MSI GT80 Titan SLI Review

👤by David Mitchelson  Comments 📅09-02-15

Closer Look (Continued)

Opening the lid of this monolith we discover a 18.4” Full HD, anti-glare screen which is LED backlit. This display offers up to 1920x1080 with a ratio of 16:9. This may not seem like such a high-resolution for a notebook of this calibre but we’ve tested notebooks with similar sized screens that offer up to 4K resolution and scaling starts to become somewhat of an issue. So we’re actually quite pleased that MSI has designed to opt for 1080p resolution.

At the top of this screen resides a high-quality webcam which offers full-HD – 1080p at 30fps.

By far, the biggest selling point for the GT80 Titan SLI is the keyboard configuration. This notebook features the World’s first built-in Cherry MX brown mechanical keyboard – this is the first time for such a product to feature on a mobile device.

The keyboard is supplied and designed by SteelSeries and as well as having Cherry MX brown switches, also has LED backlighting. Having a gaming-grade keyboard at your finger-tips is great for general usage and for use with the latest gaming titles – no longer is such a device limited to the desktop PC.

Above the keyboard is a large aluminium plate which contains three buttons – GPU fan boost, NVIDIA GPU enable/disable and the power button. MSI has re-arranged this entire section. Usually, the keyboard would be at the top and the touchpad would be at the bottom but we now have this large expanse which can be used to place useful items. This isn’t its only use though – the plate can be completely detached from the notebook and access to the memory, HDDs and GPUs is made possible for users to potentially interchange hardware.

At the very top, MSI has chosen to use Dynaudio for their audio solution. Combining this with Audio Boost 2, Sound Blaster Cinema 2 and we get a rather immersive experience. MSI has improved the digital sound processing with this unit and has supplied dedicated amplifier chips with a sub-woofer.

So far, GT80 Titan SLI has proven itself to be an innovative piece of kit but when we arrive at the touchpad the innovation ramps up to a whole new level. MSI has installed a portrait orientated touchpad on the right-side which has left and right buttons. By default this pad will act as the mouse navigation but once the “Num” button is double-tapped this whole section lights up to allow the user to use numpad functionality.