Over at CES, MSI has unleashed a new generation of refreshed “true gaming” notebooks which boast Intel’s newest Kaby Lake processors and Nvidia’s GTX 1050 (and 1050 Ti) graphics to better drive VR gaming (and of course traditional titles, too).
There’s a whole range of refreshed models, including the (deep breath) top-end GT83VR – which gets an RGB keyboard – plus the GT73VR, GT72VR, GT62VR, along with the GS73VR, GS63VR, GS43VR, and the GE72VR, GE62VR, plus the GP62VR, GP72VR, GP62MVR, GP72/GP62, and finally the GL72/GL62.
All of these notebooks will come packing up to Core i7 Kaby Lake (seventh-generation) HQ-series CPUs which MSI estimates will provide a 15% (non-overclocked) to 25% (overclocked) performance boost over the previous Skylake CPUs.
Graphics firepower
On the graphics front, MSI is introducing Nvidia’s GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti with its new line-up. Compared to the last-gen GTX 960M, you can expect 15% better performance with the 1050 Ti, according to the company.
As well as Kaby Lake and Pascal hardware helping to give smoother performance levels in VR games, MSI has also improved matters on the sonic front with the world’s first virtual reality sound enhancement courtesy of Nahimic VR with 7.1 surround – although this will only come on selected models.
A further audio boon is the inclusion of ESS Sabre HiFi audio DAC to ensure you get the best quality output to your gaming headphones. The GT83VR series boasts a 32bit/384KHz sampling rate, with the GT73VR, GS73VR, GS63VR and GS43VR series offering a 24bit/192KHz rate. It’s not all about the graphics, after all.
MSI further boasts that it has implemented highly efficient cooling for these machines to ensure they won’t overheat while being driven hard by demanding games.
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