List Price: $1,299.99
Sale Price: $1,169.99
Today's Bonus: 10% Off
This is an amazing laptop for the price,
Pros:
Pure AMD so no Intel/Nvidia tax
GPU is amazing on this thing
eyefinity on a laptop (because why not?)
The sound system is amazing on this baby
The screen is also amazing
The fan on this thing can be a little loud with turbo fan on but max the volume while gaming, you won't notice.
Battery life is also nice (around 5 hours. hell, I got around 4 hours while running 7 virtual computers and installing the OS on 4 of them at the same time)
I get compliments on the keyboard all the time :)
The power button is white when you are using just the APU and orange when the sleeping beast (8970m) is on
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Cons:
The 8970 seems to be too powerful for just the battery, it will need to be plugged in or it will reboot on you.
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I have talked to MSI customer support and they said removing the warranty sticker doesn't really void the warranty, also do a google search a lot of people have had the same response (http://lmgtfy.com/?q=msi+warranty+sticker) MSI support was also very helpful in getting the second HDD bracket. I didn't want to send my credit info in clear text over the internet so I gave them my number and we settled it over the phone.
That being said I put a 128GB SSD (Crucial M4) in there and reinstalled windows 8. All I have to say is do it. Install it right meow. It is blazing fast.
I want to upgrade this thing to 32GB so bad (because why not and RAMdisk).
Now the fun stuff.....gaming!
When the orange light goes on it means business. Sometimes it doesn't auto detect (and read a review that really disliked AMD because of this. lol wut? start game, oh didn't detect? close game, right click desktop, "configure switchable graphics," set game to high performance, and done)
Most games will be able to max out with this laptop, however console ports that rely on a powerful CPU are not going to run as nice because the A10 isn't the strongest CPU in the world. But still runs with playable frames. That is what this laptop is about, play games with all the eyecandy you want and be able to play it, who cares if Intel can get 10-20 FPS better? Yes the CPU will limit you 90% of the time but not enough to ruin your experience. BF3 runs in the 40FPS range in single player but on a 64(not 48 and below) player map it struggles and goes to around 20. However with a few tweaks (set priority to very high for example) you can get it to 25+ and it won't stutter now and then.
All my games (and I have a ton http://steamdb.info/calculator/?player=76561197996741554&country=us) run perfectly fine with this laptop.
I have high hopes for AMD as it is now in the PS4 and Xbox one, meaning games will be more optimized for AMD's architecture.
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