 Today I'm going to be unboxing something pretty exciting from MSI. It comes from, well, a pretty plain brown box initially, but I'm sure we will find a more suitable retail oriented box inside. This is just a shipping carton. So this is the GT780R-01 for US. It's part of their GT780R line. So notebooks using that particular shell. And this is the 014 model. And what is really cool about this one is that lots of notebooks say they are for gamers or for gaming, and they have really high spec and all that good stuff, but you often don't see a whole lot of consideration for what gamers actually need. So this one takes a bit of a, well, what I think is a big step forward for notebooks, and it uses a gaming keyboard. So we've seen backlit keyboards on notebooks before, but what we haven't seen is one designed by SteelSeries. So SteelSeries is obviously very well known throughout the world for their gaming peripherals, and apparently this keyboard is good enough that they're willing to put their name on it. And given the fact that there are only about four keyboards on the market right now from SteelSeries that they consider good enough for their name, I have very high expectations of this one. So let's see what else MSI has to say for themselves on the box here. Up to 16 gigs of memory are supported. Sound is by Dynaudio. Now that might sound like kind of a gimmick sort of thing, but on my GX660, it makes a dramatic difference. It's just a higher quality overall setup than I see on most notebooks. With four DDR3 DIMMs, okay, so for up to 16 gigs, we saw that before. Full color backlit keyboard for friendly gamers' usage. For friendly gamers' usage. Apparently that's an option, so I'm not sure if this one supports that or not. Interesting. Dual SATA hard drives with RAID 0 to double the... Sorry about that, guys. My memory card was full. Okay, so dual hard drives up to RAID 0 to double the transmission speed. What I'd really recommend doing here is throwing an SSD in there and using a hard drive as well, which is a really cool feature. It's got an HD webcam, USB 3.0, THX, another audio-oriented thing, and apparently MSI is celebrating their 25th anniversary. Good for them. All right, what else we got here? Ooh, free coupons inside. Just Cause 2, Mafia 2, and a StarCraft 2 trial. All right, neat. Okay, so let's break the seal here and open this bad boy up. Now this is a big notebook. The thing about gaming notebooks is that, you tend to suffer a little bit in terms of the weight and battery life compared to an ultra-portable or even a standard notebook, but think of it this way. It's good exercise when you're carrying it around, right? Yeah, that's why you get a gaming notebook, so that you can exercise. All right, so we've got a power brick here that really looks to be about the size of a brick, so I'll pull out the old iPhone 4 for comparison. So you can see it is quite large, quite large indeed. There's the size from the back. Okay, so there's the power brick. Then there's the battery, also quite large, heavy. Smaller than the power brick though, surprisingly. There you go. All right, so I'll put that there for now. Here's those coupons, special offers from Nvidia. All right, what else we got here? We got some discs, some manuals, driver utilities, hotkey recovery options, CE compliant booklet. Okay, then we've got finally a power cable to plug into the power brick, and that's pretty much it. So it's a fairly bare package in terms of accessories, but really this notebook is about performance, and I shouldn't say a bare package. That's not fair at all. I mean, it comes with two free games, which you can't really complain about, right? Okay. And the notebook itself. Here we go. So yeah, as I was sort of saying before, it's quite large. Here we go. What's this here? Got questions or problems, feel free to contact MSI support. Okay, good, good. We've got a dust proof cover here. All right. So there's the notebook itself. Let's take off the protector. It is using a matte screen. Kudos, MSI, for using a matte screen on this high end model. Give me two seconds. I'm going to plug it in. All right. So I've plugged it in. I'm going to start peeling off the plastic so we can see it in all of its HD glory. Mind you, I'm only going to upload this video in 720p because I'm not convinced it makes a difference on YouTube. There's the protector behind the keyboard. There we are. It seems like a lot of work to make this, doesn't it? Okay. All right. We've got a few different options for languages. We can go with French, Spanish, or English. You cannot change your language later. That's fine. Country or region is not the United States. Canada. All right. There we are. This will be Tech Tips. Next. All right. So the setup is fairly straightforward. We're just going through the standard Microsoft Ubi. So let's take a little time and have a look at the physical attributes of this notebook here. Okay. So first of all, screen. Okay. So as I mentioned before, we've got a matte screen. This is a 17.6 inch screen as I recall. Oh, hold on. Give me a sec, guys. Sorry, my bad. That's a 17.3 inch screen. This is a 1920 by 1080 full HD screen. It comes pre-configured with two 500 gig drives. So that is one terabyte of storage in RAID 0. It also has 16 gigs of RAM and an Intel Core i7-2630 QM quad core processor. Okay. It uses a 1.5 gig Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 mobile and it has just a really slick look to it. Can you see the brushed finish on the back of the notebook as well as the shiny MSI logo here? So let's look at what we've got in terms of I.O. We'll start at the back. So we have an HDMI out as well as a VGA out. I actually really like seeing VGA out on notebooks because so often you go somewhere where you're not familiar with and like, you know, let's say you have to use a projector in a restaurant or something. A lot of the time they're using older projectors that support VGA so that's really handy to have. We've got eSATA as well as LAN and a Kensington lock. We've got a huge exhaust vent here on the back. Can you see through there to the aluminum fins? And the one on the other side seems to be covered up although maybe that's for like, I don't know. I don't know what that could possibly be for. On the bottom we find I have not installed the battery yet and we have some plastic here. Just give me a sec. You know what? Why don't we show the battery installation procedure since we haven't flipped over anyway. Should be fairly straightforward. Put the thing in the thing and then lower it into the other thing. There we go. Lock it down in place. Alright so from here you can see some heat pipes, you can see some RAM, you can see some more heat pipes, you can see that this whole panel comes off making upgrades quite simple. Now this is an experience I've had with MSI notebooks in the past is that you can take the whole thing off, you can replace and upgrade the RAM and hard drives very very easily. Now please note though that the warranty is void if the sticker is tampered with although if you have a technician at an approved facility such as NCIX do the upgrade for you then they can register that serial number with MSI and your warranty will not be voided. Alright let's have a look at the side. So here we have our two USB 3.0 ports, we have an SD card reader, a USB 2.0 port and dedicated 5.1 audio port so that's really handy to see as well. In case you wanted to plug in surround sound to your notebook you have all the ports that you need. Okay moving around to the final side here we have two more USB 2.0 ports and an optical drive. Now this does not have a button on it which initially I thought was a terrible idea but actually now looks okay because it looks like I just have to use that button. Wah wah wah. Maybe when we're finished booting up it'll do that. Okay here we go so let's have a look at the buttons up here. Okay and you know what give me a sec I'll be back. This is kind of neat now this notebook does come with some bloatware but it actually gives you the option for whether you want to install it or not so I'm just going to unselect everything I don't need. Never mind no I can't there's only Magix Music Maker can I actually uncheck so I guess I'll just yeah all these Magix ones I can uncheck. Okay okay. Okay so here we are we're back everything is pretty much installed Nuance PDF reader I don't know why you remind me in seven days for that. Let's finish going over the physical aspects of the notebook so first thing here I did want to oh wow okay so it's very quick now that the driver is loaded okay so there is a hole on the side so you can use a paper clip or whatever if you actually have to manually open it but otherwise this software button seems to be fairly responsive so I wouldn't worry too much about that. We can turn on and off the Bluetooth there is Bluetooth included on this particular model we can turn the wireless network on and off oh that's kind of neat check this out watch the screen though okay so we turned the wireless on and now we turned it off see that's neat okay Bluetooth I guess does the same thing it's on now let's see what this button does I apparently turned my screen off maybe if I press it again oh oh neat okay that's actually kind of cool so it doesn't turn it back on it only turns it off so it's like okay I'm stepping away from my computer boom screen on and then if you want to turn it back on you just move the mouse that would actually be convenient that is the kind of thing I would actually use here we go we can adjust brightness no I don't know what that's for okay well this one I know what it does this turns the fans way up high so when you're gaming you can be sure that your CPU and GPU are going to run as cool as possible the fan noise should be fairly noticeable in a moment here don't move the camera because otherwise they can't compare now that actually doesn't get as loud as the GX 660 let's see what this does cinema pro okay so it launches windows media player apparently alright so basically it's just a media player launching button okay turn off turn on oh wait hold on is it adjusting something about oh it's adjusting the color of the screen okay so it's like for movie watching mode and then this last one over here is a programmable button so it's set to turn turbo on right now apparently okay sure wish I knew what this one did if anyone knows what this button does let me know okay we also have some more traditional hotkeys built in so with the function keys you can switch from internal to external monitor you can turn off the touchpad we also have a dedicated touchpad off button here that's handy because if you are gaming on this particular notebook WASD is going to put your palm right on the touchpad if you have a dedicated gaming mouse you're going to want to be using that not a touchpad obviously so you go ahead turn it off boom you're ready for gaming turn it back on now you can use your touchpad again we've got a webcam eco mode wireless bluetooth sleep and we do have a built-in number pad on this particular notebook here so here's function keys for brightness down and brightness up okay guys we're back so I want to show you guys what that button does we're having a little bit of difficulty with this feature right now but I do have to finish the unboxing so I can go home and maybe watch the rest of the hockey game but it's for nothing already so I might not bother basically it launches in theory the keyboard LED manager so this gives you a bunch of different options for how to manage the keyboard you can control it by different zones so here in standing okay so in gaming mode you only light up this part of the keyboard that seems fairly straightforward in normal mode you can light up as many different parts as many different colors as you want so you could have like a rainbow keyboard if you wanted to you can do a color where it'll pulsate two different colors so you can go okay I'm going to have this one yellow and then it's going to go from yellow to purple and it shows you a simulation of what it's going to look like you can do a breathing effect where it'll darken and then turn up you can do a wave effect pretty neat and that's pretty much it so you can choose what you want the keyboard to do in idle mode and what you want it to do in standard mode as well so here let me just go ahead and let's say we want it to well like I said we haven't had much success with it yet but pressing this button at least closes the app if nothing else the keyboard overall I quite like the responsiveness of the keys is excellent there's still a bit of a bit of flex to the keyboard itself that is to be pretty much expected on notebooks although what I did notice is that this part of the keyboard where you're going to be using it for gaming is a little bit stronger than over here on the number pad where it looks like not quite as much attention has been paid because it is a gaming keyboard so that is not that unexpected our stereo speakers are up here and that pretty much covers everything I wanted to say about the MSI GT 780R don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos so I got the backlight keyboard working before I finished up basically what had happened was during shipping the cable on the underside under the panel here that powers the backlight keyboard came loose in shipping so that was that was what was causing my frustration with the backlight keyboard so you can see now that it has the three separate zones of backlighting this button right here once the app is loaded so we'll have to give it a minute to load the app will allow us to switch between all the different completely customizable modes on this notebook so here let's see if it works already yeah there we go so that's gaming mode so it only lights up the one side okay so I'm going to press it again and that's evidently some other mode press it again that's the whole thing oh I had another mode going before okay give me a sec I'll get the app open I'll show you guys in a minute so I'm going to show you guys the different modes now so there is dual color mode where it'll alternate between two different colors so you can go ahead and you can set maybe we want it to alternate between green and purple so it's going to show a green background and then a purple background it'll alternate between them you can do wave where it'll light up one side of the keyboard then the middle then the other side and you can set each zone according to whatever color you want it to be so I'm maybe I'll set them all green like this and now it'll do a green wave across the keyboard very cool okay there's also breathing mode which will just it allows only one color to be set oh no it doesn't you can set different colors if you want so it's like completely user customizable it's set this side to blue so what that does is it has a slowly pulsating light effect across the whole keyboard let's go like that give you a little bit more shade this is more like what it'll look like in the dark actually looks really cool and then finally there is gaming mode which will light up only the far left of the keyboard and this one actually has a wider variety of color settings so you can set more vibrant colors or you can set more pale colors so here I'm showing kind of pinks and oranges and blues and purples and lots and lots of different colors that you can set you can do white as well and then finally normal mode so you can set it to whatever you want your normal mode to look like so I've got it set to a white green and orange right now and that is what it looks like so it's a very cool feature thank you for checking out my unboxing of the GT680R don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxing reviews and other computer videos.