MSI GS70 Stealth review

The MSI GS70 has a quad-core i7 processor, and it's one of Intel's new Haswell chips - so it benefits from a minor performance bump as well as architectural improvements designed to boost battery life when compared to last year's Ivy Bridge parts.

The Core i7-4700HQ comes from Intel's mobile range, and it's got four Hyper-Threaded cores clocked to 2.4GHz. That's higher raw speed than the 2.1GHz chip inside the Asus Zenbook U500 and the 2.2GHz core used by Razer inside its Blade Pro.

The MSI GS70 gets off to a good start with one of Intel's latest chips, but it's unable to match the Schenker XMG P703, which has a Core i7-4800MQ - it's also a quad-core Haswell part, but it's clocked 500MHz higher than the processor inside the MSI.

Graphics grunt comes from the GeForce GTX 765M. It's one of Nvidia's top-end mobile GPUs, and it's based on the desktop range's GTX 660 card. It's a 28nm part that boasts 768 stream processors inside a dozen clusters, and it's clocked to 850MHz. It also has 2GB of 4,000MHz GDDR5 memory that's accessed using a 128-bit bus.

It's a good GPU, but it's unable to compete with the GTX 770M that's included with the Schenker system. The XMG P703's core includes 960 stream processors clocked to 811MHz alongside 3GB of RAM.

The storage is worth a mention: it's created by fusing two 128GB SSDs together in a RAID 0 array. The two SSDs provide 237GB of usable capacity as well as a speed boost thanks to the striped array used.

Elsewhere, there's a 1TB hard disk, Killer DoubleShot networking and 8GB of RAM - which MSI has doubled in the model that's available for sale. A decent port selection is littered around the GS70's edges: four USB 3 ports, two mini-DisplayPort connectors, HDMI and D-SUB display ports and an SD card slot. Understandably, there's no room for an optical drive.