MSI brought plenty of gaming goodies to CES, and one of the most prominent is the company's massive GT80 Titan SLI gaming laptop, which is the first to offer built-in mechanical switches.
MSI opted to use Cherry MX Brown switches, giving the keys haptic feedback without the auditory click, which will certainly be appreciated by guests around you if you decide to work (or play) in, for example, the library.
The keyboard includes gold WASD keys (there's a replacement kit that includes WASD keys in black, as well), and there's a touchpad on the right side of the keyboard that can function as a numpad. A touch numpad sounds absurd, but MSI built in haptic feedback so you get a sense of what you're pressing. Of course, the whole keyboard is backlit.
The laptop itself is massive. It measures 17.95 x 13.02 x 1.93 inches and weighs over 10 pounds, although that's not unreasonably heavy for a monster gaming notebook like this one.
It will be available in two versions: one with the Intel Core i7-4720HQ processor with 16 GB of RAM, and another with the Intel Core i7-4980HQ processor with 24 GB of RAM. Contrary to what you'd expect from the product name, however, it doesn't come with a GTX Titan, but rather two GTX 980Ms in SLI. You can swap these out for Nvidia MXM cards with more horsepower later on down the line.
The entire laptop is also built to be upgradeable, and you can simply remove a couple of screws to easily remove the top cover to access four M.2 slots, two SODIMM memory slots, and the hard drive bay. To get to the graphics cards, you need to pop the back off, which will take a bit more effort than pulling off the top cover.
The GT80 Titan SLI has an 18.4-inch TN panel with Full HD resolution.
For storage, MSI has plenty of options thanks to the numerous M.2 slots. In at least one configuration, the notebook has a pair of 128 GB M.2 SATA in RAID 0 with a 1 TB 7200 RPM HDD. There's a Killer Gaming Network plus Killer N1525 combo for networking.
We were a bit taken aback at how large the 350 W power brick was. It's enormous, about the size of an Xbox brick.
Both versions of the GT80 Titan SLI will be Newegg exclusives at launch:
- High-power (opens in new tab)
- Very high-power (opens in new tab)
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