Review MSI Dominator Pro GT62VR

The existence of gaming laptops is one of the biggest mysteries for people who never dealt with them. Can a compact device compete with a stationary device? And even if so, is compactness and autonomy worth paying more? The new MSI Dominator makes you believe that yes - it can. And just about portability yourself.

Like other lines of MSI notebooks, Dominators have not changed in appearance for several years. This is an impressive size device with an aggressive design, which leaves no doubt that they are designed for games without compromise.

Hardly MSI engineers conceived the GT62VR 7RE as a universal laptop for every day. In the closed state its thickness reaches four centimeters, but it does not weigh as much as it seems - about three kilograms.

Given that the power unit weighs another half a kilo, every day to carry it with you to work will not everyone want, and even in a cafe with such a particularly not sit. For these purposes, the MSI range should look more like a 15-inch Apache Pro, it's lighter, thinner, and generally attracts a bit less attention.

A Dominator Pro is created for another. This is a full-fledged gaming station, which, if necessary, can be put in a backpack and not to be confused in endless wires.

Specifications:

Processor: Intel Core i7-7700HQ 2.8 GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070, 8 GB, 1.4 GHz
RAM: 32 GB, DDR4 (2.4 GHz)
Display: 15.6 '' IPS, 3840 × 2160, 60 Hz
Storage: HDD 1TB 7200 rpm. + SSD 512 GB
Weight: 2.98 Kg,
Price in Russia: ~ 150000 rubles
Ports and connectors:

X3 USB 3.0, x1 USB 2.0, x1 USB-C
X1 HDMI
X1 Mini-DisplayPort
X4 3.5 mm MiniJack (microphone, headphone, line-in and line-out)
1 GB / s Ethernet RJ-45
SD card reader

"Iron" from MSI Dominator Pro is quite impressive for a laptop. The top portable Core i7 Kaby Lake, one of the "older" GeForce Pascal graphics cards and 32 GB of RAM (four 8 GB slots) look decent in the eyes of any PC player.

Despite the fact that the processor and video card work at slightly lower frequencies (the difference with desktop analogs is about 20%), in the case they show themselves perfectly.

In gaming tests, we ran into one of the main features of the GT62VR 7RE. The laptop is equipped with a QHD monitor with a resolution of 3840 × 2160. We'll take a closer look at its quality, but now it's much more important that at this resolution the games require much higher powers than when starting in Full HD.

Unfortunately, the GTX 1070 can be called at best 4K-Ready, and about 60 FPS at high settings in the new blockbuster speech is not.

As a result, we made two tables with test results: the first shows the fps values ​​when playing in Full HD on an HDMI monitor connected, and the second one - on your own Dominator Pro monitor in full resolution.

The screen is definitely the strong point of MSI Dominator Pro. Current technological trends are increasingly gravitating towards 4K, and another (or the first in-house) ultra-high resolution monitor will never interfere.
IPS matrix is ​​perfectly calibrated, the standard setting gives bright, but not oversaturated colors and excellent smooth black. In addition to the standard preset in the command center Dagon Center, you can choose one of the thematic settings - with increased contrast for games, more "soft" for movies and a special working mode with reduced brightness and excess of yellow, so that even in case of insufficient illumination the eyes become less tired during reading and work With the text.

You need to get used to high resolution - the fonts look smoother and clearer, but the movies will have to search at least Full HD, because the 720p entries do not look good even from a meter away from the screen. And even in Windows, you will have to scale the interface up to 200%, otherwise the icons are displayed too small.

But in games, the high screen resolution becomes an absolute plus. Yes, most new products go less than 60 fps. The games that participated in the testing (except for the still disgustingly optimized Deus Ex) consistently produced above 35-40 frames per second at "high", that is, above the average console level. If you shy away from the quality of shadows and smoothing, you can get more.

It would seem that concessions, but in practice, games in 4K look much more detailed with medium-high settings than on Ultra in 1080p, and console-level frame rate may not be perfect, but it is sufficient for a comfortable game.

The Dominator Pro uses a power supply with a four-pin connector - powerful iron consumes a lot of energy. Without connecting to a power source, the notebook automatically switches to Eco mode and reduces the frequency of the components to conserve power.
To play it as a whole does not interfere, if you adjust the graphics settings a little. In Prey, the laptop lasted about two hours.

Otherwise, the laptop is almost identical to other models of the current MSI line: the keyboard from SteelSeries with bright RGB-backlighting, a full set of proprietary utilities, a separate button for activating the turbo mode of the cooling system - I described in detail in previous reviews.

The fans of the GT62VR 7RE are quite noisy, under load, their noise is not muffled by the speakers. But if you turn on the turbo mode, then only the closed or in-channel headphones will save. But the place under the left wrist never heats up, keeping the hand on the keyboard comfortable under any circumstances.

According to experience, the temperatures of the processor and the video card hardly rallied above 83 degrees under continuous loads in the standard blowing mode, this is quite tolerable for the GTX 1070 and Core i7. If you press the turbo button above the keyboard, the indicators fall by 5-10 degrees, most of the time it's not worth it. But this regime is sometimes used only to raise morale. Inexplicable, but personally to me this wild roar acts extremely motivatingly in difficult situations and helps to concentrate.

A small square grid on the left - a built-in subwoofer. But it's better to leave the speakers in case you need to turn on the music at the party or the show on the background - they are loud, do not rattled, but they do not have enough depth.
Play will be much more comfortable in the headphones, and from the noise of fans can be fenced off. And if you want to connect external speakers, the Dominator Pro has both USB and Bluetooth, and as much as two 3.5 mm outputs (line and headphone).

The HDMI, Mini-DP, USB-C and RJ-45 ports on the rear panel facilitate the more "stand-alone" use, so that nothing hovers on the sides. Again, this is a full-fledged gaming station, and since the laptop came to us for testing a few days before the release of Prey (2017), we decided to use it to play a review game as a "fire test."
We played sessions for 7-13 hours with work in a text editor and a browser in between. At the same time, it was connected to a 1080p monitor part of the time, and the rest to a 4K TV with DualShock 4 connected via Bluetooth. The PS4 Pro was compared only fluently, but subjectively the laptop gives out a much better picture with a similar frame rate. But as the gain in quality and the number of effects correlates with the difference in price, one must decide for himself.

Moderate, but still the portability of "Dominator" still played a role. As a person who prefers stationary assemblies (but does not have a car), I appreciated that it is not necessary to leave work or play if it is required to suddenly arrive at the office or run away from the city.

The device fit well in my usual city backpack, along with a power supply unit, a notebook, a couple of changeable T-shirts and a few other trifles - two hours later I was playing on the verandah about fifty kilometers from Moscow under the tweeting of birds and advice gathered behind friends and watching the process with one eye Cooking shish kebab. In another situation, I would politely refuse to travel because of work, but I was lucky.
And there was also a case when the houses were turned off electricity - Dominator Pro quietly survived two hours without an outlet when working on the Internet and the "Canobu" did not stop to leave the news. Of course, the listed situations do not happen every day, but be prepared to break from a place at any time and do not throw a full house PC was surprisingly convenient.

MSI Dominator Pro is not without flaws, but I liked working with it. Now it remains to wait for "suitcases" from some publisher to buy yourself the same.