your standard media commands, including the ability to enable MSI Eco boost which is designed to improve battery life, switch into airplane mode, change to an external display and disable or re-enable the touchpad.

The keys are laser etched. There's also a slight concave dip to them which makes typing quite pleasurable. We wouldn't rate it as highly as some of the best Lenovo ThinkPad designs however.

There's no left hand windows key, which gamers will likely find pleasing – nothing worse than hitting that key while you're in the middle of session – though it does eliminate the ability to one-hand a lot of windows key functions.

At the front, just ahead of the touchpad, are the indicator LEDs, which give you an idea of system power, whether it's charging or not and when the SSD/HDD is being accessed. They all work fine and wouldn't be worth noting, if not for the fact that when this laptop is in sleep mode, the indicator flashes intermittently non-stop until you take it out of sleep mode.

I appreciate it's trying to get you to shut it down, but a solid, less bright LED would have been preferable to an irritating blinking one.

When powered up, the Apache Pro is a nice looking piece of kit. It's smart, but has a slight gamer feel to it, which might be preferable for those that don't want something festooned with stickers and LEDs.

The screen is very capable and movies look gorgeous at 1080p, though with the matt finish you do miss out on some of the most extreme contrast differences. Audio is also pretty good, though as usual with laptop speaker systems, it does lack a lot when it comes to low end frequencies.

That said, the internal soundcard is pretty solid, so if you plug a decent pair of headphones in, you'll be more than happy about what's on offer.

 

The keyboard for this laptop has some colour gradient LED backlighting, going from red, through purple and blue at default, though through the pre-loaded Steelseries software you can adjust the lighting to your personal preference.

  

The first check we run on a new test system, especially on branded laptops, is what sort of bloatware installs have made pre-purchase. In this case there aren't too many, though you might have spotted the inclusion of Norton Internet Security. Unfortunately that, along with MSI's registration reminders, loved to pop up during testing.

While they never interrupted a benchmark, they did irritatingly cover buttons sometimes and regularly annoyed us. If this was our machine we would de-install the offending software and clean the registry.

 

Looking at the CPUZ readings, we can see that this laptop comes with the i7 4700HQ chip. While hardly the most contemporary CPU out there, it's certainly powerful and can be boosted from its stock 2.4GHz all the way up to 3.4GHz and packs 6MB of level 3 cache. However here you see it running at a lower clock speed to reduce power consumption when high performance isn't necessary.

This is twinned with 12GB of DDR3 running in dual channel.

 

The GPU however is the really exciting part of this build, as it's brand new.

The 860M has 640 built in shaders, with a good core clock and comes with 2GB of GDDR5 running through a 128bit channel. This is a capable GPU, so it'll be interesting to see how it handles our gaming benchmarks.

It's paired up with an Intel HD 4600 for low powered scenarios.

Software:
3DMark Vantage
3DMark
3DMark 11
PCMark 8
Cinebench R15
FRAPS Professional
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
Unigine Valley
SiSoft Sandra
CrystalDiskMark
ATTO Disk Benchmark
Cyberlink PowerDVD 10
Cyberlink MediaEspresso
GRID 2
Tomb Raider (2013)
Titanfall
League of Legends
Bioshock Infinite

Technical Monitoring and Test Equipment:
Kingston HyperX 3.0 64GB USB 3.0 drive
Canon 300D camera

Some game descriptions are taken with courtesy from Wikipedia.

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.

Sandra is a (girl’s) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)
• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)
• Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)
• Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)
• Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

• SMP – Multi-Processor
• MC – Multi-Core
• SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading
• MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions
• GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics
• NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access
• AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86
• IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

The performance of the 4700HQ is excellent. Memory performance is pretty strong too and sits about where you'd expect for a dual channel laptop solution.

PCMark 8 is the latest version in our popular series of PC benchmarking tools. Improving on previous releases, PCMark 8 includes battery life measurement tools and new tests using popular applications from Adobe and Microsoft. Whether you are looking for long battery life, or maximum power, PCMark 8 helps you find the devices that offer the perfect combination of efficiency and performance for your needs.

The scores here aren't going to break any world records, but they're high enough to let us know that there's not many office or domestic tasks that this laptop won't be able to handle.

CINEBENCH R11.5 64 Bit is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer’s performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON’s award-winning animation software CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Spider-Man, Star Wars, The Chronicles of Narnia and many more.

CINEBENCH is the perfect tool to compare CPU and graphics performance across various systems and platforms (Windows and Mac OS X). And best of all: It’s completely free.

The 4700HQ is a capable processor for light to medium duty rendering tasks, on the move.

Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand.

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk.

Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:

• Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render
• Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux
• Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
• Multicore CPU support
• Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
• Powerful C++ API
• Comprehensive performance profiling system
• Flexible XML-based data structures

Considering how strenuous the Heaven benchmark from Unigine can be, this was a pretty impressive result. Chances are if we cranked Tessellation up it would struggle, but for a laptop, this is a lot more FPS than you'd usually see.

Valley Benchmark is a new GPU stress-testing tool from the developers of the very popular and highly acclaimed Heaven Benchmark.

The forest-covered valley surrounded by vast mountains amazes with its scale from a bird’s-eye view and is extremely detailed down to every leaf and flower petal.

This non-synthetic benchmark powered by the state-of-the art UNIGINE Engine showcases a comprehensive set of cutting-edge graphics technologies with a dynamic environment and fully interactive modes available to the end user.

Valley is similarly tough on hardware, especially mobile chips, but the 860M performed perfectly in this situation, delivering sold frame rates throughout.

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.

Stock performance settings were used.

The MSI GE60 performs well in this older Direct X 10 benchmark, scoring almost 20,000 points overall.

3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista the benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.

After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page.

Stock performance settings were used.

A strong score in 3Dmark11, showing that old and new titles should perform well on the MSI GE60.

3DMark is an essential tool used by millions of gamers, hundreds of hardware review sites and many of the world’s leading manufacturers to measure PC gaming performance.

Futuremark say “Use it to test your PC’s limits and measure the impact of overclocking and tweaking your system. Search our massive results database and see how your PC compares or just admire the graphics and wonder why all PC games don’t look this good.

To get more out of your PC, put 3DMark in your PC.”

Stock performance settings were used.

Some impressive performance there, showing what a powerhouse this CPU / GPU combo can be.

The GE60 2PE uses a single 120GB SSD for its main boot drive, and a secondary 1TB storage HDD.

The SSD does alright in CrystalDisk Mark, though its performance is hardly mind blowing, particular its write speed which is disappointing. The HDD is a decent performance drive.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

 

ATTO produces very similar results, though as usual it is a little more flattering to the components.

We test the USB 3.0 performance on the MSI system with one of our portable flash drives – the Kingston HyperX 3.0 portable drive.

Slightly lower than expected write speed, but overall high enough performance that you shouldn't notice much of a drop off.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

Very similar results here, with good consistency across different file sizes.

While we'd normally make use of our favourite Blu-Ray software, Cyberlink PowerDVD 13 Ultra, since this laptop comes pre-equipped with a copy of PowerDVD 10, we decided to test CPU usageit on that instead.

The BluRay Disc of choice this time around, was Batman: The Dark Knight.

It doesn't like print screen. Imagine there's some ass kicking going on in the background.

Very low result there, which shows multitasking during a full 1080p movie would be a piece of cake.

The Matroska Media container is a very popular, open standard Multimedia container which is usually found as .MKV files. It is a very popular format in enthusiast circles and can be played directly in Windows Media Player with suitable codecs installed. We use the Combined Community Codec Pack (CCCP).

We ripped our BluRay disc of Batman: Dark Knight to 1080P MKV and used Windows Media Player to play back the file.

No problems coping with this test, with plenty of CPU cycles left over for multitasking.

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats.

Now you can easily playback and display your favourite movies, songs and photos not just on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology.

New and Improved Features

• Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously.
• Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention.
• Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices.
• Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment.
• Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A.
• Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier.

For this test, a 3.8GB MKV file was converted to a much larger MP4 file. The time it took to complete this task was noted down. Hardware acceleration was turned on.

This is one of the best times we've ever seen for a laptop, even beating out some desktop chips. Even though it makes use of the aging source engine with a few tweaks here and there, Titanfall is still a good looking game in the right circumstances and since it's such a popular recent release, we would be remiss if we didn't make sure that anyone buying this MSI laptop can play it at full tilt.

All settings were set to their highest possible, at a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels, with 4x AA.

Since Titanfall has no built in benchmark, we played several rounds of different game modes, using FRAPS to take averages of the frame rate throughout.

Very impressive frame rates for Titanfall considering this is with every aesthetic tweak you could make turned up to maximum. The frame rate might even have ended up higher if it wasn't capped at the frame rate of the display.

While League Of Legends is far from a strenuous game even for mid-range hardware, it's the most popular hardcore gaming experience in the world right now, so it's worth making sure anything stylising itself as a gaming PC/laptop can play it.

Even though it's more of a formality than a difficult test for the Apache Pro, everything was set to maximum and the resolution at native 1080p.

Since LoL has no built in benchmark, results were gleaned by playing several 5vs5 matchups on the Howling Abyss, since that features the most regular teamfights and GPU stressing effects.

Not a problem, as expected. It's good to see LoL gamers won't be disappointed with this laptop.

When released, Bioshock Infinite was considered one of the best looking games ever created, with believable character models, advanced facial expressions and a stunningly lifelike world to explore. It's aging pretty well, albeit with a lot of bloom and can still give new hardware a thorough thrashing if it's not prepared for it.

With that in mind, we set everything to run at UltraDX11, with a resolution of 1080p.

While for the most part the 860M handled Bioshock Infinite pretty well, busy scenes like the raffle caused it to chug to well sub 30FPS. Of course this is at absolute maximum settings, so this is still a damn good run.
After a delayed release from late 2012 to March 2013, the game received much anticipation and hype. Tomb Raider received much acclaim from critics, who praised the graphics, the gameplay and Camilla Luddington’s performance as Lara with many critics agreeing that the game is a solid and much needed reboot of the franchise. Much criticism went to the addition of the multiplayer which many felt was unnecessary. Tomb Raider went on to sell one million copies in forty-eight hours of its release, and has sold 3.4 million copies worldwide so far.

Tomb Raider has some fancy graphical effects, including some of the best hair in gaming, so we pushed it right to the limit with everything set to ultra and a resolution of 1080p.

You'll probably want to run this one just shy of full tilt, unless you want the occasional stutter, but this is a very good looking game and the MSI-GE60 did well considering.

Grid 2 is the sequel to the racing video game Race Driver: Grid.  It was developed and published by Codemasters. The game includes numerous real world locations such as Paris, numerous United States locations, and many more, and also includes motor vehicles spanning four decades. In addition, it includes a new handling system that developer Codemasters has dubbed ‘TrueFeel’, which aims to hit a sweet spot between realism and accessibility.

Since this is a pretty capable laptop, all settings were turned to their highest, at 1080p.

Not a problem here. The benchmark ran flawlessly at maximum settings and looked very pretty too.

The tests were performed in a controlled air conditioned room with temperatures maintained at a constant 20C.

Idle temperatures were measured after sitting at the desktop for 30 minutes. Load measurements were acquired by running Furmark and Cinebench together. Room ambient temperatures were 20C.

It's worth noting that while these results aren't going to melt the casing, this laptop does get pretty warm to the touch during hefty gaming sessions. We'd recommend placing it on a desk or at least playing with something covering your lap.

To test battery life we put the machine through a variety of ‘real world’ situations, mirroring the usage of a potential customer.

One as a media movie lover on the move (wearing headphones), a person wanting to watch high definition media on a train journey or bus with screen brightness two notches from maximum.

Second as a businessman, with screen brightness around half way. Wireless was enabled. A mixture of checking, answering emails using Microsoft Office and procrastinating with the odd Youtube video.

Lastly as a gamer, playing Titanfall until the machine turned itself off.

Beyond our usual testing, we also repeated the tests with MSI's “Eco Mode” enabled for each of our specific “users”. That way we can see if the feature has much of an effect.

Eco Mode seems to make no difference to any of our scenarios and battery life overall is not impressive on this laptop. Granted as a high-end gamer system you wouldn't expect it to be, but it's a shame that you can't even watch a two hour movie in one sitting.

The MSI GE60 2PE Apache Pro 15.6in gaming notebook is an impressive piece of kit. Despite being light and mobile, it's able to play some of the most graphically intense games out there and generate playable frame rates with settings absolutely maxed out.

It isn't going to break 3Dmark world records, but the combination of a Core i7 and Nvidia G860M makes this a very capable gaming notebook that was able to pass all our gaming tests with ease.

MSI have bundled a small 4,400 mAh battery which limits life on the move. When in full gaming mode, the system shuts down in around an hour. A power cable and plug socket will be a necessity for any kind of serious gaming session.

Thanks to the 12GB of RAM and solid state drive, general operation and boot times are incredibly fast. The GE60 2PE Apache Pro is bundled with Windows 8 which may prove unpopular with a specific audience.

We feel the Apache Pro should have shipped with a larger 256GB Solid State Drive. With the 128GB SSD, Titanfall devours 50% of the drive in one fell swoop. There is plenty of storage space thanks to the inclusion of a 1TB mechanical drive – but the performance is distinctly average, averaging around 120-130MB/s.

I enjoyed typing on this laptop –  the Steelseries keys offer tactile feedback under gaming situations and the backlighting was a nice touch, though I didn't enjoy using the touchpad. Quite soon after testing began I found myself yearning for a mouse due to the weird touchpad experience … it was almost as if the touchplate was moving around on the hardware behind it.

We appreciate the additional of the KillerNIC network adapter. This should be great for heavy MMO players or very ping specific titles, as there are many adjustment options available. Our pings during testing rarely breached 80ms.

The audio capabilities of the laptop are fantastic thanks to its Dynaudio speakers, with plenty of volume and a nice, crisp (albeit bass lacking) sound, though we would advise the use of dedicated speakers or headphones to get the most from the laptop.

The overall feel of the GE60's body is reasonable, with the screen hinge requiring a decent amount of force to open and close. The brushed aluminium top coat looks great from a distance. Sadly it attracts fingerprints easily and we had to clean it with a cloth on a regular basis to keep it looking pristine.

The screen's matt finish is fantastic and it means the laptop can be used in a variety of bright (and dark) environments and with Matrix display, you can branch out to give yourself multi-monitor control for business multi-tasking, or added information while gaming.

The MSI GE60 2PE Apache Pro 15.6in will set you back £1200 at retailers such as Overclockers. If you can make do with 8GB of memory and no Solid State drive, then you can save a further £200.

MSI also informed us that for the time being, this laptop will come with a free copy of Titanfall, a free headset or a free notebook rucksack. Claim them here.

Pros

• Very powerful CPU/GPU combination for gaming.
• Quality matt screen is great for use in bright environments.
• Fast RAM and SSD make for snappy system.
• Steelseries keyboard with impressive backlighting.
• Good selection of ports and accessories, built in BluRay drive.

Cons

• Materials used for some parts feel flimsy.
• Loose touchpad.
• Fans get quite noisy when playing high end games.
• Battery life is poor, even when not doing anything strenuous.
• Fingerprints and dust show up very easily.
• SSD is quite small.

KitGuru Says: While we'd certainly like to see a larger SSD and more powerful battery in this one, the MSI GE60 2PE is still an incredibly powerful laptop for a not-astronomical price. If you're a gamer on the move and you have a plug handy, this one will not let you down. 

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