Friday 17 November 2017

MSI WT73VR 7RM

Earlier this year, TechRadar reviewed the MSI GT73VR Titan Pro, a gaming laptop that our colleague Parker Wilhelm described as cramming “top-of-the-line tech and a gorgeous 120Hz display into one sleek design – but top-tier power demands an equally top-tier price tag”.

The Taiwanese company, which has mastered the ability to reuse a chassis for dual purposes, swapped the GPU and the CPU to deliver a workstation version called the WT73VR. Note that it is a very different beast to the WS63, its more svelte but far less powerful little brother.

Design

The WT73VR is the antithesis of the WS63. Whereas the latter managed to produce an eye-pleasing device that weighs under 2kg with some obvious shortcomings, the former is more of an attempt to deliver the absolute best performance in a barely portable format.

Yes, the WT73VR is an absolute monster, a behemoth that weighs more than 5kg when you include the brick-like charger (and yes, you will need it more than you think). Its dimensions – 428 x 287 x 24-49mm – and weight are very similar to that of an A3 ream of paper. If you have one in your office, put it on your lap to get an idea of this notebook’s heft.

Since it uses the same chassis as the GT73VR, the rest of the analysis from TechRadar’s earlier review regarding its design still holds, although we’d thoroughly disagree about its “top-shelf luxury electronics” appearance. It offers nothing like the clean lines of the MacBook Pro or even the WS63.

Brash, industrial and utilitarian is how we’d describe the aesthetics of the WT73VR; it looks as if the laptop could turn into a Transformer robot at any moment. Its rear is designed to look like a sports car, and its belly has so many holes to facilitate air circulation that the base probably consists more of air than plastic. Not that this is a bad thing, just bear this in mind if you plan to use the machine on your lap – this thing can get very hot.

Specifications

The star of the show has to be the Quadro P5000 GPU, one of Nvidia’s fastest workstation chips, superseded only by the more powerful and far more expensive GP100 and P6000. The P5000 is the fastest professional mobile solution currently available and MSI paired it with 16GB of GDDR5X memory.

Given that the desktop version costs £1,799 ($2,375) and has a power consumption of 180W, it is safe to assume that this mobile GPU has a fair share of the power budget and the bill of materials.

The other component worth mentioning is the Intel Xeon processor. This Kaby Lake part integrates a graphics subsystem, a rarity on a Xeon part. It has a relatively high TDP for a mobile CPU but is priced competitively compared to the Core i7-7820HK or the 7820HQ.

We didn’t partake in any overclocking but the options are definitely available via MSI’s array of software.

MSI engineers also chose to keep the same 17.3-inch Full HD resolution 120Hz display as seen in the GT73VR. The memory is ECC but there are no RAID options, just a single SSD and a hard drive that doubles as secondary storage.

As for connectivity, the vast amount of space available means that there are plenty of options: a Killer GbE LAN port, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.2, Mic-in, Headphone-out (SPDIF), Line-in, Line-out, six USB ports (one Type-C), one HDMI port, one mini-DisplayPort and a card reader.

Usage and performance

This is the fastest laptop we’ve tested. Ever. But it’s hardly your standard notebook. A hefty price tag – around £4,800 – combined with a back-breaking weight means that it is aiming for a very small niche, albeit a very, very lucrative one.

However, don’t count on it to last hours before the battery runs out. Despite shipping with a massive 8-cell battery (with an 80Whr capacity), it only lasted 2 hours 15 minutes in our simple YouTube test.

Put the workstation through something a bit more taxing (3D rendering, real-time VR visualization) and you’re likely to see your battery life depleted in less than an hour.

A 120Hz display is useful for gaming, making the likes of shooters more natural and fluid, but that’s not the case for a professional workstation. That said, the screen delivers some great pictures with an excellent color gamut; the fact that it’s a matte panel is useful, as well, to avoid any unwanted glare.

One thing that becomes abundantly obvious under load is how loud the workstation can be. The WT73VR is equipped with two fans each with 29 blades and a total of 10 heat pipes to dissipate the formidable amount of heat from the CPU, GPU and the other parts in the laptop.

Speaking of sound, the laptop has two speaker pairs with one subwoofer, courtesy of audio specialists Dynaudio. These are located under the laptop which is inconvenient if you plan to put the notebook on your lap.

As for the keyboard and touchpad, the former – provided by SteelSeries – is a backlit model with multiple colors (remember this is a gaming laptop chassis) and a full numeric keypad. It offers good feedback, decent travel, and it’s not too noisy.

Just bear in mind that if you plan to use it on a flat surface, the keyboard will be around 40mm above it, and that, combined with the sheer size of the typing area, could potentially increase your risk of RSI and frozen shoulder/elbow due to the increased stress on your joints.

The touchpad is reassuringly large and comes with physical click buttons, a divisive move, but one that’s likely to be welcomed by the pro community. The power cable is also shockingly short at 120cm.

Further points of interest: this is an ISV-certified workstation with Dassault, Autodesk, Siemens and others having officially endorsed the WT73VR. The workstation also comes with Windows 10 Pro rather than Home. You can add up to 64GB of RAM to the system using four 16GB memory modules.

There are no signs of Intel’s vPro advanced management features although the Xeon CPU does support this. Finally, there are no optical drives.

The competition

The follow-up to the Dell Precision 7710, the 7720, is competitive with the WT73VR. Both cost around the same amount (at least in the UK) and while the MSI laptop benefits from the Xeon processor, Dell offers next business day delivery, vPro, a built-in smart card reader, an optional fingerprint reader, RAID storage and a bigger 91Whr battery. Plus this being Dell, there’s always the opportunity to haggle the price down.

HP’s ZBook G4 is probably the biggest rival to MSI’s flagship workstation. Look for the model Y6K39EA#ABU which comes with a more powerful Xeon CPU, twice the on-board memory, a bigger system SSD, a much bigger battery and a very similar price tag. Check out our review of the ZBook Studio G3 which is a smaller version of the G4.

Eurocom’s PX7 Pro is slightly lighter and costs a tad more at around £4,900 ($6,470). It does come with an optical drive but the biggest issue will be the fact that you will have to return it to the vendor for repairs. That could be a massive deal-breaker for some.

Lenovo’s P71 is the only workstation that comes with a 4K display by default. It’s competitive with the MSI notebook when it comes to pricing, and outclasses it in terms of the actual components. The P71 has a color sensor, a fingerprint reader, a security chip, 512GB SSD that’s OPAL2 certified, a 96Whr battery, a smart card reader and vPro certification.

Final verdict

A good workstation is more than the sum of its parts, and it’s in this respect that the WT73VR has some significant drawbacks. There are no RAID options by default, no support for vPro, and no security features (like a fingerprint scanner, OPAL/SED, smart card reader).

We don’t mind MSI using the same chassis as its gaming laptop. What isn’t so acceptable is the fact that MSI’s workstation is not significantly cheaper than the competition. All the models we looked at were around the £5,000 ($6,500) mark and all but one of the competitors are tier-1 players, which means that they can leverage ISVs and resellers in a way that MSI can’t.

MSI launched the GT75VR earlier this year and references to its alter ego, the WT75VR, can be found on MSI’s Russian and French web pages – although the beast itself remains elusive.

Scan is the only company in the UK selling the WT73WR. It carries a massive price tag – as mentioned it’s £4,810 at the time of writing (and currently on pre-order). The workstation is available for as little as $4,599 in the US, albeit with a different set of components.



from TechRadar: Technology reviews http://ift.tt/2AX4KOH

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