- Playing alone sucks.
I had so much fun at Whale LAN
that I'm ready to pack up and go to another LAN party.
But no compromises this time.
I want all the performance, and I want all of my games.
- [Voiceover] Ai-yah! (bones crackling)
- Ooh, this is not gonna work.
If only there was some portable device
that you could use to replace your desktop,
but without compromising on performance.
Maybe it could be battery powered with a keyboard attached.
(choir singing)
It's a laptop.
When MSI heard that we wanted to go all out
on a mobile battle station.
They stepped up to sponsor this video with the Titan GT77.
The most powerful laptop they offer.
And we're gonna be upgrading it
and extending it to the limit
to make it a true desktop replacement.
("Supernova")
Let's start with what it comes with.
Every GT77 includes a 128 gigabyte flash drive.
An M99 RGB gaming mouse.
And a little Lucky the Dragon key chain.
All of which I'm going to, oh, my God,
find at some point here.
(test signal tone rings)
Because this machine is designed for people
who want the most overkill possible performance,
there's actually not a ton of choice
when it comes to configurations.
Our model, the 12-UHS, has a 3080 Ti.
More on that in a bit.
But, there's also a 3070 Ti available
if that's too fast for you.
And, in either case,
you can choose between an i9-12900HX, that's what we've got,
or a i7-12800HX.
Each with the same eight P-Core, eight E-Core configuration.
We've got all of this linked down below.
Now, being in North America,
our laptop is equipped with a 120 hertz 4K IPS display.
That's what they claimed.
DCI-P3 coverage of 100%.
Like a hundred?
Like, wow.
Alright.
And, if you're in other markets,
there's also a 1080p 360 hertz option
in case you're looking
for every possible competitive advantage for gaming.
Good gravy.
And the best part, is that if anyone tries to steal it,
not only will they get tired
trying to carry it down the street.
But, you can throw this power brick at them,
likely stop them in their tracks.
I think I trust it farther than I could throw it.
330 watts.
Nice reversible power connector.
But, before we plug it in,
why don't we crack it open?
And see what it needs that (object crashing) 330 watts for.
Eleven screws later.
It's time to reveal a feature
that is exclusive to laptops of this caliber,
assuming I can actually get it to open.
Come on, baby.
Come on, you can do it.
Okay, this is sick.
Check this out.
Not one, not two, but four memory slots.
So you can load up a whopping 128 gigs
of DDR5 memory in this thing.
And, four.
Count them.
One, two, three, four SSD slots.
That wild, or what?
A quick word, by the way, about these M.2 slots.
The two up here are wired directly to the CPU,
while these two go through the chipset.
MSI helpfully silkscreens this Intel onto the motherboard,
or you can just follow the traces if you're a big nerd.
For now, though, three of them are painfully empty
and that just won't do for our overkill laptop build here.
Is this thing on?
Hmm.
Oh, maybe we should power it off
before I poke around too much more with the screwdriver.
The fastest way to fix this problem
is to unplug the battery,
which, I mean, we should be doing
when we're working on it, anyway.
Step 1, is to double our included memory,
from 64 gigs to 128 gigs
with these two 64 gig kits from Crucial.
It should be noted that having four sticks like this
does put additional strain
on our integrated memory controller,
so we're gonna be limited
to 3,600 mega transfer per second speeds.
Holy crap!
Are we putting 32 terabytes of storage on this thing?
32 terabytes of storage in a laptop.
The numbers gotten so big, it sounds small again.
'Cause like it can't possibly be that,
you know what I mean? - Yeah.
- Like if I say, yeah,
it was 32 terabytes of storage in this laptop,
you'd go, oh, wow, it's a Chromebook probably then.
- Yeah. - You're thinking gigabytes.
No, no, no, no!
Order of magnitude higher.
We actually missed something.
The keened eye among you might have noticed
that this M.2 slot is a little bit special.
It actually supports PCIe Gen 5.
Unfortunately, Gen 5 SSDs haven't quite hit the market yet.
But this laptop will be ready when they do.
Probably this fall when all the next gen CPUs arrive.
Until then, we're gonna make do
with our Gen 4 8 terabyte drive.
(Crew laughs)
And each one of these is four times our original storage,
which means we're at 16X our original storage.
That's actually more in storage
than the cost of the laptop to start with.
And, before you ask, yes, we're gonna be RAID-ing them.
We did RAID-0, right? - Oh, yeah.
- Huh, that's really stupid. (crew laughs)
Like, really stupid.
One drive fails, whole thing gone.
But realistically,
we're just loading it up with games anyway, right?
So. We're almost ready to do that,
but, first, there's a few things
that we wanna take a look at inside.
This is a 99.99 watt-hour battery,
that is literally as large as the law will permit
if you wanna take your laptop on a plane with you.
Not that I would necessarily, eh.
Ah, yeah, you could travel with it.
Portable workstation, sure.
Ah, we've got a pair of 2 watt speakers
as well as a WiFi 6E capable killer wifi card,
which is, dat-dat-dat-dat-dat-da, right there.
To be clear, ah, killer no longer means bad.
It's actually got, it's an Intel chipset.
So, cool.
Of course, the piece de la resistance is the 3080 Ti.
This is a full fledged, non Max-Q design
with 16 gigs of GDDR6
that will suck back up to 175 watts
to hit a maximum boost speed of 1,640 megahertz.
And with an integrated MUX switch, you can be sure
that you're connected to the 3080 Ti directly,
rather than route it through the IGPU,
which means you're gonna be getting the most frames possible
out of your laptop.
That 175 watts is part of the 250 watts total
that MSI's OverBoost provides to distribute
between the CPU and the CPU via Nvidia Dynamic Boost 2.0.
What it essentially means is that in GPU limited games,
where you need every single one of those 175 watts
to feed the 3080 Ti,
you'll still have 75 watts left over
for the 12900HX to hit a maximum turbo of 5 gigahertz.
On the flip side,
in CPU limited games or other applications,
either of the 16 core CPUs available for this laptop
can draw up to 150 watts,
leaving just 80 remaining for the GPU.
Unfortunately, no, you can't have 175 and 150,
because it's just not possible to do in this form factor.
And like, you'd be overwhelming your brick.
Remember, you gotta have all kinds of other power available
for connected peripherals
and all that good stuff too, right?
Now, keeping this mess cool are four fans.
That's right!
One, two, three, four fans in a laptop,
which are all fed through the ventilation holes
in the bottom panel.
There are also a total of six exhaust vents.
Although, in fairness,
this back one kinda counts as one gigantic exhaust.
More impressive than the number of fans though
is the number of heat pipes.
Let's count them, shall we?
One, this one goes from GPU to just this heatsink.
Two, this one goes almost in a complete square
and is also dedicated to the GPU,
feeding both this radiator and this one with heat.
Now, because we can share our power,
that means we also need to share our cooling.
So this one runs over to this and this heatsink
in case our GPU is getting extra power
and needs extra cooling.
There's a little heat pipe right here
that seems to be, just for memory?
It looks like memory.
Then with number five, this one goes from our CPU
all the way over to these radiators right here, one, two.
Six, this one is almost a full circle again.
And goes one, two, covers three radiators
and goes over the CPU.
Seven, these two rads, and the CPU.
Took a little while to power on,
thanks to our bizarro RAID-0 boot configuration.
Like, over a minute.
Okay, this is an interesting strategy.
To accommodate the powerful internal components,
MSI has a bit of a, ahem, caboose
on the back of the machine.
And I guess, rather than try and stealthify it,
they're like business at the front, party in the back.
It's got full RGB, (chuckles) RGB butt.
Wear it, wear it loud and proud, right?
Just own it, just own it.
Yeah, I'm a big laptop, mm, mm, yeah.
Anyone else noticing a problem right now?
I'm sure it's gonna ramp up to be very clear.
But, yeah, there it goes.
At idle, it is damn near silent.
Okay, this is hilarious.
We've a grand total
of 372 Steam games installed on this machine.
And the best part?
We're not even close to filling it up.
(heavy energetic music)
This is kinda nutty.
We're not getting the full benefit
of our 120 hertz display on "Ultra Nightmare" at 4k.
But that's unreasonable.
But what we are seeing
is anywhere from 80 to 110 frames per second.
I would not have thought this level of performance
is possible for a laptop, even just a few years ago.
This is a cool, little feature.
If the FPS indicator isn't enough for you to know (chuckles)
you can check if the integrated GPU
or the dedicated GPU is running,
simply by looking
at the color of the LED on the power button.
So it's red right now,
which means our dedicated graphics card is running.
Ooh, nice.
But, actually tabbing out of the game
won't be enough to change that.
If I exit the game, boop,
hmm, does it take a little while
to decide to switch over to the IGPU?
Well, oh, so there we go.
Yup, it's white now.
Oh, and it's red again.
Oh, 'cause when you're plugged in, obviously,
you might as well just use the 3080 Ti, cool.
For a game at the other end of the spectrum,
I fired up "CS:GO."
And the idea here is that I wanna see what kind
of power our CPU is drawing now compared to our GPU.
So we're running at somewhere
in the neighborhood of 250, 300 frames per second.
Boop-boop-boo, boo-boo-boo-boo.
And, yeah,
our GPU's only in the neighborhood of 120, 130 watts.
Our CPU actually is only sitting at about 60, 65.
Again, it's surprisingly quiet in game.
But we're barely stressing the cooling system.
To be clear, I can hear it just fine.
But compared to the way that some gaming laptops,
especially like the high-powered, reasonably thin ones,
will just sound like they're gonna take off from the table.
It's downright reasonable.
(gun bangs)
You know, for little tiny speakers,
(gun bangs) honestly not bad.
(In-game voiceover speaks indistinctly)
(guns blaring)
Blah, blah, blah, ba-blah, ba-blah.
- [In-Game voice] Aagh! (laughs)
- 97 damage, gosh, darn it.
- [In-Game voice] This is the end.
Yes, I wish to exit.
Something we haven't talked about yet
is the IO on this thing put some desktops to shame.
Each of these USB Type As runs at 20 gigabit per second.
We've got one, two, three of those.
A UHS-1 SD card slot.
Headset jack.
And then back around to the other side,
that is not one but two Thunderbolt 4 ports,
as well as a Mini Display port and an HDMI out.
Oh, yeah, 2.5 gig LAN too.
And more cool stuff.
MSI has gone with a low profile Cherry MX keyboard
powered by SteelSeries.
So you can use SteelSeries' software
in order to configure everything
from per key macros to per key RGB lighting.
We also have a large glass touchpad, fingerprint sensor,
and 720p IR webcam.
And the infrared is really important
'cause that means you can use Windows Hello
and you'll never have to type your password or a pin again.
Though, if you do prefer a pin,
it's actually got a number pad
for you gaming accountants out there.
At 23 millimeters thick and 1.8 pounds lighter,
the GT77 looks like an obvious win
compared to the GT76 that it replaces.
You guys can check it out
at the link in the video description.
Man, you can pack a lot of performance
in a gaming laptop these days,
assuming that it's got a large butt, mm.
I mean, if you look at it,
it's all basically cooling, right?
Like, they've taken the normal laptop form factor here,
16 by 9, they've gone, yep, all cooling.
Well, that would've been extra thickness,
but it's actually, probably quite a bit more efficient
to do it this way, which would explain why it's so quiet.