#MSI BURN RECOVERY REVIEW WINDOWS#
Keys are in their usual places, save one - there’s only one Windows key, and it’s on the right. The keys are responsive and offer a fair amount of travel with a satisfying (but not overly loud) click following every tap. The full-sized keyboard attached to the GT70 does not disappoint, with wide chiclet keys that spaced evenly, leaving plenty of room for my large mitts. I’m generally opposed to slapping logos and the like onto PCs, but SteelSeries has earned a reputation for making great peripherals. The keyboard is designed by SteelSeries - it even says as much right on the bottom left corner of the tray. A set of nice headphones will arguably serve a bit better, but these speakers will fill a room with sound that doesn’t disappoint. Audio is loud, and while the bass isn’t exactly spine-tingling, there’s a fair amount of oomph pumping out of the cavernous body. The subwoofer is underneath, towards the rear of the chassis - the raised rubber feet keep the laptop from being muffled. The pair of speakers sit at opposite ends of the laptop just over the keyboard tray, pumping audio directly at you.
The Dynaudio 2.1 speakers, by contrast, are actually rather nice. It gets worse when the screen is tilted even slightly - purples become blues, reds become pink - so if you plan on watching movies on this machine you’ll want to find a comfortable position and stay there. That’s not exactly a shining endorsement, but it’s apt: move slightly right or left of center, and the color reproduction starts to suffer. If you’re sitting still, directly in front of the 17.3-inch, 1920 x 1080 display, you won’t have too much trouble with its performance. The Gigabit ethernet, VGA, HDMI and eSATA ports are located on the rear alongside with the power plug. On the right, you'll find a pair of USB 2.0 ports and the Blu-ray burner. On the left, you'll find three USB 3.0 ports, a multi-format card reader, and the headphone, microphone, line in, and line out jacks. The GT70 offers a fair selection of ports scattered about its base. A pair of 64GB mSATA solid state drives arranged in RAID 0 host the operating system and applications offering limited but speedy storage, while a 750GB hard drive rounds out the pack. The GT70 is well equipped for the beefy-gaming rig role, sporting a quad-core 2.3GHz Core i7-3610QM, which is backed by 16GB of RAM and a 3GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 670M GPU.
That said, beauty remains in the eye of the beholder and aesthetic appeal is in no way a deal breaker. Truth be told, my only real gripe with the GT70's design is that it looks a bit dull - clichéd, even. The 17.3-inch display will start to flex if you put the slightest bit of pressure on the lid, but that never presented itself as much of a problem while I used the machine. The MSI logo is arrayed in the center and glows softly when the machine is powered up. The brushed aluminum lid sits on sturdy hinges, opening and closing slowly but smoothly. The right side of the palm rest is covered in badges and stickers which ruin both the look and feel annoying, but common and easy enough to remove. The chassis feels solid (as it should, given the size), and the plastic gives way to an aluminum palm rest. In fact, tucked indoors is probably the best place for it: I wouldn't go so far as to call the GT70 ugly, but the slight racing aesthetic and bulky plastic chassis telegraph "hardcore gamer" in the least flattering sort of way.
At 8.6 pounds it probably won't twist your back out of shape, but you'll want to consider keeping it on a desk. The MSI GT70 is pretty big - but you probably expected as much from a gaming laptop.