 With its factory tuning and data center DNA, an Intel 730 series SSD is an amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts. By popular demand, here is my video about the MSI GS60 Ghost, the super thin, super sexy gaming notebook that made big waves at CES 2014. So let's start with a brief rundown of the specs. It's got a Haswell 4th Gen Core i7-4700HQ quad-core processor that's clocked anywhere from 2.4 to 3.4 GHz depending on the turbo boost frequency. It's got a 15.6-inch 1920x1080 matte IPS display that uses embedded display port rather than a more traditional notebook interface internally, although don't worry too much about that. All you guys need to know is it looks very beautiful and motion blur doesn't seem to be a concern here. Huge points for using a nice IPS panel and not using a TN panel on a gaming notebook. I hope those days are behind us. It's got 16GB or 12GB of DDR3 memory depending on the skew and it comes with a GTX 860M 2GB with DDR5 memory graphics card, although there's a Pro model coming later that will have an 870M and will upgrade the screen to a 3K IPS panel. For storage, it has a 128GB M-SATA SSD with either a 1TB or 750GB 7200RPM drive and for network connectivity, it's got a 7260802.11ac Intel wireless card that also includes Bluetooth as well as a Killer E 2200GB LAN implementation with packet prioritization. The power brick is a little bit on the larger side, but at least it's thinner than a typical one. There could be some improvement here, especially with what we've seen from Razer with respect to how power bricks can be innovated on. Physically, the laptop is absolutely stunning. It's only 19.8mm thick, that makes it about 10% thinner than Gigabyte's P34G and 10% thicker than the Razer Blade 14. It weighs only 1.98kg, which makes it marginally lighter than the Razer Blade 14 in spite of its significantly larger screen and overall size. This is achieved with a special magnesium-lithium alloy construction that manages to feel solid in spite of the lightness of the material. The overall build quality of this notebook is a really strong point. There's about as much flex in the screen as my GX660 from a few years ago, except it's much much thinner and better looking. So we'll do a short tour of the ports around the outside of the notebook. Just gonna drop that there. Okay, so on the left-hand side we've got a ventilation port as well as a Kensington lock, power-in two USB 3 ports, microphone and headphone jacks. At the front we have all the indicator LEDs with everything from drive activity to wireless to caps lock. Then on the right-hand side we've got a USB 3 port, SD card reader, very nice, thank you MSI for including that, I still use them. HDMI out, mini display port out, that hardwired gigabit LAN I was talking about, and another ventilation port. Then at the back we've got two more ventilation ports and that is pretty much all she wrote. Now on the top of the notebook, once you've opened it up, you can see there's a massive grill here that I initially thought was for speakers, but actually it's for ventilation. The speakers are located instead near the bottom of the front of the notebook and beyond pointing out that their performance doesn't feel worthy of the Dyne Audio co-branding, I don't have too much to say about those. Speaking of branding though, the back of the notebook is absolutely beautiful. The brushed aluminum finish here looks even better in person than it does on camera and the subtly illuminated gaming series branding reminds me of a performance vehicle rather than tacky gamer bling like on MSI's earlier gaming notebooks. The one disadvantage here, as you can see I'm wearing gloves, is that it does tend to fingerprint pretty aggressively. The keyboard and touchpad locations, both Luke and I noticed almost immediately that something was a little bit different about this layout, but it took me about 30 minutes and a measuring tape to find exactly what was bothering me. First up, the touchpad is offset to the left and aligned directly below the home row. Second, the touchpad and keyboard have been moved down to make room for the grill and lone power button up at the top. This gives it a smaller wrist rest surface compared to other notebooks this size. The last thing I noticed was that the relocation of the start button, which is an unnecessary decision on a notebook with a fully programmable keyboard, shifted the spacebar to the left quite a bit and I used my right hand for space most often and it threw me off a bit at first to be barely hitting the right edge of the spacebar rather than being closer to the middle. But aside from those niggles about the layout, the tactile response of this SteelSeries co-branded RGB backlit keyboard is surprisingly solid and its lack of flex combined with a surprisingly long key travel distance makes it feel great considering that it's on a notebook this thin. All in all I was impressed with how quickly and accurately I could type after a short adjustment period and I consider the inclusion of the SteelSeries engine software powering it a bonus at this point. It gives you four layers of remapped or macroed functionality for every key per profile, an unlimited number of profiles, a wide variety of LED effects including wave, breathing, and multiple colors, and even some other neat features like a heat map of your most frequently used keys so you can analyze your gaming style and optimize your key mappings for the shortest travel distances. The touchpad is less exceptional so all I'll say is that the subtle chrome accent around the outside looks really really sharp, other than that it's a touchpad. And okay, changing gears a bit, I really wasn't sure where in the review to put this, but this notebook features Nvidia's new battery boost that lets you save GPU power by entering a limit to the number of frames the GPU will draw per second when the laptop is on battery. I found a spot in Crysis that runs at 50 FPS on wall power and 40 FPS on battery normally and I ran it both with a 30 FPS limiter and without it. Then I used a time lapse camera to see when the battery actually ran down. My limited scenario, I only did one test, achieved 47 minutes of playtime versus 45 minutes of playtime without the limiter. So I'll take the 10 FPS over the 2 minutes of extra time in this case, but it's obvious to me that this feature requires some more investigation. So the only real takeaway here is that if you're not playing at low details or running older games that your GPU can plow through at really high frame rates, you're unlikely to see the two times battery life that Nvidia says the technology is capable of delivering. Some other thoughts now, both Razer with the Blade 14 and Gigabyte with the Aorus X7 made a big fuss about their cooling implementation, but MSI has been relatively quiet and even covers up the bottom of the notebook with a big warranty void if removed sticker to prevent inexperienced users from mucking about in there. But the good news is that as long as you don't physically damage the inside, they will still honor the one year global and two year local warranty. So let's find out what makes the GS60 so cool while keeping it within reasonable noise levels. First up, it's obvious why MSI doesn't want end users trying to upgrade this thing. Other than the 2.5 inch hard drive and wifi module, nothing is accessible without removing the entire motherboard. We can get a good look at the cooling solution though, so there are two blower fan cooling modules that are connected via heat pipes to the CPU and GPU and that pull air in from both the top and the bottom of the notebook when it's open and then exhaust it out both the sides and the rear. We can also see that the sound system includes two speakers that I didn't notice before that fire down and away from the user at the back of the unit, although they didn't help much. I also noticed while I was poking around that while MSI's website says the SSD is mSATA, the slot it's plugged into is in fact m.2, a newer standard that is a derivative of SATA Express and capable of higher throughput than mSATA with an appropriate SSD. On top of that, there are actually two of them and MSI confirmed that they are both functional and a handy notebook owner could easily throw a couple of m.2 SSDs in there in raid 0 for a hefty storage upgrade. With that out of the way, let's take a look at our actual temperatures. For a gaming notebook, I expect the keyboard to stay relatively cool so as not to heat up your hands while you're gaming and I use the chassis temperature near the rear exhaust as a gauge of the overall cooling efficiency of the notebook. I run Crysis 1 for both of these tests and I'd say the results are great to the point where the trade-off between cooling and onboard sound may have been worth it but that's going to come down to the individual to make that decision. Alright, so who's the competition for this notebook? Obvious ones are the Mac Pro 15", the Razer Blade 14 or maybe the Aorus X7 but those are all somewhat different sizes with different feature sets and very different price points. So that makes the conversation here less about how does it stack up to the other well-built yet thin and super light 15.6-inch gaming grade notebooks with HD displays since there ain't really much out there and more about who is this product for? I mean well the short answer is that it's targeted at the same sorts of folks as those other models, that is to say on-the-go gamers but with a couple of features that really differentiate it. Its weight to screen size ratio is a big one and so is the inclusion of a full-size number pad, something that will be important to many road warriors who want to get some work done on the thing while they're traveling. The great feeling keyboard and the fact that all the gamer bling except the badge on the back is optional and can be configured in software keeps this notebook from falling into the no one with the money to afford this would want to be seen with it trap and finally the strong specs, very limited bloatware although I did see a copy of Norton there and fairly aggressive pricing compared to other well-built thin gaming notebooks makes it a very compelling option. Speaking of compelling options, Chiro is back with another deal for Linus Tech Tips viewers. Their Grip 2 portable battery is on for $999 at the link in the video description. It's small and hand-shaped so you can carry it around with you and its 1 amp charging port is hooked up to a surprisingly large 5200 mAh internal battery that has enough capacity to charge an iPhone twice with capacity to spare and even the beefiest Android phones at least once or more. It's available in four different colors. I've got the blue one here and the high quality internal battery can be recharged around 500 times. Now if this sounded like a sales pitch I'm about to make things even worse because act now and I'll throw in this flashlight a $999 value free of charge. Wait that can't be right. Oh wait that can't be right. Hold on. Sorry. No no it's not free of charge. It's rechargeable and the grip 2 is the flashlight for a flashlight so fantastic. Anyway guys like and share this video if you liked it. 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