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Its not OK to have a thick and heavy gaming laptop these days, unless you think you can still handle that heavy rig in your bags because you want all that powerful performance onboard. However, things don’t need to get that complicated with today’s modern laptops such as the MSI GE62 Apache Pro that we have been using in our labs, don’t let its thick aesthetics fool you because this is a 15-inch gaming laptop that weighs a mere 2.4kg and has some powerful hardware internals under the hood that you do not need to burn your wallet.
MSI GE62-2QF Pro Specifications (AIDA64)
Design and Hardware
The GE62 Apache Pro is marketed as a mid-range gaming laptop offering in the company’s portfolio. Despite of that, its design doesn’t show you its mid-range position, the laptop sports a brushed metal finishing on its lightweight magnesium alloy chassis and that curved line design on the chassis does remind us of car hoods, this is a premium looking machine that both professionals and gamers will tend to fall in love with.
When you have a huge form factor it also mean you could squeeze more ports out of the chassis, MSI isn’t stingy on that and has included a generous amount of input ports, including – three USB 3.0 ports, one HDMI 1.4, one mini DisplayPort 1.2, one Killer Gigabit Ethernet, one USB 2.0 port, and two gold plated audio/microphone port, there’s even an optical drive on the right should you ever need it.
MSI has made sure that the GE62 uses a matte non-touch display panel which is a necessity on a gaming laptop, I’m happy that MSI has kept the display resolution at Full HD as Windows 8.1 is terrible at managing QHD+ and UHD resolutions, and it is already sufficient for a great computing experience, the viewing angles are good and you could actually use it outdoors with the bright display, MSI has also added its True Color Technology software to produce vibrant and accurate colors, users can also choose to adjust the display color settings according to their liking.
MSI has given easy access to the laptop’s hardware internals and we could actually see all of the available expansion slots being used up, its motherboard layout is clean and simple, there’s two cooling fans that dissipates heat from the CPU and GPU, and you will need to be careful not to damage its speakers as they could come out pretty easily. Overall, the GE62 is a well built machine that we couldn’t really find flaws in its hardware.
User Experience and Performance
I’ve been carrying the GE62 around for a week and I have to say that the laptop isn’t a brick if you are carrying a backpack, the laptop has been my favorite on the go video editing laptop, its powerful Intel Core i7 processor and GeForce GTX 970M GPU has allowed me to perform video edits on Adobe Premiere Pro fast and smooth. Thanks to the Dual M.2 SATA SSD, startup speeds of the GE62 is crazily fast, I managed to clock around 8 seconds on a warm boot and waking up the laptop from standby is almost instant.
I work on the GE62 for long hours most of the time (gaming included), the laptop’s palm area has been really comfortable to lay my hands on and while you could hear the dual cooling fans whirring happily when the system is under load, the working area feels comfortably warm and there has not been any overheating issues.
The GE62 comes with a pair of Dynaudio powered speakers and subwoofer underneath and further enhanced by Nahimic audio engine, the audio experience has been truly immersive especially on headphones, in which you are able to hear extremely clear detail in games and movies, the speakers will work well in your small crib and you really don’t need to attach a pair of external speakers to amp up the volume, because it is really loud.
Apart from being a powerful working machine, the GE62 comes packed with a GTX 970M that packs 3GB of GDDR5 RAM, this is really surprising for a mid-range gaming laptop as the GPU is able to run most modern games decently in high graphics quality setting. In my tests, I forgo NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience optimized settings and tried tuning the graphics setting in games like GTA 5 and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and I’m able to achieve an average framerate of between 25-45 fps in these games, such performance is really commendable for a gaming laptop as these games are truly resource demanding in every way and you can’t run these games properly without a decent GPU.
Apart from graphics performance, I have to emphasize that NVIDIA has really done a great job on implementing GameWorks on the Maxwell chipset, this technology is able to make graphics more lively and realistic while maintaining great performance. For instance, human and animal hairs are being rendered in strands rather than a single texture, shadows in games are being rendered smoothly thanks to NVIDIA’s ShadowWorks.
While 4K gaming isn’t possible with some games, you are still able to hook the laptop to a 4K display with a 60Hz refresh rate over its mini DisplayPort – sorry folks, no G-SYNC here.
MSI’s GE62 has been a powerful companion for the past week and despite of that, the laptop’s battery life isn’t something favorable for the productive user, you will be hunting for wall sockets after an approximate 2.5 hours (60% brightness, Power Saving Mode, MSI Green Shift mode) of use, gaming with NVIDIA’s BatteryBoost (max. 30 fps) will get you around 1:45 hours of juice.
Benchmarks
The GE62 ran benchmarks with no issues, the system is plugged in to an AC source and power profile is set to Balanced mode to be fair to users.
Verdict
As a gaming laptop, MSI has once again impressed us with the GE62 Apache Pro with its great hardware performance out of the box. The laptop isn’t difficult to afford coming from a gamer’s point of view, the base configuration of the laptop will start from RM4699 with a GeForce GTX 960M GPU and up to RM5499 for our particular model. At this time of writing, MSI have already refreshed the laptop with 5th Generation Intel Core i7 CPU and you should be getting slightly better battery life out of the new models. The MSI GE62-2QF Apache Pro is a gaming laptop made for those power craving gamers on a budget and we see no reason to consider owning one, only if you could live without SLI and a 4K resolution display.
The Good:
+ Speedy system performance
+ Reasonably priced in hardware range
+ Good thermal system
+ Great keyboard typing experience
+ Generous amount of I/O ports
The Not so Good:
– Mediocre battery life
– Can still be heavy for some
This is a sponsored review made for MSI Notebook Malaysia.
