We had the chance to visit the MSI suites where they were showing off both components and notebooks that will be upcoming in the next year. Although our time there was limited, I did have a little time to get to play with a few of their upcoming products.
Written by: Wes
Pictures by: Wes
I started first over on the component side of things and the first thing that caught my eye was a pair of mechanical keyboards. I was told that they are considering these for the US market but they will be released in other markets for now. The boards matched the color schemes that MSI uses on their motherboards and video cards. Both keyboards had cherry red key switches as well.
Along with the keyboards they had iBuyPower’s new revolt system sitting there with MSI components in it as well as a system built in a Cooler Master XB case as well.
They had a nice display of their Twin Frozr cards showing the progression over the last few years. They also had their GTX 680 Lightning displayed along with the CES Design and Engineering award that it received.
On the motherboard side of things MSI had their whole lineup displayed but we focused on a couple products. First we were admiring their Z77IA-E53 MiniITX board. They would like to fit this in at a price point lower than Asus’s offering by cutting out the extra PWM’s. It won’t have as much overclocking ability but even at stock Ivy Bridge CPU’s are quick enough for almost anyone, especially in a small form factor build. They also talked about their Z77-G45 Thunderbolt and how it will be one of the cheapest boards on the market with a thunderbolt port while still supporting SLI as well.
Over on the laptop side of things we had a chance to take a look at MSI’s latest gaming laptops like the GT70 Dragon edition. That one specifically was very interesting. For one it had what they called Killer Doubleshot with Killer NIC’s for both ethernet and Wifi. It also has a SteelSeries keyboard, TWO SSD’s in Raid 0 and a GTX 680M to keep even the most demanding games running smooth. One of its other features is the Dragon design on the top and keyrest. This laptop also won the CES Innovations award.
They had a few cheaper models on display as well including an all AMD laptop with an AMD CPU and GPU. They also are introducing another line of laptops that are very similar to their gaming line but focused on graphic artists and other people who need powerful laptops for things other than gaming. These are set apart by their use of the Quadro line of GPU’s as well as much higher quality screens that will recreate colors more accurately.
Last they had a new windows 8 convertible laptop that functions like a tablet but has a keyboard slide out. I was especially impressed with this, its unique design would be perfect for use on an airplane where space is a little more limited.
