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MSI’s gaming laptops all have the same hulking black chassis, and the GE72 6QF Apache Pro is no different. The brushed aluminium finish looks familiar, as does the crimped lid and splashes of red. It’s an aggressive look typical of gaming laptops, going some way to matching the rather imposing size. Weighing a significant 2.7kg and at 27mm thick, the GE72 is hardly designed for portable use, but it’s actually 2kg lighter than the behemoth Asus G751JT.
Display
The screen is, as you would expect, the reason for the large footprint. The 1,920x1x080 resolution is the minimum we would expect from a screen this size, but the anti-glare matt coating means you aren’t distracted by reflections. Black levels were respectably deep at 0.37cd/m2, and a peak brightness of 330cd/m2 was high enough that you can just get away with outdoor use in a pinch. Contrast was a little lower than we’d have liked, with a ratio of 808:1, but images and video still had enough punch. At 86% of the sRGB gamut, colour accuracy was on par for a gaming laptop, but below what you’d want for professional work.
The accompanying speakers are surprisingly impactful, with real presence and volume. A headset will still be best for gaming, but the GE72 is fine for casual listening.
Keyboard and touchpad
Gaming peripheral maker SteelSeries has supplied the backlit keyboard. There’s just enough travel and feedback from the keys so that accuracy isn’t hindered. Keys are well spaced, so you’re not going to mishit keys as you frantically mash at the keyboard during an intense gunfight or raid. It has the usual macro customisations you would expect of a gaming keyboard, available through the pre-installed customisation software, but there aren’t dedicated macro keys. With plenty of room on the chassis, a vertical row of macro keys could easily have fit, as is the case on gaming laptops from Gigabyte, but as it stands macros become a bit fiddly to use. The customisation software extends to customising the colours and brightness levels of the keys, too.
The reasonably-sized touchpad is located off-centre below the keyboard, but won’t likely get much use for gaming, where a USB mouse makes more sense. Even in day-to-day use it was a little frustrating, with occasionally unresponsive multi-finger gestures and a rough finish.
Performance
MSI has made the switch to Intel’s Skylake platform for the GE72, opting for a quad-core i6-6700HQ that runs at 2.6GFHz and can boost up to 3.6GHz when temperatures allow. This is paired with 16GB of 2,133MHz DDR4 memory, and delivers a respectable performance jump over the Haswell processor found in last year’s GE62. Scores were impressive across the board, with an overall of 116 versus 105 on Haswell, but Skylake excels at multitasking and video encoding in particular.
The GE72 relies on an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M with 3GB of GDDR5 memory for the all-important gaming performance. Frame rates were on par with other 970M-equipped systems, with 84.5fps in Dirt Showdown at 1,920×1,080 and Ultra graphics, and 30.5fps in Metro Last Light at 1,920×1,080 and SSAA enabled. Turning this off saw this leap to 55fps.
Battery and storage
In our battery benchmark, the GE72 lasted 2 hours 40 minutes – about average for a gaming laptop under light use. Keep in mind battery life will be a fraction of this when gaming, so you’ll definitely want to be plugged in for anything other than web browsing.
A 128GB SSD and 1TB hard disk are included as standard, and while there are configurations that allow for up to four PCI-E SSDs, they become eye-wateringly expensive. The SSD boot drive could have been bigger; with Windows 10, a few games and our benchmarks installed, warnings about remaining space began to appear.
Connections
You get the usual array of ports, including two USB3 ports and a single USB port. The new inclusion is a USB 3.1 Type-C port, which brings the GE72 more up-to-date and will be useful if you have a newer device that uses the connection, saving you dealing with adaptors. There’s Gigabit Ethernet to go with the 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.1. You can output to a separate display through HDMI or mini DisplayPort, and audio is handled through a microphone and headphone jack that also doubles as an optical S/PDIF for up to 7.1 audio. A convenient SD card reader is included and there’s even room for an optical DVD-RW drive, too.
Conclusion
There’s a lot to like about the GE72 6QF. It’s unsurprisingly powerful considering its high specification, there are plenty of connections and some of the gaming-centric extras will be useful. The only real negatives are its design, which is beginning to feel a little basic, and the frugal SSD storage. Compared to some of its rivals, such as the Gigabyte P37W and Asus G751JT, it’s otherwise better specified and good value. It will be interesting to see what MSI’s competitors can do with their Skylake refreshes but for now, the GE72 sets an impressive yard stick.
