The World’s Most Powerful Laptop

 MSI’s new Titan GT77

MSI’s Titan GT77 is the most powerful  gaming laptop I’ve ever tested,  but with great power comes great  responsibility - uh, I mean fan noise. This machine falls into the desktop  replacement category, or DTR for short, but despite having so much power, it’s  not as big compared to previous designs. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still heavier  compared to a lot of 17” laptops out there, especially with the chonker 330 watt power brick  and cables, and it’s larger compared to most 17”  machines too. Especially in the depth as its  rear sticks out, but these compromises give us  impressive performance and upgrade options  that most of the laptops can only dream of. The Titan has an all black metal design with  an aluminum lid, interior and bottom panel, and there aren’t any sharp corners or  edges. Build quality feels pretty good. Despite the metal finish and thickness, there’s a  little flex to the keyboard deck, but it felt fine  during normal use. The metal lid has some flex,  and although the hinges felt smooth, they might  need to be tighter because the screen wobbles  a bit when typing on the mechanical keyboard. I’ve got the maxed out GT77 with  Intel’s Core i9-12900HX processor,  Nvidia’s RTX 3080 Ti graphics, 64 gigs  of DDR5 memory and a 17.3” screen. For some reason the screen in mine is 1080p  360Hz, which I think only really makes sense for eSports players. Personally I see it as  a bit of a waste on a machine this powerful,  but to be fair there are also  other options like 4K 120Hz. You can check out other configurations and  current prices with the link below the video. I’m guessing 1080p could also be cheaper  and if you do plan on using this as a true desktop replacement and connecting screens  to it, then I guess in that case there’s no point spending more money to get a better  laptop screen. So at least there are options. The GT77 has a MUX switch, so we can disable the integrated graphics to get a speed boost in  games, but at the expense of worse battery life. Unfortunately there’s no  Advanced Optimus or G-Sync, but Adaptive Sync is available when Optimus is on. The color gamut was ok for a gaming machine and  contrast was good. It doesn’t get super bright, but I consider anything over 300 nits at full  brightness to be good enough for indoor use.The MSI Center software, the  control panel for the laptop, appears to let us enable or  disable Display OverDrive, however I didn’t actually measure any  response time difference with it on or off. Based on the excellent average  grey-to-grey response time of 3.8ms, I’m assuming overdrive is on,  as there was a little overshoot. It’s a great result compared to other  laptops, but not quite the 2.78ms needed  for transitions to occur within the  refresh window. Though to be fair, none of the other 1080p 360Hz screens  I’ve tested could pull that off either. The total system latency is the amount of time  between a mouse click and when a gunshot fire appears on the screen in CS:GO, and the GT77  was the second fastest machine tested so far. It’s only slightly behind MSI’s GE76, but honestly  half a millisecond is within the margin of error. Backlight bleed wasn’t great. My partner said  she’s never noticed bleed during normal use on any other laptop, until the Titan, but  this will vary between laptops and panels.  The whole front of the lid sticks out a  little which makes it easy to open up.The screen goes back 135 degrees,  which was plenty for normal viewing. There’s a 720p camera above the screen in the  middle and it has IR for Windows Hello face unlock. I would have preferred to  see 1080p in such a pricey machine. This is how the camera and microphone  look and sound and this is how it sounds while typing on the mechanical keyboard, so you can hear it a bit and as you can  see the screen does wobble a little too.The mechanical keyboard has per-key RGB  backlighting. All keys and secondary functions get lit up, and there are 4  levels of brightness which can be cycled through with the F8 shortcut key. There’s no  shortcut for changing the lighting effect, so you’ll have to open up the  SteelSeries software to change it. This is also used to manage the RGB  lighting that spews out of the back, the two strips just above on the rear air  vents, and the MSI logo on the lid. All of these can be customized individually or  you can just use the built in effects. Back to the mechanical keyboard. It’s using  Cherry MX ultra low profile switches with 1.8mm of key travel. I thought it felt great to type  with, nice and clicky, though as you’d expect, it does sound a little louder  compared to most other laptops.There’s also this Cherry MX logo  below the keyboard that lights up, apparently it’s critical that you  don’t forget what switches you’re  using. The smaller right shift key might  annoy some people, but I don’t use it. The power button is part of the keyboard, and  accidentally pressing it will put it to sleep unless you change this default behavior in  Windows. Other MSI laptops require you to 

hold the power button down for a few seconds  first, but that’s not the case with the Titan. The touchpad is smooth, fairly big,  clicks down anywhere and works well. There’s a fingerprint scanner to the right of  the touchpad, and I found it quite accurate. Black metallic finishes make  fingerprints more obvious, but they’re easy enough to  clean with a microfiber cloth. There are front facing speakers on either side of  the keyboard, as well as underneath down the front on the left and right sides. Generally  I don’t find MSI laptops to sound good, but I’d say the Titan was at least above average  compared to others, but still not amazing. There’s some bass and it gets quite loud, but there was  palm rest vibration even at lower volume levels. The latencymon results weren’t looking very good. The left side from the back has  the rectangular power input, two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, a UHS-III  SD card slot and 3.5mm audio combo jack. The right side from the front has  a third USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port, two Thunderbolt 4 Type-C ports, Mini DisplayPort  and HDMI outputs followed by 2.5 gigabit ethernet. Although ethernet is not facing the  preferred way, I found it high enough that I could still get my finger under to  press down on the tab of the ethernet cable. Neither of those two Type-C ports could be used  to charge the laptop and that was the case with MSI’s GE76 as well. Maybe there’s just not as much  point delivering such a small amount of power to such a beast like this. I don’t know,  but it would have been nice to have. Now with optimus off, both of those two  Type-C ports, the Mini DisplayPort and HDMI port all connect directly to the  Nvidia graphics. But if we turn optimus on, then both of those two Type-C ports  don’t have any display output at all. The HDMI port could run my LG B9 TV at 4K 120Hz  8-bit with G-Sync, so variable refresh rate. There was also a strange problem when running  games on an external screen connected to the HDMI port. With optimus off, the performance  was garbage, but with optimus on it worked perfectly fine. Now it shouldn’t matter if  optimus is on or off when we’re connecting an external screen to the HDMI port, because  it’s going to the Nvidia graphics regardless. But for some reason optimus just had to be on  for the frame rate to actually be any good. I don’t know if this is an Nvidia bug or  what, because I have seen this exact same problem in another Alienware laptops  - it’s not something unique to MSI.There are 11 Phillips head screws to remove to  get inside, and they’re all the same length. I found it quite easy to access using my usual pry  tools. I’ll leave a link to them below the video. Inside we’ve got the battery down the front, 4  memory slots just above that, as well as 4 M.2 slots. The one on the left with an SSD installed  supports PCIe Gen 5 and connects to the CPU, while the second installed SSD supports Gen 4,  but it also connects to the CPU M.2 slots are also Gen 4, but they connect via  the chipset, and the Wi-Fi 6E card is on the left. Just in case you missed that, that’s 4  DDR5 memory slots for up to 128 gigs of RAM and 4 M.2 slots for up to 32TB if  you used 8TB drives, crazy stuff! As a result of all that extra upgradeability,  it’s no surprise that the GT77 has the second best score in this area. It’s only beaten  by the Clevo X170 from last year which gets extra points for a removable  battery and upgradeable CPU and GPU.Both 1TB PCIe Gen 4 NVMe M.2 SSDs that came  in my GT77 were performing very nicely. There aren’t exactly a whole lot of Gen 5 SSDs on the  market just yet, but once those are available even higher speeds should be possible. The  SD card slot was performing well enough, but I’ve seen more than double this on other  laptops. The card sits most of the way into the machine but it doesn’t click in, you can just  pull it straight out without first pushing in. The Wi-Fi performance is alright, but there are  a number of other laptops with Killer Wi-Fi that  are doing a bit better. It’s slightly ahead  of the GE76 which had the same Wi-Fi card. The Titan is powered by the largest  possible 4-Cell 99.9Wh battery. The MSI Center software has Display Power Saver  enabled by default. This lowers the screen’s  refresh rate down to 60Hz when you unplug  the charger and then automatically reverses it when you plug back in. A lower screen  refresh rate uses less power, and this is why the screen flashes black during this  process. My testing was done with this enabled. With optimus enabled it lasted for just over 5  hours in my YouTube playback test. I normally turn off RGB lighting effects here, but I forgot to do  that the first time so I figured I’d include that  result too as it shows us we lose about half  an hour of run time just having RGB enabled. The battery life surprised me, with other desktop  replacements I’ve seen worse battery life, but that wasn’t the case for the Titan.  To be fair, those older DTR machines had desktop processors which are probably more power  hungry. 5 hours isn’t amazing compared to the AMD laptops at the top of the graph, but it’s decent  when compared to other Intel 12th gen machines. Let’s check out thermals next. There are multiple  heat pipes shared between the CPU and GPU, and unlike most other laptops, the  Titan has 4 fans. MSI confirmed to  me that both the CPU and GPU are covered  with their new phase-change thermal pad, which stays in a solid state until  it warms to 45 degrees Celsius. There are holes on the bottom panel above all  of the fans for air intake, and some more intake vents on the back section that sticks out, and  these also run below the screen on the front. Air gets exhausted out of the left and  right sides as well as out of the back. We can see the entire rear side is an exhaust and  covered by heatsink fins. So better cooling has been prioritized rather than having ports here. The MSI Center software let’s us change between different performance modes, which from lowest  to highest are silent, balanced and extreme performance. Extreme mode applies a little  70MHz overclock to the GPU core by default, but you can change that here. Extreme  mode also lets you enable cooler boost, which sets the fans to full speed, or you  can also go to advanced mode to customize it. You can hold the function key and press the up arrow key to enable cooler boost  at any time to max the fan out, regardless of the performance mode in use.  This works in Linux too, no software required. By default my Titan came with a -0.05v  undervolt applied to the CPU. This can be changed through the BIOS as the HX processor is  completely unlocked, just like Intel’s K series The temperatures were fine when just sitting  there idle. The rest of the results are from combined CPU and GPU stress tests which aim  to represent a worst case full load scenario.  Most applications don’t fully load both  the CPU and GPU at the same time like this. It was the warmest in silent mode and then  got cooler as we stepped up through the higher performance modes. Most other laptops get  warmer in the higher performance modes because  more power equals more heat, but not  here. The cooling pad I test with, linked below the video, was able to reduce the  CPU and GPU temps by 6 degrees Celsius. The CPU gets warmer if I manually boost its power  limit with Intel XTU, but the GPU gets cooler. These are the clock speeds for the same tests just  shown. We can see why the CPU gets warmer when I  boost the power limit. It’s because the clock  speeds in the blue bars are much higher now. 4.3GHz is close to the 4.4 all core  turbo boost speed for the 8 P cores, so that’s quite impressive given the GPU only  lowers by 100MHz. Otherwise the differences in speed between extreme mode with the fans on  auto, maxed out, or with the cooling pad weren’t  too different. This is because there wasn’t  thermal throttling in these modes, so boosting  the fan speed or adding the pad just lowered  temperatures without giving a performance boost. By default, the CPU is limited to 75  watts in balanced and extreme modes. 75 is quite high when you consider that  most other laptops limit the processor to 45  or 55 watts in a combined CPU and GPU stress  test. We can also see that by manually increasing the CPU power limit, it needed 106 watts in  order to hit the maximum turbo boost speed, but to do this the GPU had to lower by about 30  watts, it’s a tradeoff. The 3080 Ti in the Titan can run up to 175 watts with dynamic boost,  the highest allowed by Nvidia, but with the CPU also active it would run at 170 watts, same  as MSI’s GE76. Check out silent mode though, the CPU is limited to 30 watts but the GPU is  surpassing 100 watts. If you recall the GPU was actually thermal throttling there, but as you’ll  hear soon it’s surprisingly quiet in this mode. Here’s how an actual game performs with  the different performance modes in use. See what I mean? Over 100 FPS in shadow of  the tomb raider at 1440p in silent mode, that’s an excellent result, just wait until  you hear the fan noise in a bit. But spoiler it is possible to play games with decent  performance without the machine being too loud. Although the CPU gets limited to 75 watts with the  GPU also active, it’s able to go higher when the GPU is idle. Take Cinebench for example, silent  mode still limits the CPU to 30 watts as before, but now balanced mode runs at 100 watts.  Extreme mode runs at 160 watts initially, but that much wattage is enough to  overcome even the Titan’s cooling, so after a few minutes it drops down to  around 135 watts due to thermal constraints. Intel’s spec sheet lists 157 watts as  the maximum turbo power for the 12900HX,  but as you can see here with Cinebench  running Hardware Info was reporting up to 160. It’s the best result when compared to  other laptops, which makes sense as this is the first time we’ve had this new 16 core  24 thread CPU in for testing. The single  core score isn’t much different compared  to other Intel 12th gen i9 processors,  which was to be expected as they have  the same 5.0GHz single core boost speed. This is the result of averaging 3 10 minute tests,  so this result accounts for thermal throttling. Just for a bit of fun, here’s how things look if  we instead just do one run of Cinebench without  a time limit on the Titan. This would be before  thermal throttling kicks in, and it seems to be how most people out there run Cinebench. Given the  amount of customization available in the BIOS, you could probably find a middle ground between this  and the last long term result with some tweaking. Performance drops back when we unplug the charger  and instead run purely off of battery power. A number of other Intel 12th gen laptops with  fewer cores and threads are able to do better, both in terms of single and multicore  result, so this isn’t super impressive. Especially when we consider that a few 8 core 16  thread AMD machines were higher in both regards. Most laptops I test sit around 30 degrees Celsius  when doing nothing at idle, and the GT77 was the  same. With the stress tests going in silent  mode remember the GPU is thermal throttling, but it’s also still running games well.  It’s fairly similar in balanced mode, the palm rest appears cold but it feels a  little warm as the metal finish conducts heat. The hot spot on the right is warmer,  but not hot. Extreme mode with the fans on automatic was a little cooler despite it now  performing better with higher power limits, it’s warm but it felt fine. With the  fans maxed out it’s much the same,  but cooler compared to most other laptops. The  fans are loud now though, let’s have a listen. The fans were still audible when idling,  it was a sort of low humming sound,  maybe because there’s 4 of them. The  stress tests in silent mode are fairly quiet considering the gaming performance shown  earlier. Balanced mode was similar to how most  gaming laptops perform in their highest mode,  while extreme mode takes things to another level  and is very loud. Turning on cooler boost  only further increased the noise a little, so with auto fans enabled it can  still get quite loud when under load. I didn’t bother with overclocking  here because thermal and power limits already made it challenging to hit the  all core turbo boost speed at stock.  Now let’s find out how the GT77  actually performs in games and see how it compares against other laptops! Cyberpunk 2077 was tested the same on all laptops,  and I’ve got Titan shown by the red highlight.  It’s no surprise to see it at the top, I mean it is the best specced machine  that we’ve tested so far. It’s only 5.5%  higher in average frame rate compared to MSI’s GE76 with the same RTX 3080 Ti and same  power limit range, but hey winning’s winning.It’s also on top at the higher 1440p resolution,  but at just 3 FPS or so ahead of the GE76, it’s probably not going to be a difference  that most people would actually notice. Sure it’s the best performing machine, but at  what cost? We’ll get to the price in a moment. The Titan was at the top of the results in  Control at 1080p, but again a 4 FPS boost  over their previous top end GE76 isn’t anything  groundbreaking. Similar deal at 1440p too, both the GT77 and GE76 have the same GPU with same  power limit, so unless games can benefit from the additional CPU cores and cache from the HX  chip, don’t expect the Titan to be that far ahead. I’m going to compare the Titan against a desktop  PC soon, make sure you’re subscribed for that!  Interestingly the Titan wasn’t the best in Red  Dead Redemption 2. I’m not really sure why, I  double checked the results on a different day and  there was no change. The other laptops ahead of it  only have a slight lead, but still you’d expect  a desktop replacement machine like the Titan to be the clear winner. The gap between the  GT77 and GE76 actually gets larger at 1440p. I guess it’s possible the game was updated in some  way recently that makes the Titan appear worse, unfortunately I don’t still have the GE76  to retest. Or maybe it could be that this game just doesn’t behave as well with  more cores and threads for some reason. Here are the 3DMark results for those that find  them useful, now for some content creator tests. Adobe Premiere was tested with the Puget Systems  benchmark tool, and the Titan was scoring 10%  higher than the next best result, which was MSI’s  thinner GS77. Although the GS77 has a lower GPU  power limit, it had dual rank memory installed  which I believe is why it’s higher than others. The Titan was also the best result in Adobe  Photoshop too, scoring almost 7% higher compared to the previous best, which again was  MSI’s GS77. This test generally favors single threaded performance, which is why the top  of the graph is full of i9 12th gen machines. DaVinci Resolve cares more about GPU power, but  despite the GE76 just below it having the same RTX 3080 Ti and same GPU power limit range,  the GT77 was still able to score 9% higher, so perhaps other factors like the additional  CPU cores and extra cache are helping it out. We’ve also tested SPEC view perf which tests  out various professional 3D workloads. MSI’s advanced BIOS can be unlocked  by entering this epic cheat code. Just like previous MSI laptops, you get a seriously  crazy level of options to control through here, and combined with the fact that the HX chip  is unlocked, there’s quite a lot you can do in here from undervolting, overclocking,  or adjusting power and thermal limits. Linux support was tested with an Ubuntu 22.04 live  CD. By default out of the box, keyboard, touchpad, speakers, and ethernet work. Wi-Fi wasn’t  recognized without, probably needs some drivers. Keyboard shortcuts to adjust volume, change screen  brightness and keyboard brightness work, and so does the max fan shortcut key. I wasn’t given the  option to use a fingerprint login when creating a new user account, and although you can’t change  the RGB lighting effect in Linux, whatever you set  in Windows through the SteelSeries software  is remembered even without Windows loaded. Let’s discuss pricing and availability  next. This will of course change over time so refer to the link below  the video for current sales. At the time of recording, the GT77 has  only just launched, so I can’t find a lot of information. The only place I’ve seen  it listed is on Newegg through HID Evolution starting at $4500 USD for the 4K 120Hz screen  option, but I would expect more configurations  and more availability as time goes on. Again,  check that link in the description for updates.  MSI’s GT77 is starting a whole new era  of desktop replacement style machines,  and it’s proving that they don’t need to be as  thick while still delivering more performance. Intel’s new HX series is able to  offer good performance without  resorting to them having  to use desktop processors. Though I suppose using a desktop socket  would mean that this would be upgradeable, but I guess the compromise is it would  probably also make the machine a bit thicker. Other companies are of course  using those HX processors too, but the Titan is the first one that I’ve seen  pushing the platform to the limit by offering 4  M.2 slots and 4 memory slots. Obviously not  everyone will need that much upgradeability,  but if you do this could be an option. If you’re after ultimate performance but don’t  care quite as much about portability but still want something a bit more portable compared to  a full blown desktop PC that needs an external power source, keyboard, mouse and monitor,  then the GT77 could be worth considering. Assuming you’re happy to pay the premium,  because as we’ve seen it’s definitely not cheap. 

  In this Blog you can get all A to Z information about MSI’s new Titan GT77 Laptop 

Note; (This blog is written by one of the best tech reviewers so if you want to buy this laptop so kindly read this. I hope so this blog help you so much) 

Some pictures of MSI’s new Titan GT77 Laptop 

 

 

                                           Back look of MSI’s new Titan GT77

                                           Close front look of MSI’s new Titan GT77

                                                            Close look of MSI’s new Titan GT77

                   

     

                                       Specs of screen MSI’s new Titan GT77

                          

 

              Thanks for coming.