Inside the box you’ll find the commonly seen drivers CD, User’s guide, Warranty guide, catalogue,Â
- Up & down arrow keys fror screen brightness adjustmentÂ
- left & right arrow keys for volume adjustmentÂ
- numpad 0 for enabling / disabling the system sound
- F4: P1 shortcut key for Instant Play feature that launch a designated application when pressed
- F5: Eco mode (power saving mode) for lower power consumptionÂ
- F6: Enable / Disable the webcam.
- F7: The SHIFT function to toggle system performance according to your needsÂ
The type of key switches used on the keyboard is the scissor switch which is commonly used on low profile keyboards.Â
Software: MSI Dragoon Gaming Center
System Monitor is a pretty useful tool for one to monitor the system performance, shift mode, temperature and network speed. All the details is presented in the simplest form which can be easily understandable.
The Utility allows you to compile all frequent used applications into the list for the ease of access.
The instant play tab allows you to add your most frequent played games to the list and launch it via the P1 function key located at the F4 key.
Display & audio tab allows you to adjust the volume for speakers/microphone and display brightness/gamma.
The mouse tab, allows you to control the mouse pointer speed, double click speed and scrolling line number easily without having to access the mouse properties in Control Panel.
The resource release tab lists out all the active programs and you can select the programs to be killed to release resources for the designated games when instant play is activated.
Software: SteelSeries Engine
With this feature you can customize the buttons with macros according to your liking and needs.
You can customize the effect, lighting and colors of the RGB LED available on the GS70 which later can be activated with FN key + 1 / 2 /3 / 4 keys for each configured layer.
Not a fancy feature but it might comes in handy if the keyboard layout doesn’t match the current keyboard on your GS70.
Here you can configure which profile to be activated when an application is launched to suit your current mood.
Temperature
- Under green mode, the CPU and GPU temperature peaked at 74°C and 76°C respectively – a little hot but still within the bearable range.Â
- When we shifted to comfort mode, the system performance is changed to balanced mode and the temperature of both CPU and GPU now peaked at 80°C and 83°C respectively.Â
- Shifting to sport mode makes the system performs at its best, the temperature of both CPU and GPU now peaked at 83°C and 86°C respectively
Battery Life
The battery life isn’t looking very good when it comes to heavy use – it lasted only for about 1 hour 21 minutes under heavy gaming session on high performance mode, around 3 hour 14 minutes on movie session and 4 hour 23 minutes on web surfing.
MSI included adjustable system performance feature is a great feature to have on a gaming notebook as it greatly improve battery life by reducing the system performance so it is less taxing on the battery.Â
Gaming
Most games are playable when we’re on Green mode and Comfort mode, except for Crysis 3. Shifting to Sports mode sacrifices the temperature for greater good – it unleashes the maximum potential of the GS 2QE and most games tested runs at decent FPS with no significant stuttering, but you will need a decent cooling pad for this.
We used the Far Cry 4, an open-world survival shooter video game from Ubisoft Montreal to check on some of the new feature we can expect from the GTX 970M:Â
Without enhancement from NVIDIA Hairworks, the fur of this goat that we’ve hunted down with a flat texture look – dry and stiff.
With enhancement from NVIDIA Hairworks, the fur of this goat looks much fluffier and lively.
Low lighting quality: The graphics looks great but what’s the big deal about this lighting quality anyway? Let’s see what NVIDIA’s Godrays can do.
High lighting quality (Godrays): And this is the lighting quality set to high. Indeed, it looks way much better and realistic.
The Dynaudio speakers delivers clear and powerful sound stage during gaming and movie session that is pretty satisfying but maxing out the volume somewhat creates a crackling sound – seems that this applies only for movies we’ve watched on the GS70 2QE, as everything sounds just fine during gaming session. Music wise, classical / ochestral music sounds the best among various genre of musics tested.
KeyboardÂ
When it comes to gaming keyboard, we’re expecting for design and feature that is beneficial to gamers. Designed by the renown gaming peripherals manufacturer SteelSeries, the keyboard on the GS70 2QE Stealth Pro comes with fancy lighting and key mapping that appears to be helpful for the gamers, but we find that the keyboard itself is lacking of the N-key rollover feature that has been widely used on most expensive gaming keyboards on the market.
We’ve tried the commonly used key combination for FPS games and everything seems well for now.
The commonly used key combination for racing games seems okay as well.
When we tried playing rhythm games that requires simultaneous keys to be pressed at the same time, the signal blocking issue arises and the maximum amount of keys that can be registered simultaneously is limited to 6 keys (not including modifier keys). We’ve tried configuring the key configuration on other area of the keyboard and there’s not way for us to resolve the issue.
In terms of graphics performance, we find the benchmark result with FPS that circles around the value of 30 is still a comfortable FPS count to game on. Do note that the FPS we’re getting is the result of having the graphics settings set to ultra, if you feel uncomfortable with FPS lower than 60, turning down the graphics to high / medium will yield higher FPS count.Â
Battery life and temperature has always been a concern when it comes to slim design notebooks, the performance shifting feature might not be a total solution to overcome the shortcoming, but it’s a pretty sweet feature to have on the GS70 2QE.Â
- Green mode sacrifices performance for lower temperature and lower power consumption
- Comfort mode is the balance point in between Green mode and Sport mode
- Sport mode sacrifices temperature and battery life for greater performance
Still, if you still wanted to enjoy a longer gaming session on battery, shifting to Green mode and lowering the graphics quality of the game is recommended.
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Another subjective issue that we would like to highlight is the keyboard roll-over feature. While not everyone is going to press all of the keys on the keyboard at the same time, the N-key rollover is still an important feature that should be cater of if its targeted audience is to be gamers from all kinds of game genres.
Pros
- Slim, stylish and portable
- Instead of being just plain black, it comes with 3 color variant
- Decent audio performance
- Good graphics performance
- Customizable keyboard macros, LED colors and effect
- Adjustable system performance helps to extend battery life and lower temperature
Cons
- Expensive
- Gets very hot under long hours of gaming
Subjective
- Keyboard doesn’t comes with N-key rollover feature
