MSI shows off 4.1GHz Haswell gaming laptop

MSI shows off 4.1GHz Haswell gaming laptop

The GT70 Dragon Edition 2 Extreme machine, which is the company's top-of-the-line offering, is built from ground up for speed.

TAIPEI -- Instead of competing in the overcrowded Ultrabook market, Taiwan-based MSI hopes to differentiate its brand with more gaming laptops. Its latest flagship offering in this segment is the GT70 Dragon Edition 2 Extreme, a large 17.3-inch notebook packing some pretty powerful hardware under the hood.

At the heart of this machine is an Intel Core i7 (Haswell) processor, which is overclocked up to 4.1GHz by the company. The chip is specially "binned" so that it can run at the faster clock speed without requiring more voltage to maintain stability, while a proprietary Cooler Boost 2 technology keeps the system cool.

Graphics-wise, the GT70 can support a whole range of discrete GPUs from Nvidia, including a GTX 780M boosting 4GB of GDDR5 memory. To further enhance the overall performance, three SSDs in RAID 0 configuration are used. Completing the package is a keyboard from SteelSeries and an onboard headphone amplifier.

Pricing for the GT70 Dragon Edition 2 Extreme starts from US$1,500 and it can go as high as US$3,000, depending on the configuration. According to an MSI spokesperson, this model is now available in limited quantity globally.

MSI GS70.

Also showcased at the company's booth in Computex is the GS70, which has been touted as a gaming Ultrabook. It has a similar 17.3-inch screen like the GT70, but is only 21.8mm thin and weighs 2.6kg without batteries. MSI claims that the GS70 is the first of its kind in the Wintel category, though it resembles an Apple MacBook Pro in some ways.

Other distinctions include an Nvidia Geforce GTX765M GPU, as well as dual-SSD (in RAID 0 configuration) and 16GB RAM. The GT70 can support up to 32GB of RAM. Besides gaming, the GS70 is also targeted at professionals who need workstation-class performance on-the-go. The MSI GS70 will be launched in Aug worldwide and is expected to retail between US$1,600 and US$2,000.