MSI’s day-one announcement at GTC is the WT72 – the company’s flagship mobile workstation that packs the new Quadro M5500 graphics card and is labeled as "VR Ready." This notebook is the result of a collaboration between MSI and Nvidia, and together they claim that it's the world’s first mobile VR workstation.
All the WT72s come with a 256 GB SSD configuration and a 1 TB 7200 RPM SATA hard drive, as well as a Blu-ray burner, Thunderbolt 3, six USB 3.0 ports (because you will need two for an HMD), and a full-HD webcam.
The base model comes with a 17.3-inch Full HD IPS panel, which isn’t an impressive resolution for its large screen size, although it won’t matter much if the notebook’s purpose is primarily to power a VR HMD on the go. Of course, the WT72 was built for tasks other than powering a VR headset. For professionals, the M5500 graphics card will handle their GPU needs, and the mid- and top-tier WT72 configurations come with a 17.3” 4K panel. All the screens come with Adobe RGB certification.
Although it's a workstation on the inside, the notebook is still styled very much like a gaming notebook. It has the same design language as other notebooks in MSI’s gaming lineup, and it has a SteelSeries backlit keyboard, a Killer E2400 gaming NIC, Dynaudio speakers, and more.
The WT72 measures 428 x 294 x 48 mm and weighs 3.8 kg, so it's not exactly thin and light.
Pricing for the base model starts at $5,499, whereas the mid-tier model will cost $6,299. If you want the Xeon CPU to go with that, along with the extra 32 GB of ECC memory, that will cost you an additional $600, bringing the tally up to $6,899. MSI covers the notebooks with a 3-year warranty.
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