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Price Analysis And Conclusion
MSI’s contender for the ultra-high-end gaming laptop market delivers on its promises.The MSI GT73VR Titan Pro-201 offers excellent performance, matched only by its solid build quality, and bold aesthetics. It powers through all but the most demanding games with ease, and it gives the most demanding ones a good run for the money. This is, by far, the most powerful laptop we’ve tested (for now, of course!)
But the Titan Pro-201’s performance isn't cheap. At $3,599, this laptop is more than $1,000 more expensive than the next best performer, the Asus G752VS OC Edition, which definitely gives the MSI laptop a run for its money. In productivity and synthetic benchmarks, the two systems trade blows. In gaming, the Titan Pro far exceeds the G752VS OC Edition in many games, but in a handful, the performance difference is close enough to question whether an extra $1,100 is worth it.
However, the Titan Pro-201 is but one of several Titan Pro configurations. Ours in particular includes 64GB of memory and two 512GB SSDs running in RAID 0. More modest (if you can say that about a system with a GTX 1080) configurations are available. For example, the Titan SLI-058 features two GTX 1070s in SLI for $100 less. This could be a much more compelling system considering how close our single GPU Asus G752VS OC Edition performs.
Less expensive Titan models with lower-end configurations exist as well. For example, the Titan Pro-202 contains 32GB of memory and one 512GB SSD for $500 less. You can also find a Titan Pro model with a UHD display, 16GB of memory, and no SSD for $2,800. It's not quite the $2,500 we’re aiming for in comparison to the G752VS OC Edition, especially considering the lack of an SSD, but it might be compelling to potential customers fixated on that GTX 1080 (we'd love to see how that does at 4K, given the struggles the P37X V6 had at that resolution, albeit with a GTX 1070 GPU). For $2,400, there's a similar model running a GTX 1070 as well.
Finally, MSI also offers more powerful Titan configurations for more adventurous gamers (by which we mean: those with deeper pockets.) The Titan SLI is also available with a massive 18.4" IPS display, an Intel Core i7-6820HK, and two GTX 1070s in SLI. One such model is available for $3,500, but with only 16GB of memory, a 256GB SSD, and a 1TB hard drive. For $500 more, the memory and storage are bumped to to 64GB and a 512GB SSD, respectively. An even more powerful configuration with an Intel Core i7-6920HQ and two GTX 1080s in SLI is available for $5,000. The Titan Pro-201 costs 72% of this, so the discerning high-end buyer would depend on the GTX 1080 SLI configuration performing an extra 28% better, or more.
Still, gamers considering a GTX 1080-equipped laptop are those who value pure, unadulterated performance above all. The best of anything inevitably carries a high price tag, and so far the MSI GT73VR Titan Pro-201 fits the bill.
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