MSI GT72 Dominator Pro Review: GTX 980M Reigns Supreme

MSI GT72 Dominator Pro: Dramatically Improved

Top performance gaming notebooks are generally quite expensive, and they’re certainly more of a niche market than mainstream laptops and notebooks. However, there’s something to be said for a gaming notebook that can rival the performance of a decent desktop PC, and that’s exactly what MSI has with the GT72. We’ve heard the same story quite a few times over the past decade – gaming notebooks are closing the gap with desktops! – but this is about as close as we’ve ever come. And perhaps most importantly, the updates to the GT72 basically wipe out nearly all of my complaints about the design of MSI’s earlier GT70 notebook. There are now two cooling fans to better distribute the cooling load, and the industrial design is modern and attractive. Finally!

Performance from the GT72 Dominator Pro is exactly what you’d expect from a top-tier gaming notebook: it set records for all of our games for single GPU performance from a notebook. You might need to turn down a few settings in a few titles if you’re gunning for 60FPS (SSAA in particular can prove a bit too much, even for the mighty GTX 980M), but so far I haven’t found a single game where you can’t average at least 30FPS at maximum quality (though I've only tested around 20 games). Most of the performance benefits come courtesy of NVIDIA’s shiny new GTX 980M, and by comparison the Core i7-4710HQ CPU looks quite tame. There are higher spec models of the GT72 with i7-4980HQ processors if you need every last bit of CPU performance, but for most games it’s not really a major concern – either the GPU is the bottleneck, or frame rates are far enough above 60FPS that it doesn’t matter.

Of course desktops are still potentially faster and more powerful than gaming notebooks like the GT72, they don't cost as much for the same level of performance, and it’s easy to make the argument that a desktop is far more upgradeable than any notebook. However, you can’t carry around a gaming desktop (and display and keyboard) without a lot of effort, and notebooks like the GT72 can easily rival many desktops in terms of performance. Plus you can connect to an external display (or two or even three), mouse, and keyboard to the GT72 and use it as a desktop replacement that you can grab and go when you need to.

I’ve complained several times about the industrial design of MSI’s GT70 over the past few years, and if you had asked me a few months ago what my order of preference would be for gaming notebooks I would have put the Alienware 17 at the top, ASUS G750 second, and third place was basically a toss-up between the Clevo P150/P157/P170/P177 and the MSI GT70. Now, MSI’s GT72 has basically vaulted from tied for last among gaming notebooks to being the one to beat, and it doesn’t look like Alienware, ASUS, or Clevo are updating their industrial designs this round so MSI should stay on top for a while.

Battery life is also respectable, and there are certainly times where having manual control over the switchable graphics is preferable to NVIDIA’s automatic Optimus switching. I’d still like to see power use for the dedicated GPU lower than the ~8W it currently uses at idle, but if you’re mostly using the GT72 for gaming you’re still going to have the AC adapter with you, and that means you probably won’t need the HD 4600 Processor Graphics. The one exception to this is if you want to use Quick Sync for video encoding or other video related tasks; it's not available without switching off the discrete GPU, which is a bit of a shame. BatteryBoost is also functional and at least somewhat interesting, but really it’s a story of giving up performance to improve battery life, and that’s not always desirable.

The only real complaint I have (other than some minor quibbles with the 10-key layout) is that MSI doesn’t use an IPS panel across the entire line of GT72 models. Of course there's a cost involved with upgrading the display, but we're almost in 2015 now; something other than TN should have become the norm on laptops five years ago (if not earlier), and it's really sad that it took tablets and smartphones to finally get companies to pay more attention to laptop displays. We're starting to see more and more notebooks and laptops with good quality displays, but this should have happened a long time ago, especially on any laptop costing more than $1000 and definitely on $2000+ offerings. The fact that MSI has a TN panel on all of the GT72 models costing less than $3300 (but more than $2100) is almost inexcusable…except the same is true of pretty much all the 17.3" competition as well. Hopefully 2015 will see more laptops shift to IPS or similar technologies.

Considering the substantial overhaul to the industrial design, not to mention the excellent performance and great feature set, I’m pleased to award MSI’s GT72 Dominator Pro with our Silver Editors’ Choice award. This is an expensive piece of hardware, but gaming notebook fans should be happy for at least a few years with the GT72. It’s fast, it looks great, it’s built reasonably well, and for now it’s the gaming notebook to beat. If we could get an IPS display (and potentially High DPI) in all of the models this would be a Gold award instead, and hopefully we'll see that with the next cycle of hardware (e.g. in early 2015 when high performance Broadwell CPUs launch).

Congratulations to MSI for providing a gaming notebook that truly impresses; they certainly deserve commendations for the most improved notebook design I can ever recall seeing. Other than Broadwell and an IPS display, I’m not sure what they can do for an encore, but this is a design that could easily carry MSI through several years of upgrades without getting stale. If you’re not in the market for a hefty gaming notebook, there’s nothing here that’s likely to change your mind, but for notebook gamers this is as good as it gets.