MSI GS70 2OD-Stealth 17.3 inch Laptop Review

1. Introduction2. MSI GS70 2OD-Stealth (Packing & Accessories)3. MSI GS70 2OD-Stealth4. MSI GS70 2OD-Stealth (Super High Res Gallery)5. Testing Methodology & Configuration6. SiSoft Sandra7. PCMark 88. Cinebench R11.5 64 bit9. Unigine Heaven Benchmark10. Unigine Valley Benchmark11. 3DMark Vantage12. 3DMark 1113. 3DMark14. SSD & HDD Performance15. USB 3.0 Bandwidth Testing16. BluRay Playback17. MKV 1080p Playback Performance18. Video Encoding19. Alien V Predator20. Total War: ROME 221. Dirt ShowDown22. Tomb Raider23. GRID 224. Thermal Dynamics25. Acoustics Performance26. Battery Life27. Closing Thoughts28. View All Pages

Today we look at one of the thinnest gaming laptops available on the market. The MSI GS70 Stealth is an aluminum design only 2.2cm thick and weighing less than 2.6kg. Inside is an Intel Core i7 4700HQ, 16GB of DDR3 memory, two 128GB Solid State Drives in RAID and a 750GB HDD for storage. The Nvidia GTX765M handles the graphics. Is this the ultimate gaming laptop under two grand?

MSI GS70 2OD-Stealth Specification:

• Screen Size: 17.3″
• Screen Type: LCD
• Backlight: LED
• Screen Resolution: 1920×1080
• Aspect Ratio: 16:9
• Screen Features: Full HD
• Processor Type: Intel Core i7 4700HQ
• Processor Cores: 4 (8 Threads)
• Processor Clock Speed: 2.40GHz (3.40GHz Turbo Mode)
• Hard Drive Supplied: 1 x 750GB
• Hard Drive Size: 750GB
• Solid State Drive: 128GB SSD x2 (RAID 0)
• Hard Drive Interface: Serial ATA-600
• Hard Drive Speed: 7200RPM
• Memory Supplied: 2x 8GB
• Memory Size: 16GB
• Memory Type: DDR3
• Memory Speed: 1600
• Memory Socket: 2 x SO-DIMM
• Max. Memory Support: 32GB
• Operating System: Windows 8
• Graphics Chipset:    NVIDIA GeForce GTX 765M
• Graphics Memory: 2GB GDDR 5
• Chipset: Intel HM87 Express
• Audio: Sound by Dynaudio
• Speaker(s): 2 x Speakers
• Subwoofer: 1 subwoofer
• Microphone: Built-in
• LAN Card: Killer E2200 LAN
• LAN Speed: 10/100/1000
• Wireless NIC: Killer N1202 Combo (2*2, a/b/g/n)
• Bluetooth: v4.0
• USB 3.0 Port(s): 4
• HDMI Port(s): 1
• Mini Display Port(s): 2
• Microphone Jack(s): 1
• Headphone Jack(s): 1
• Line In Jack(s): 1
• Line Out Jack(s): 1
• LAN Port(s): 1
• Battery Life: 4hrs
• Card Reader: SDXC/HC
• Web Camera: HD type ( 30fps@720p)
• Only 22m thick
• Product Weight (g): 2.6Kg (w/Battery)
• Supplied with FREE Protective carry case
• Warranty: 2 Years

The system arrives in a plain brown box with just the MSI badge visible.

Inside, the MSI box itself – very dramatic with a red dragon highlighted on the black surface.

MSI bundle a protective carrying case with the laptop, which is certainly a welcome addition – especially for lan gamers who will be carrying this around with them on a regular basis.


The bundle includes literature on the product, along with a software disc and power adapter with regional plug. The power brick is substantial, but not the biggest we have seen in recent years. It will work worldwide and it rated 19.5V 6.15A.

The laptop is protected inside a black bag, and inside this is another white protective cover – all with matching MSI logos.


The MSI GS70 2OD-Stealth is a very thin laptop from front to back, and the chassis reminded me a little of the excellent Apple 17 inch MacBook Pro, which was recently discontinued.

It has elegant lines and uniform width – being constructed carefully from aluminum. It measures 41.8 x 28.6 x 2.1cm.

The finish is first class and the svelte appearance is immediately endearing. MSI pay homage to the aviation industry with this model, naming it after the F22 Raptor Stealth Fighter. This is an elegant, streamlined design and appealed to me right out of the box. The white dragon in the logo lights up when the machine is powered on, ready for use.

There are certainly no shortage of ports on the GS70. Along one side we have two USB 3.0 ports, a card reader, power adapter connector and security connector. The other side has a GB lan connector, HDMI port, two mini DisplayPorts, and two more USB 3.0 ports. At the front is a headphone, speaker and microphone connector. Two large vents are visible at the back of both sides of the GS70.


The battery is built into the GS70 and is rated 58.8Wh, 5300mAh. We test battery life later in the review. There are small vents all over the chassis to help improve airflow. Interestingly, the back of the underside has a felt covering – to help with grip and comfort.


The MSI GS70 is an attractive laptop from all angles and maintains its slim profile right to the very back. The keyboard is by Steelseries and is certainly head and shoulders above every other we have tested in recent years, although my favourite is still the Lenovo ThinkPad keyboard.

This keyboard is backlit and looks great from an angled viewpoint as shown above. The 17.3 inch 1080p display is reasonably capable, but not class leading. Colours are bright and dynamic range is good even factoring in the anti glare matt finish. The panel is able to resolve a decent level of detail from small text and you can pinpoint fine details in high resolution images viewed in Photoshop. There is also minimal artifacting and screen lag when gaming – ideal for such a machine – I had no problems playing a handful of Direct X 11 titles. This is pretty much as good as it gets.

The multicoloured backlighting is controllable with the KLM utility. The software lets the end user tweak from over 1,000 colours and five effects (Normal, Gaming, Dual Color, Breathing, Wave).

1080p bluray movies look stunning on this screen, although the matte finish does have a slightly negative impact on high contrast scenes – a necessary tradeoff however. Viewing angles are average.

Above the middle of the keyboard is the power button which glows when the machine is on and in standby. Close by is the speaker system. Onboard audio is no better than average – slightly hollow with limited impact. The volume level is decent, but you will want to partner this machine up with good headphones or speakers to get the most from the experience.

The trackpad is large and the buttons are registered along the bottom, both left and right. The appearance is attractive and as far as trackpads go, this is excellent. I still wouldn't want to be using it in all but the most confined situations however as I have a particular aversion against trackpads.

The hinges on the laptop are very good and the screen takes a little force to move. This also means it won't shake uncontrollably with a minor vibration – ideal for gamers who play in less than ideal situations.

The last time we reviewed an MSI laptop they were using a painfully slow 5,400 rpm 2.5 inch hard drive. Not surprisingly this destroyed the review score for us. Thankfully this time around MSI have gotten it right – they are using two mSATA drives in RAID 0 – paired up with a large 750GB 7,200 rpm mechanical drive for storage duties. We check out drive performance shortly.
On this page we present some super high resolution images of the product taken with the 24.5MP Nikon D3X camera and 24-70mm ED lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source.













Always worth running a new system through the Windows Experience Index, although it doesn't really go into much detail. Still, initial reports indicate very strong overall performance, limited by the graphics to 6.9.

Not the cleanest install, with a lot of third party software installed – such as the bloated Norton Internet Security … nagging immediately for a payment. Urgh. Not the worst install we have seen, but a lot of this software could have been omitted for a cleaner initial starting point.

The worst aspect of this install was PC Checkup. This program would pop up stupid alerts bottom right of the screen.

For instance?

When we were running CrystalDiskMark on the internal hard drive it popped up with an alert saying that an application was utilising a lot of hard drive time. CrystalDiskMark then crashed mid test and it would not let me cancel the test. I attempted a restart and the GS70 hardlocked. Exactly the same situation as the GE40 which we reviewed way back in June this year. This needs to change.


An overview of the hardware inside the GS70. The Core i7 4700HQ is a powerful processor – a quad core processor with hyperthreading (4+4), it runs at 2.4ghz and can turbo up to 3.4ghz. It has 6MB of cache. This system has 16GB of DDR3 memory installed in a dual channel configuration. Regular readers will remember that the MSI GE40 Dragon Eyes which we reviewed in June only shipped with a single 8GB SO-DIMM which dropped overall performance.

The System has Intel HD4600 graphics, and a discrete Nvidia GTX765M solution to handle more intensive duties. This solution runs at 800mhz and the memory runs at 1000mhz (4Gbps effective). It has 16 ROPS 64 TMU's and 768 CUDA Cores. The 2GB of GDDR5 memory is connected via a 128 bit memory interface.

You can get validation of the system over here.

Comparison Systems (for specific synthetic test compares):
MSI GE40-20C Dragon Eyes (Intel Core i7 4702MQ)
PCSpecialist Inferno 11.6 inch (Intel Core i7 3630QM)
MSI GX60 (AMD A10 4600M)
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (featuring Core i5 3427U)
Lenovo ThinkPad Edge S430 (featuring Core i5 3210M)
PC Specialist Vortex III HD72 (featuring Core i7 3610QM).
Asus G74SX-91013Z (featuring Core i7 2360QM).
Dell XPS 14z (featuring Core i7 2640M).
AlienWare M18X (featuring Core i7 2960XM Extreme Edition).
MSI CX640 (featuring Core i5 2410M).
Intel Core i7 2600k desktop processor.
Intel Core i5 2500k desktop processor.

Software:
3DMark Vantage
3DMark
3DMark 11
PCMark 7
Cinebench 11.5 64 bit
FRAPS Professional
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
Unigine Valley
SiSoft Sandra
CrystalDiskMark
ATTO Disk Benchmark
Cyberlink PowerDVD Ultra 12
Cyberlink MediaEspresso
GRID 2
Alien V Predator
Tomb Raider (2013)
Total War ROME 2
Dirt Showdown
Splinter Cell: Blacklist

Technical Monitoring and Test Equipment:
Asus USB BluRay Drive
Lacie 730 Monitor (Image Quality testing)
Thermal Diodes
Raytek Laser Temp Gun 3i LSRC/MT4 Mini Temp
Extech digital sound level meter & SkyTronic DSL 2 Digital Sound Level Meter
Nikon D3X with R1C1 Kit (4 flashes), Nikon 24-70MM lens.

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 i7 4700HQ is exceptional, commanding the top of our performance chart, by a clear margin over the 3630QM. Memory bandwidth falls in line with what we would expect from a dual channel mobile 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 overall scores are very impressive, indicating a well balanced configuration.
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 mobile powerhouse, no doubt about that now. A score of 6.87 is actually higher than AMD's desktop FX8350 @ 4.0ghz (6.65 score).

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

We configured Unigine Heaven to use the settings above at the native resolution of 1080p.


Quite a good score, although the system did struggle to maintain smooth frame rates, dropping below 10 fps several times.

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.

We configured the benchmark to use the settings above, at 1080p.


The system averages just below 31 frames per second in this benchmark. Most of the time the engine runs smoothly, but a lower resolution would help improve these frame rates a little.

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.


A good overall score in 3DMark Vantage, highlighting the incredible performance of the mobile i7 4700HQ.

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.


Again we can see the performance of the Core i7 4770HQ processor shining through – a Physics score of 7556 is excellent.

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.”


Another exceptionally strong physics score, just below 9,000 points – this is easily high performance desktop territory for Intel. Overall score is brought down by the graphics performance, but still a very good result for a laptop.

The GS70 Stealth uses a RAID 0 configuration of mSATA drives, and a 750GB mechanical drive for storage duties.

The two 1.8 inch Solid State Drives score very well in Raid, around 1000MB/s in the sequential read test in CrystalDiskMark. There is a slight write improvement when enabling the 0x00 mode which deals with compressible data.

The 750GB hard drive isn't in the same performance category, but for a mechanical 2.5 inch drive these results are as good as you are likely to see.

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.

The rates in this benchmark are higher than CrystalDiskMark. The Raid 0 SSD's score around 1000MB/s read and peak at 980 MB/s write. The 750GB HDD scores around 120 MB/s in both the read and write tests.

We test the USB 3.0 performance on the MSI system with one of our fastest portable flash drives – the Patriot SuperSonic Magnum 256GB. We reviewed this back in February, check it out over here.

Performance via the USB 3.0 controller is very strong, peaking at over 316 MB/s in the read test. We couldn't get the final test to complete as the software would conflict with Norton's PC Checkup – which we mentioned earlier in the review.

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.

The ATTO DiskBenchmark scores the drive slightly lower, as shown above – peaks around 270 MB/s read and around 60 MB/s write.
Our good friends at Cyberlink kindly supplied the software for our BluRay and conversion tests.

Cyberlink PowerDVD 13 Ultra is one of the finest solutions for the BluRay experience on Windows and we found this software to work perfectly with this chipset.

We tested with The BluRay Disc of The Hobbit: An UnExpected Journey.

We could easily watch a bluray disc and handle other tasks in the background. Only around 10 percent CPU demand for the 1080p playback.

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 AVATAR to 1080P MKV and use Windows Media Player to playback the file.

No problems handling intensive 1080p MKV files. Plenty of CPU cycles free 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 our testing today we are converting a 4.4GB 720p MKV file (1h:58mins) to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device. This is a common procedure for many people and will give a good indication of system power. Hardware acceleration is enabled.


The video encoding task was completed in 9 minutes and 32 seconds, which is one of the fastest results ever from a mobile system. The fastest desktop systems have completed this encode in around 7 minutes. The slowest ATOM powered laptops take around 1 hour and 15 minutes for the same task.
Aliens V Predator has proved to be a big seller since the release and Sega have taken the franchise into new territory after taking it from Sierra. AVP is a Direct X 11 supported title and delivers not only advanced shadow rendering but high quality tessellation for the cards on test today.

To test the cards we used a 1920×1080 resolution with DX11, Texture Quality Very High, MSAA Samples 1, 16 af, ambient occulsion on, shadow complexity high, motion blur on.

Performance at 1920×1080 is borderline. Generally the game is playable but there are some intensive sections of gameplay that drop the frame rate below the sweet spot of 25.
Total War ROME 2 is the eighth stand alone game in the Total War series, it is the successor to the successful Rome: Total War title. The Warscape Engine powers the visuals of the game and the new unit cameras will allow players to focus on individual soldiers on the battlefield, which in itself may contain thousands of combatants at a time. Creative Assembly has stated that they wish to bring out the more human side of war this way, with soldiers reacting with horror as their comrades get killed around them and officers inspiring their men with heroic speeches before siege towers hit the walls of the enemy city. This will be realised using facial animations for individual units, adding a feel of horror and realism to the battles.

We selected 1080p resolution with ‘very high' image quality settings.

Performance is generally acceptable, but again a few sections of the environment which drag the frame rate below 25, causing some stuttering.
Dirt Showdown is the latest title in the franchise from Codemasters, based around the famous Colin McRae racing game series, although it no longer uses his name, since he passed away in 2007.

We selected the medium preset at 1920×1080 with 2x MSAA. Higher settings than this at the native panel resolution were unplayable.

At these settings the game is super smooth – higher anti aliasing settings would have a rather negative impact on the frame rate.
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.

We selected 1080p with the Ultra profile , as shown above. The screenshots above show the Intel HD4600 graphics, but when the game fired up the Nvidia GTX765M took over.

At these settings, the game averages 32 frames per second, maintaining a >25fps rate at all times. Good results and it looks great too.
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.

We test at 1080p with 2 MSAA and the high preset – all shown in the screenshots above.

Frame rates are super smooth, and the Anti aliasing could be increased a little further before dropping below 30. Some gamers like a solid 60FPS with their racing games and we got close with these settings.
The tests were performed in a controlled air conditioned room with temperatures maintained at a constant 24c – a comfortable environment for the majority of people reading this.

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 23c.

The cooling system inside has to work quite hard to maintain a stable thermal curve, especially under load.

We attached five diodes to the back of the chassis and measured the temperature (Celcius) after one hour of intensive work and gaming.

The underside of this chassis does get hot while under load and playing games. Two fans draw in cool air via intakes. We would recommend one of these protective cooling mats if you want to use it on your lap regularly.

We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with almost completely passive cooling and it means we can measure noise of just the graphics card inside the system when we run looped 3DMark tests.

We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the closed chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation. Ambient noise in the room measures close to the limits of our sound meter at 28dBa.

Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the video card. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635.

KitGuru noise guide

10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refrigerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum

The system is reasonably quiet, even when loaded. Of course you will hear the fans working hard, but MSI do deserve some credit as this system never creates a huge racket, even when gaming.

To test today, we are putting the machine through a variety of ‘real world’ situations, mirroring the real world 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 editing pictures in Adobe Photoshop.

Lastly as a gamer, playing Half Life 2 until the machine turned itself off.

Battery life is strong, especially with Intel HD4600 graphics enabled. We managed to get close to 5 hours under ‘general' working conditions. When gaming this dropped to just under 2 and a half hours which is reasonable.

The MSI GS70 2OD-Stealth is one of the most impressive laptops that we have tested in 2013. It can handle a myriad of tasks without a hitch, including gaming, heavy duty 3D rendering and video encoding.

Initial impressions are certainly positive. The design is going to appeal to a wide audience of people who hate lugging around a thick heavy 17 inch laptop. As we mentioned earlier in the review, the uniform front to back super thin chassis puts us in mind of the now-discontinued 17 inch MacBook Pro, which we loved.

In regards to MSI GS70 Stealth performance, we were exceptionally impressed with the processing capabilities. The powerful Intel Core i7 4700HQ processor is right at the top of the mobile performance chart and the score in Cinebench R11.5 is actually higher than the reference clocked 8 core AMD FX8350 desktop processor. This is remarkable and showcases current generation Haswell performance.

One of our main sticking points with the MSI GE40-2OC Dragon Eyes laptop that we reviewed back in June was the painfully slow 5,400 rpm mechanical hard drive. Thankfully MSI have adopted two mSATA drives in the GS70 Stealth, and configured them in RAID 0. This means the GS70 Stealth boots to a workable state in around 8 seconds and our testing highlighted sequential read performance around 1000 MB/s. In the real world you are never waiting for this machine to save a file, or load a program. Adobe Photoshop CS6 for instance was ready to use in around 2 seconds.

Gaming performance is also commendable, The Nvidia GTX765M is able to power many of the latest Direct X 11 games at the native panel resolution of 1920×1080. That said, if you want to maximise the settings and use high levels of anti aliasing then it might run out of steam with more demanding titles. This is why Nvidia sell the GTX770m and GTX780m however.

Noise levels are maintained well and the machine is audible but never that intrusive – negatively it does get hot under gaming load so good air circulation is a must. On a positive note, it didn't thermally throttle during our tests.

The screen is quite good, and the Steelseries keyboard is one of the best we have used to date, although not quite as good as the one adopted in the Lenovo ThinkPad range.

If you are in the market for a well designed high grade gaming laptop then the MSI GS70 Stealth is certainly worth of our Must Have Award. At £1,699.99 inc vat from Overclockers UK it offers excellent value for money.

Pros:

• lovely thin chassis design.
• adjustable backlit keyboard.
• good screen.
• excellent keyboard.
• Haswell processor is a powerhouse.
• class leading SSD performance.
• decent battery life.
• Nvidia GTX765M is capable.

Cons:

• onboard sound is average.
• gets hot.
• not the cleanest software install.

Kitguru says: We love this laptop, it certainly faces challenges from Alienware, but at the price, it is hard to beat.

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