This is MSI’s new Vector GP77 gaming laptop! The GP series is a step down from their higher tier,
but more expensive GE series, so there’s no RGB unicorn spew and it’s missing some
other nice to have features. It instead focuses on what makes a good core gaming
experience without having to spend more money on the extra bells and whistles.
The design is similar to MSI’s previous GP series laptops, with an all black metal
finish for both the lid and interior. There aren’t any sharp corners or edges,
and overall build quality felt good. Even pushing down hard on the keyboard
was surprisingly sturdy, and the metal lid flexed less compared to others.
The hinges felt alright, but there was a little screen wobble if you
type hard. It’s easy enough to open up with one finger,
despite there not being any dedicated spot on the front to get your finger into.
It’s a bit of a fingerprint magnet, but easy enough to clean with a microfiber cloth.
The laptop alone almost weighs 6.2lb or 2.8kg,
increasing to 7.8lb or 3.5kg with the 240 watt charger included.
It’s similar in size to a lot of other 17 inch laptops,
though on the thicker side towards the back.
The configuration I’ve got has an Intel Core i7-13700H CPU,
Nvidia RTX 4060 graphics, 16 gigs of memory, and a 17.3” 1440p 240Hz screen. You can check
out other options at different price points with the link below the video.
There’s a 720p camera above the screen in the middle, but no IR for Windows Hello face unlock.
Here’s how the camera and microphones look and sound,
and this is what it sounds like while I’m typing on the keyboard,
and as you can see if I type a little harder there is a little wobble to the screen.
The keyboard has per-key RGB backlighting, and all keys and secondary functions get lit up. You can
change between 4 brightness levels by holding function and pressing the F10 and F11 keys,
but you have to let go of the function key to see the changes. The key lighting isn’t very bright,
and there’s more customization available through the included SteelSeries software.
Typing felt fine, the keys have a clicky feel.
The plastic touchpad worked fine and felt clicky,
but it felt a little small for a modern 17” laptop.
The left side has a Kensington lock at the back, a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port,
a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port, and 3.5mm audio combo jack.
The right just has a couple more USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports, so three in total.
The rest is on the back, with Mini DisplayPort, 2.5 gigabit ethernet,
HDMI 2.1, and the rectangular power input on the far right.
The Ethernet port wasn’t facing the preferred way,
but I was still able to remove a cable without lifting the laptop.
The single Type-C port can be used to charge the laptop with up to 100 watts,
and it also has DisplayPort support,
so you can connect a monitor. And that Type-C port along with the Mini DisplayPort and HDMI
outputs all connect directly to the Nvidia graphics, whether optimus is on or off.
We also confirmed the HDMI port can run a 4K screen at 120Hz 12-Bit with G-Sync.
Getting inside requires unscrewing 13 Phillips head screws, all the same length. It’s extremely
difficult to open, because the front lip on the bottom panel sort of wraps around the front. I
had an extremely tough time opening it, even with my usual pry tools, link below the video to those.
Inside we’ve got the battery down the front, two memory slots near the middle,
two M.2 storage slots to the left of that, and Wi-Fi 6E card on the right.
The Wi-Fi speed was fine, but lower compared to other laptops,
including MSI’s smaller and older GP66 which uses the same Intel Wi-Fi chip.
The speeds from the installed 2TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD were excellent, and both slots can fit a
double sided drive, though you may need to remove the installed pads in the primary slot first.
It’s actually got DDR5-5600 sticks installed, however
Intel’s 13th gen H series processors are limited to DDR5-5200, which is what this laptop runs at.
in terms of upgrade options, I took off a full point from ease
of access due to it being so hard to open. Seriously, it’s that bad,
the worst I’ve ever had, MSI, please stop this. If you don’t care about getting in,
you still get access to two memory slots, two SSD slots, and removable Wi-Fi, a good selection.
The speakers are found on the left and right sides towards the front. They start
sounding muffled at higher volume with quite a bit of wrist rest vibration,
but were ok with a little bass at about 50%.
The latencymon results weren’t great,
but there is a known Nvidia bug at the moment that may increase this.
The GP77 is powered by a 4-Cell 65Wh battery. The MSI Center software has display power saver
enabled by default, which automatically lowers the screen’s refresh rate down
to 60Hz when you unplug the charger to save power. This is why the screen flashes black,
and it goes back to 240Hz when you plug back in.
The battery life was objectively pathetic, worse than any gaming laptop I tested last
year. I ran it twice to double check it, but same result. It only lasted for 3 hours and 22 minutes
in my YouTube video playback test, though the runtime in a game was decent compared to others.
Let’s check out thermals next. We’ve got 2 fans with 5 heatpipes, 2 of which are shared between
the CPU and GPU. MSI are using their phase change thermal pad on both the CPU and GPU,
so basically liquid metal. There are plenty of holes underneath for air intake, directly above
the fans, which exhaust out of both the left and right sides, and out of the corners on the back.
The MSI Center software allows us to change between different performance modes, which
from lowest to highest are silent, balanced and extreme performance. Extreme performance
gives us the option to overclock the GPU, but there’s no overclock
applied by default and we haven’t changed that. You can also enable cooler boost,
which sets the fan to full speed, or customize it a bit in advanced mode.
There's also a keyboard shortcut to max the fan out at any time,
no software required for it to work.
The internal temperatures were cool when just sitting there idle. The rest of the
results are from combined CPU and GPU stress tests which aim to represent a worst case full
load scenario. At least, that’s what I’d normally say. The Heaven GPU stress test
can’t actually max out the RTX 4050, 4060 or 4070 wattage due to a voltage limit Nvidia
have placed on these GPUs. This is why the temperatures look especially cool. Regardless,
we can see that maxing the fan out was able to lower the temps a bit, but we could get
the same effect from using a cooling pad instead. Closing the lid and docking it was a bit warmer.
The GPU was exactly at 2505MHz in balanced and extreme modes because of Nvidia’s voltage
limit in this workload, and the GPU power limit was running a little above 90 watts,
not ideal considering they advertise the RTX 4060 in this model at 140 watts.
So what’s going on here? Is the Heaven GPU benchmark finally too old to work
on these new 40 series GPUs? That’s not the case, because it still works
perfectly fine on the 4080 and 4090 and can happily max them out at 175 watts.
What’s happening here is a voltage limit is getting hit before the regular power
limit. Games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider hit the voltage limit too,
except in that case it was running closer to 110 watts. So still not the full 140 watts,
but higher than what I was seeing with the heaven stress test.
I can actually max out this GPU at 140 watts if I use something more intensive like Furmark. But
that’s basically a power virus and not really representative of a real game.
I re-ran the docked test my usual way with Heaven and with Furmark. This was more than 10 degrees
warmer on the GPU, but realistically these are still relatively cool temps for a laptop
under load with the lid closed. Changing the GPU workload was able to get the GPU
running at its maximum 140 watts, so it is possible, it just depends on the workload.
I want to show a worst case scenario in these reviews,
so in future reviews I might experiment with using Furmark instead of Heaven,
just so that I can fully max out the GPU, because Heaven clearly isn’t doing that
anymore. I mean for that matter most games don’t seem to be doing it either, but the
couple that I checked did seem to be making the GPU hit a higher power limit compared to heaven.
The downside of this is of course that it means future data won’t be comparable with my previous
thermal temperature data. I really want to hear how you think I should handle this, let me know!
There’s not really a difference in performance with an actual game with
the different performance modes in use, again because the voltage limit gets hit
in balanced and extreme modes before the 140 watt power limit is reached.
The CPU can boost higher when the GPU isn’t active, like in Cinebench. It
started at 130 watts in extreme mode, but then started thermal throttling
and ran between 105 and 110 watts for most of the test.
Intel’s i7-13700H has the same amount of cores and threads as the 12700H from last gen,
and it was able to beat those 12700H laptops while also offering a higher
single core score. The 13700H’s single core score is close to the i9-12900H, again with
the same amount of cores and threads, but with a higher single core boost compared to the 12th gen
i7. At the end of the day there's not really a big performance gain with the 13th gen i7.
Performance lowers if we unplug the charger and instead run purely off of battery
power. The single core score remained higher compared to the 12th gen counterparts though,
and although the multicore score was close to a number of 13th gen laptops with way more cores,
it’s also basically tied with a last gen 8 core Ryzen chip.
Most laptops I test are in the low 30 degrees Celsius range on the keyboard at idle, and
the GP77 was in line with this. It’s warmer with the stress tests running, but not much. Balanced
mode was actually cooler despite it performing better, and extreme mode wasn’t much different
with the fan on auto. Maxing out the fans is still cold, but again this is probably because many GPU
workloads hit the voltage limit, preventing it getting too hot. Let’s have a listen to the fans.
The fans were off and completely silent at idle, and still fairly quiet with the stress
test running. I found it weird that balanced and extreme modes with the fans on auto were
basically the same. They performed the same in Shadow of the Tomb Raider earlier and had similar
thermal results, so then what’s the point of having two modes that do the same thing?
The GP77 has a MUX switch, and MSI's website notes you can reroute power in a blink with a
single click. This might be true if you hold your eyes closed for more than 30 seconds, because it
does not have advanced optimus, so you’ve got to reboot to swap. There’s also no G-Sync,
but this is meant to be a cheaper model with less features compared to their higher end GE series.
There is adaptive sync, but only when optimus is enabled, as the integrated graphics handles that.
Mine has the 1440p 240Hz screen, but there’s also a 1080p 144Hz option. Color
gamut is quite good for a gaming laptop, but contrast wasn’t anything special.
It’s able to get above 300 nits at full brightness,
which is the minimum I want to see, so it’s not particularly bright, but it’s not too bad either.
The MSI Center software has an option to enable or disable screen overdrive mode,
but this doesn’t actually work, because I measured the same response time at around
6 and a half milliseconds whether it was on or off. There wasn’t any overshoot or
undershoot with it on, so not sure if that will change with an update.
It’s not an amazing result for a 240Hz screen compared to others that do have overdrive modes,
but it’s not far off other more expensive models like Razer’s Blade 17 either. Last
year’s 165Hz GP66 was faster, while the OLED option was super quick.
The total system latency is the amount of time between a mouse click and when a gunshot fire
appears on the screen in CS:GO. The result was decent here, beating the non-OLED GP66, despite
that having a faster screen. Generally speaking, this year I’ve found RTX 40 laptops to do better
here compared to their RTX 30 series counterparts, even when paired with a slower screen.
Backlight bleed looked a bit patchy, but I couldn’t actually see it with my own eyes,
though this will vary between panels.
Alright, let’s see how a full powered RTX 4060
laptop GPU compares against others in three games at two resolutions.
Cyberpunk 2077 was tested the same on all laptops, and I’ve got the GP77 shown by
the red highlight. At 1080p it was close to a number of RTX 3070 Ti laptops in average FPS,
though interestingly it was a little behind in terms of 1% low. At 1440p
it’s slightly ahead of Razer’s far more expensive Blade 15 with RTX 3080 Ti,
at least in terms of average FPS, but the higher powered 3070 Ti laptops were ahead now,
though the GP77 was still ahead of some of the lower powered 3070 Ti options.
Red Dead Redemption 2 was tested with the game’s benchmark, and the results were similar here too.
It’s ahead of lower powered 3070 Ti laptops at 1080p, while higher powered variants were
slightly ahead. This continues at the higher 1440p resolution, so I’m starting to wonder if I should
look into a dedicated 4060 and 3070 Ti comparison, let me know if that’s something you’d want to see.
It’s a similar deal in Control at 1080p and 1440p. The 1% low was a bit behind compared
to the 3070 Ti laptops, which may be because its memory bus is half the size. In some of my first
RTX 30 vs 40 comparisons I speculated that this was due to Intel’s 13th gen HX processors having
more cores and not enough power, but that might not be the case given the 13700H is basically
the same as the 12700H. I think more games need to be tested to see the real difference there.
Here are the 3DMark results for those that find them useful, now for some content creator tests.
Adobe Premiere was tested with the Puget Systems benchmark tool,
and it’s basically scoring the same as last year’s smaller GP66 with last gen CPU and GPU.
Adobe Photoshop generally likes single threaded performance, and the 13700H
was better here compared to the 12700H, so it’s got a larger lead over the older GP66.
GPU power usually matters more in DaVinci Resolve,
and like the games it’s close to a number of RTX 3070 Ti laptops.
Blender is entirely dependent on the GPU, and again, in between the 3070 Ti results.
We’ve also tested SPECviewperf which tests out various professional 3D workloads.
Like other MSI laptops, we get full access to the advanced BIOS after entering this shortcut.
This gives us a crazy amount of customization over everything, from power and thermal limits
to memory tuning, so make sure you know what you’re doing first and don’t brick the machine.
Linux support was tested with an Ubuntu 22.10 live CD. By default the keyboard, touchpad, camera,
speakers, ethernet and Wi-Fi all worked fine. All keyboard shortcuts to adjust screen brightness,
key brightness, volume and maxing the fan out all worked too, a great result.
Let’s discuss pricing and availability next. This will change over time,
so check the link below the video for updates and current sales. And speaking of sales,
make sure you check out my gaminglaptop.deals website to get the best deal on your next
laptop! We update it daily to include all of the latest sales.
At the time of recording, I can’t actually find the GP77 available in the US just yet. Here in
Australia, we’re looking at $3400 AUD, so if you remove our 10% tax and convert currency,
that’s around $2000 USD for my international viewers. Honestly that doesn’t sound too great,
given you can get an RTX 3070 Ti laptop for like $1500, and as we saw in the games earlier, those
were generally ahead. I mean for the same price as the 4060 GP77, you could get a GP66 with 12900H
and RTX 3080 Ti, which will objectively perform better in games. Stuff is just overpriced in
Australia though, so hopefully the GP77 is priced more reasonably when it comes to other regions.
Overall MSI’s GP77 follows the trend set out by previous GP laptops,
in that it offers the core features needed for a good gaming experience without going
overboard with extra features that just increase the cost. These include a decent looking screen,
a MUX switch, and high CPU and GPU power limits for good performance in games. Technically this
has a full powered 4060 laptop GPU, but until we get more 4060 laptops in to test,
it’s hard to say if this actually means much if they all cap out at
around 100 watts in games. But that’s an Nvidia thing rather than an MSI thing.
According to MSI, the GP77 is basically a refreshed GP76 but with newer CPU and GPU options,
DDR5 memory, Type-C charging, and fewer heatpipes. They said the new design didn’t need the extra
pipe, and based on my thermal testing there weren’t any problems, so that appears to check
out. Even if I run something stupidly heavier like Furmark to use the full 140 watt GPU power limit.
The only downsides were the terrible battery life, for some reason the
screen’s overdrive mode doesn’t work so you can’t get a faster response time,
but the main concern is the price. If you can get a high powered RTX 3070 Ti laptop for less money,
then in most games it’s probably going to perform better. At least until you take Nvidia’s new frame
generation feature into account. As that only works with RTX 40 series GPUs in supported games.
I’ve tested the 4060 in this laptop in 25 games at 1440p and 1080p resolutions in this video, so
check that one out next to see what the 4060 can do with features like DLSS and frame generation,
or if you just want to see what FPS it can hit in way more games. I’ll see you in that one next!