15.6-inch laptops with the world’s fastest mobile GPU aren’t exactly a dime a dozen. Actually there has just been one so far, so this release is far more interesting than, say, the overblown hype surrounding the Razer Blade.
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580M is considerably faster than anything you usually find in a 15-inch machine, including the most common GTX 560M. Only the Clevo P150HM (often sold under other names such as Origin PC’s EON 15-S or Sager’s 8150P) has had the option for cramming in this tremendously fast mobile graphics card in a portable 15-inch chassis. At least until today, when MSI has taken the lid off its brand new GT685–a laptop that is not likely to replace the current GT683DXR (with the same design and a GTX 570M), but is more likely to be offered alongside it as a faster and more expensive alternative.
What’s also very interesting is that MSI mentions “Optimus” in the press release, which may imply that this laptop comes with NVIDIA’s graphics-switching feature Optimus. This technology saves a great deal of power and battery life by seamlessly switching to integrated Intel graphics when the laptop runs on battery power. The lack of Optimus or AMD’s version of switchable graphics is the Achilles heel for most of its high-end competitors, since using a high performance GPU alone has a detrimental effect on battery life. This does not equal better battery life for playing games of course, but it certainly improves it in almost every other situation. A caveat is that MSI calls it “Optimus overclocking display technology”, so maybe the manufacturer has invented a new use for the term.
Besides the major graphics upgrade, the MSI GT685 looks identical to the GT683R and GT683DXR. It is equipped with a number of funky orange LEDs along the sides and on the lid. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the keyboard, which is still not backlit. The remaining internal components are also the same, including a quad-core Core i7 processor, dual hard drives in RAID 0 as well as an optical drive. It also has the proprietary MSI feature called Turbo Drive Engine (TDE) that overclocks the laptop with the push of a button.
