 I try to be unbiased, I really do, but the truth is I came into this review desperately wanting this notebook to be the one, my Neo, because it promises something that's never been delivered before. A teaser for the upcoming Yeti Pro review? No, we do that all the time. No, I'm talking about the full portability of like an ultra-class type form factor device with the gaming capability of a desktop and even some upgrade ability to boot, putting it in the tough position where the only possible results are the deep satisfaction of a long time desire being finally fulfilled or the disappointment that follows when said desire rips a gigantic fart right in the middle that kills the whole mood. So which one is it? We'll have to start with a physical tour of the portable components by itself because while alone it doesn't redefine a product category or anything, and it certainly doesn't justify the price tag by itself, it's a pretty darn fine little notebook packed into this thin astonishingly light magnesium aluminum blend chassis as a Core i7-4870HQ quad-core processor, 16 gigs of RAM, 156 gigs of RAID 0 SSD storage, Intel Iris Pro 5200 graphics, a really nice 13.3 inch matte finish IPS 1080p display, which only needed to be touched to be perfect for me, and a 47 watt hour battery that lasted for two hours and 25 minutes in the PCMark 8 work battery life test. On the left of the unit is a lock, ventilation port, USB 3.0, and discrete headphone and microphone jacks, a nice touch for a gaming notebook. Around the front is this kind of weird illuminated strip thing that I personally think looks pretty cool, but I think should be possible to turn off since the rest of the notebook is so professional and non-gamery looking by comparison. On the right is an SD card slot, another USB 3.0 port and HDMI 1.4B port, a killer gigabit ethernet jack, and a power input for the unremarkable, what reasonably sized included power brick. The only improvement I'd probably make to I.O. would be mini display port instead of HDMI, and maybe another USB 3.0 port if it could be done. The keyboard is white LED backlit with a stiffer than usual tactile feel to it, but reasonable key travels. I rate it okay. The layout is solid with no cardinal sins committed, and my only real complaint is that while somehow it bothered me less than on the Dell XPS 13 I reviewed recently, you can watch that here by the way, there is a lot more flex in the deck than I like to see giving it a mushy feel when you bottom out your keystrokes. Improving this might add some weight to the chassis, but it would make this notebook feel much more premium under my fingers while working on it, and while MSI's at it, $2,000 notebooks need glass touchpads. The XPS 13 taught me that too. Flipping the unit over we find not a whole lot, some vent holes and a metal bottom plate that reveals unfortunately downward firing speakers, and fortunately easy access to two sodium slots and the storage upgrade slots. While we've got it open seems like a good time to show off the obnoxiously loud cooling solution. I really wish a better job had been done of this even under light loads. This notebook is not very quiet, and the proprietary interface connector that sticks out the back and makes the whole desktop graphics thing possible. Because that's right, we missed the back of this notebook where there's another vent and these plastic flaps that fold back to plug this baby into a desktop graphics box. Now Total Biscuit's initial reaction to this thing on Twitter is one that I bet a lot of you share. I mean WTF, Matt, it's basically the size of a single GPU gaming desktop anyway, so what's the bleeding point? And the point of it is that this is pretty different from any other gaming desktop or notebook out there. For someone who wants to buy one device that they carry around with them a lot, and then normally only use for lightweight tasks, but then can, without actually owning two full computers, dock for the full desktop gaming experience, this is a pretty compelling little piece because with how little development there's been in CPU performance of late, and how little is on the roadmap, most of this machine will actually keep up fine, possibly for years to come with only graphics needing a shot of adrenaline now and then. And that's what this box does, and a bit more too. Just like a normal notebook dock, you get ample data connectivity for the right side I.O. over here. So next to that 92 millimeter intake fan is a four-port USB 3 hub, gigabit ethernet, and audio jacks that you can just leave permanently plugged in. There's a power button over here and the plug for the 450 watt included power supply that powers everything inside and the docked notebook, so you don't need to fuss with your power adapter on the other side. But you also get a PCI Express Gen 3 16x link and SATA 3 6 gigabit per second. So while I could take you on a full tour of the outside of this thing, there frankly isn't much you haven't seen already. There's an MSI logo on the mesh front that conceals a speaker that's functional, if not particularly immersive since it only comes from one direction, and that's pretty much it. Let's take that piece off and find out all that cool stuff inside. Ah yes, here it is. Inside the dock is room for officially any MSI graphics card you desire or any reference AMD or Nvidia design and realistically most other ones. It's not locked down in any way. There's also a power supply, the one I mentioned before, a three and a half inch drive mount, so it can be plugged in here, then screwed in here and used for up to eight terabytes of game and mass storage. Anything that you don't need with you when you're on the go, and finally the custom PCB that powers the whole thing. Now one little trick I did find was to flip this fan control switch to low, since it only makes a couple of degrees difference under load, but I would like to see a more elegant solution next time around because it is freaking loud on high and honestly that should be speed controlled anyway by the system. There needs to be some communication there. I mean while I'm wishing for things with how big this dock is, maybe the option to have a single PCIe 16x or split 8x 8x for some other expansion card on the next revision would be nice and maybe some smart ducting for a larger 120 millimeter fan so that it forces air into the laptop docked on top of it so it doesn't need its own cooling fan to unleash an unholy whine upon my ears when I'm gaming. Which I guess leads us pretty well into the usage experience doesn't it? It's loud like the CPU fan in the notebook overpowers the fan in the dock and the graphics card under load, but with that aside the GS30 shadow is simply put fucking awesome. You do have to shut down every time you switch graphics configs, so here we'll do this live. This is kind of an interesting little demo here. Boop. Whenever you want to switch graphics configs, so for the first time ever I actually care about boot up speed and thankfully it is shockingly fast and that's not the only thing that's fast about it. I mean the machine absolutely flies. Even with the CPU over 90 degrees in some tests it turbos up to 3.5 to 3.6 gigahertz in games which puts it on par with some pretty capable desktop CPUs. Of course you've got to pay to play without a dedicated graphics card for the dock. It's over two grand, and then you've got to buy one of those. Pro tip for you guys by the way get a reference card using a rear exhaust 980 at the same clock speed as the MSI gaming 980 that they sent me resulted in higher GPU temps by six degrees, but still under the throttle point, but five degree lower CPU temps thanks to less heat energy being transferred from the dock up into the notebook. So much more reasonable CPU temperatures a worthwhile trade. Which leads us to the conclusion the GS30 shadow from MSI is the first of its kind. I mean yes, there are janky DIY solutions and yes Alienware also has an external graphics card box that works with a handful of its notebooks but MSI's is different to me because they're the ones that I believe are doing this the way that I want it done with a lightweight legitimately super portable notebook rather than something that's already a gaming laptop and already has a gaming graphics card in it. But it's got some first-gen growing pains. Cooling needs to be quieter. Standalone battery life could definitely be better and I'm sure that MSI can tune the base to be a bit more compact or offer some additional functionality. But with all of that said this is a great start and I'm hyper excited about the future of a technology that I've been eagerly awaiting for years now. Speaking of the future of technology today's episode sponsor Ting has just reached a whole new level of technology themselves by beginning to offer their service on a GSM network. 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