 The GTX 980 went in a laptop. It's an entirely different beast depending on how it happens to be implemented, and this comes down to power and thermal constraints placed upon it. In this video, we're going to give a little bit of a deeper look into MSI's implementation on their GT72S6QF Dominator Pro G. Not only in normal operating mode plugged into the wall, but also overclocked plugged into the wall, and stock but on battery. FreshBooks is the super simple invoicing solution that lets you get organized, save time, and get paid faster. Click now to try it for free. First off, let's take a look at its overall physical features. This probably out of your budget level expensive machine features an SD card reader, four 3.5mm audio jacks, and four USB 3.0 ports on the left hand side. On the back, there's a Killer E2400 Ethernet jack, one power in, one USB 3.1 type C super port, and one mini display port. On the right hand side, you have your last two USB 3.0 ports, and a Blu-ray writer. On the top of this unit, it has a chiclet based keyboard with zoned lighting controls. There's also some buttons for power on and off, a graphics switch between the iGPU and discrete GPU for power saving reasons or performance reasons, a cooler boost button which massively ramps up your fan speed, a dedicated XSplit GameCaster or user defined application button, and a dedicated button to launch the SteelSeries engine for keyboard lighting and macro control. It also features a pretty nice touchpad with dedicated buttons, which I actually do prefer on something like a gaming laptop. But one thing that I don't like, well it's good aesthetically, is that they outline the touchpad with an LED. But for physical reasons, I'm not going to be looking down at my touchpad, so it's not actually really going to help me, and I'd like to be able to know where the edge of the touchpad is. For a screen, it features a 17.3 inch anti-glare wide view 1080p screen, which doesn't feature G-Sync. I thought all MSI Dominator Pro G laptops featured G-Sync, hence the whole Pro G thing, but I can't find it anywhere in the Nvidia control panel or on the box or on the laptop itself physically on a sticker, so I don't know, we're awaiting comment from MSI. Moving on to the internals, there's an i7-6920HQ processor running at 3.8 GHz with Turbo Boost engaged, 32 gigs of DDR4 memory, two PCI Express based NVMe SSDs in RAID 0 totaling 512 gigs, and a single 7200 RPM 1TB hard drive. Bluetooth version 4.1 Killer N1535 combo 2x2 AC wireless, and finally, the piece de resistance, the full desktop grade GTX 980. So that's a lot of hardware and a lot of money. Let's see how it performs. We tested our laptop in three different scenarios, running on AC power, running on AC power but overclocked, and running on battery power at stock. We used a 500 MHz overclock on our CPUs and a 100 MHz overclock on our GPUs, which were both stable even without giving the chips any extra voltage. Our goal was not only to get an idea of the MSI GT72's performance, but also to contrast the different approaches that MSI and Sega took with their respective desktop GTX 980s. We recently reviewed the Sega NP9870U2G, which features not only a desktop GTX 980, but a desktop Intel Skylake i7-6700K as opposed to the laptop specific Skylake we have in our MSI notebook, meaning these two units will have to approach power management quite differently. With that in mind, let's start off by looking at power draw and thermals in our Crysis 3 Skybox load test. Not surprisingly, the MSI drew 47 watts lower than the Sega, with the latter essentially trying to cram an entire desktop rig into a laptop chassis. The MSI though ran hotter under load, with the GPU getting up to 83 degrees Celsius and the CPU getting up to 78 degrees at stock speed, and 87 went overclocked. But to be fair to MSI, the Sega has a much louder and more aggressive default cooling profile. The aforementioned cooler boost button on the MSI really cranks up the fans and would undoubtedly result in lower temperatures. In any event though, the MSI ran quite a bit cooler on battery thanks to throttling to save power. We also saw a difference in GPU boost, with the MSI GTX 980 ending up 26 MHz lower than the Sega at stock. The MSI CPU also didn't overclock as well, as applying a 100 MHz offset only resulted in an actual clock speed increase of 65 MHz. But where the MSI really struggled was when we unplugged it and ran the load test on battery power. Here, the GTX 980 maxed out at only 256 MHz, way lower than the Sega's 734. Here we can see the differences in design philosophy between the two models. While Sega designed theirs to be a true replacement for your high-end desktop rig, MSI seems to be more focused on building the 980 into a more traditional, conservative mobile platform. Which results in it being lighter, smaller, and quieter, but not as great in the performance department. With that said, you'd probably think that the MSI would give us more longevity due to a lower power processor and more aggressive throttling on the GPU. But sadly, this was not the case. Our benchmarks added up to roughly 16 minutes of gameplay time, which drained both the MSI and the Sega by a whopping 39% each, meaning you'll be hard-pressed to get an hour of gameplay time out of either model. However, the MSI was only able to manage 25 FPS in Crysis 3, 32 in Tomb Raider, and 35 in Battlefront with the settings cranked up at 1080p, when you consider that the Sega achieved frame rates of 45, 65, and 67 respectively for the same percentage of battery drain. However, the experience was much more positive when we plugged it in, where it managed frame rates that took full advantage of the screen's 75Hz refresh rate and were only slightly lower than the Sega's, possibly due to MSI's notebook-class CPU. Overclocking our CPU and GPU gave us a nice little bump of 4 to 5 frames per second. Squarespace is a simple platform for building powerful and beautiful websites. Starting at only $8 a month, and with a free domain if you sign up for a year, you get 24-7 live chat and email support for your website, whether you're going for one of their larger awesome templates, or even one of their cover page designs, more focused on, well, a single page. They also have support for things like commerce if you intend to sell products, and they have responsive designs so your website can be seen optimally on all screen sizes. Start a trial with no credit card required and start building today. 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