 The outward appearance of the MSI GS75 is surprisingly professional, giving its gamer roots. But don't let it fool you. This five pound laptop is packing hardware that would make most desktops blush. With a GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q, a 6-core Intel Core i7-8750H, 32 gigs of RAM, and one terabyte of RAID 0 M.2 SSD storage. Every single component of this machine is balls to the wall. Which should mean balls to the wall performance. But can you possibly hope to cool all of that stuff in a chassis this thin? Are RTX cards even worth the extra cost in a laptop? Can Linus go for just one video without interrupting the flow of the content for a sponsor message? The Marlin screwdriver set from iFixit features five specialty precision screwdrivers. Check it out today at ifixit.com forward slash Linus. So here's the thing, see, the performance of a laptop with one of Nvidia's shiny new RTX laptop GPUs will vary significantly depending on the cooling and the power available. So you'll always get the same number of CUDA and RTX cores, but for the 2080 Max-Q in particular, the base and the boost clocks can be all over the place. Laptop manufacturers can actually configure this particular card's power target to anything from 80 watts all the way up to over 150 watts. That means, and remember this is according to Nvidia's spec, that you could end up with a base clock of just 735 MHz while a properly cooled one would be capable of boosting to over double that. So what that means is that independent reviews of this generation of laptops are going to be even more important than ever before, because you cannot compare between models based on the spec sheet alone. So how did MSI then fare taming the beast? Fine, I guess. So under a stress test, the CPU immediately jumped up to 100 degrees and was forced to throttle down until its turbo boost ran out and it settled in around 2.8 GHz sustained on all cores, which might not sound amazing and it's not as good as it could be, but it still kicks out a right impressive 1205 score in Cinebench, so mobile professionals take note, but also stay tuned because we're going to go further in depth with that in a future video. Today's focus is mostly gaming since this is our first look at mobile RTX. So let's change gears to 3DMark's new Port Royal test, leading our eyeballs to some of the first real-time traced rays to come out of a laptop. And this also gave us a moment to really appreciate the 17-inch 1080p display that MSI crammed into what it would have traditionally been a 15.6-inch laptop chassis. And I got to say, their IPS-type panel delivers some damn good visuals at 144Hz, and of course with the horsepower to back it up. Notably only G-Sync and factory calibration are notable missing features here. I gotta say, like just overall the industry, I love the move to these super slim bezel 17-inch displays. The difference in immersion versus a 15.6-inch is palpable. Now back to the benchmark, we got a score of about 4000, which at face value meant basically nothing to me since this test hasn't been around for very long. Upon further investigation, it turns out that it's roughly a third slower than a desktop RTX 2080 with a similar CPU. And that lines up pretty nicely with the reduction in clock speed, with the G75 landing around 1200MHz versus 1850 on the desktop card. Now, I could show you guys a bunch more benchmarks of a desktop graphics card, expectedly crushing a thin laptop, but we figured it would be a lot more interesting to compare it to other thin and light gaming laptops, which is why the GS75 is going to be taking on the gauntlet of Zephyruses. Zephyr? Zephyri? Zephyr? Anyway, with the Max-Q versions of the GTX 1070, 1080, and RTX 2080 all represented, back in the Port Royal test, the two RTX cards completely destroyed their GTX equivalents. Well, partly because the test won't run on those cards, but more interestingly, the Zephyrus GX701 pulled out a convincing lead in both the score and core clock achieved, likely thanks to its superior cooling. Stay tuned for our full review of that little beast. Even more interestingly though, in 3DMark's Time Spy benchmark, the RTX cards absolutely wiped the floor with their last-gen competitors, turning out a result that is 30% faster than what we've ever seen in a thin laptop before. And this kept up past the synthetics as well, which is just great news for gamers. The mobile RTX 2080 is a freaking beast. Max-Q design or no. Now, the GS75, again, wasn't quite able to keep up with the Zephyrus GX701, but generally just by a couple to maybe about 5 FPS. So MSI is leaving some performance on the table here. Perhaps this was in order to maintain a more conventional keyboard and trackpad layout? Or perhaps it was that they tuned it this way for acoustic reasons. Now, the GS75 isn't silent, but per Nvidia's Max-Q guidance, it's quiet enough that it's not going to bother you while gaming, and it's easily overpowered by its decent onboard speakers. So overall, the GS75 games really freaking well. But what about the whole portability thing? It is a laptop. Well, as much as we're kind of tired of saying it, but MSI just keeps making us repeat ourselves here. The build quality here just isn't good enough for a machine that costs $3,000. I can easily click the trackpad by pushing the palm rest area, and you can feel the machine flexing when you're picking it up. Like, honestly, the word we settled on here was flaccid. They do claw back some points with one of the best assortments of IELTS that I've seen in quite some time, with Thunderbolt 3, full-sized HDMI, and Ethernet being the stars of the show. Although if you want to be a star, you'll probably need a standalone camera, as this one here isn't going to get you too many compliments on Twitch. But I look like 10 years younger, which is nice. Look at that smoothing. Maybe our biggest gripe about the GS75 though is the trackpad. It is glass-topped, which is good, but the flex of the chassis removes any chance of it having a solid, clicky feel. And although I like where MSI was going with the size, using up almost all of the available vertical space, and giving it this extra horizontal width, they somehow went too far, making it really hard to type without ending up with a palm resting on the trackpad, causing accidental activations. And when I brought up these issues at CES, MSI's reply was, well, the trackpad turns off when you plug in a mouse. And although I do expect the average user of the GS75 to regularly have a mouse plugged in, it's kind of like dropping your dog off with a friend when you go on vacation and saying, well, Oliver won't sh** in your house at all, as long as you've got him outside when he needs to sh**. So I just, I never thought I'd say this, but until MSI can get their palm rejection way better, they should stick to smaller trackpads. Now, as mentioned above, the worst part of the keyboard is actually still the trackpad, but once that is disabled, it's actually pretty good. The keys have a nice long stroke with decent feel overall, and my only real gripes here are about the layout, and they're pretty small ones. I just think that these keys up here could have been better used as dedicated home and end or media control keys. With that said, they can be remapped, so... yeah. Removing the bottom of the device, we're greeted by an impressive 82-watt-hour battery, which, given the power in here, is not going to be letting you work cordless all day, but if you treat it nicely and you're not running games or heavy software, it gets you a pretty darn solid five hours of work time. Then, past the battery, we've got access to three M.2 SSD slots, making for very easy storage expansion, and RAM that is, well, it's technically upgradeable, but if you're like, oh, gee, where are the DIMM slots? Ah, it's the same thing we were wondering, so our unit has both of the SODIMM slots filled already, and if we did want to change them out, we'd actually have to remove everything to get to the other side of the motherboard. Bringing us to the bottom line, should you buy one of these? Now, you will be getting one of the fastest gaming laptops on the market, faster than anything that was released in 2018 by a fair margin, and compared to the Zephyrus, you get more RAM for $300 less on an otherwise identically specced system, but the Zephyrus, in the real world, is faster, and it has G-Sync and factory panel calibration, along with noticeably higher build quality. Also, maybe I'm off base here, but in my mind, by the time you're spending $3,000, I feel like it's not that much of a stretch to go a little bit further to $3,300, which is why I am not recommending that you buy this laptop, but instead recommending that you buy this laptop, except for $2,300. To make that happen, you do need to drop the specs a bit, but there should be more than enough cooling for an RTX 2070 in here, 16 gigs of RAM fits the needs of most people, and at that price, I am much more willing to let slide some of my gripes about the build quality, in exchange for the overall usability and the great battery capacity that MSI has to offer here. Today's video is brought to you by DocuSign. DocuSign helps businesses save money by reducing errors and eliminating incomplete forms, so they don't spend money on administrative work that could have just been done right the first time. It's fast, which, saving time, is always good. It's scalable, allowing you to standardize processes, forms, and contracts, so if you're a growing company that wants to scale efficiently, it can help you with that, and it's secure, providing full document encryption to ensure the privacy of your data. 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