15.6" Thin A15 Gaming Laptop, 16GB DDR5, 512GB SSD, Full HD Display, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050, AMD Ryzen 5 7535HS, Wi-Fi 6, Backlit Keyboard, Webcam, Bluetooth, Windows 11 Pro, Black

I am very happy with my purchase, I first will discuss the pros, follow it with cons, and after, any final thoughts!..Pros:The MSI GT780DXR-446US laptop has enough juice to kick BF3 up to ultra and power out native resolution of 1080p just beautifully without a stutter. Which is primarily what I wanted it to be able to do in terms of benchmarking (along with hopefully carry through the next 3 years of game releases). Bottom line, it is a monster of a mobile machine.. And I say this without even slight hesitation.I was pleasantly surprised, and did not initially anticipate the sheer quality of audio from the speakers. It won't rival my desktop set-up, but it's a far cry from other gaming laptop speakers I've had and is perfect for travel. Hearing smooth deep bass out of them is a nice touch and providing an artificial 'multi-speaker' surround sound from the stereo set-up is just too cool. Also! Speaking of sound, it's a virtually silent laptop when idle or being used for non-gaming! The keyboard itself is comfortable and solid to type with, and for those who love their flash, it's LED's have 5-6 primary colors to choose from and look GREAT in the dark. You can configure them with MSi's software to fade in and out known as 'breathing', or wave through, blend multiple colors together, dual-color, or singular with varying hues of the primary colors. (I will note, you can't control EACH keys set of LED's, they are controlled in 3 groups!) The HD screen produces bright dynamic colors while offering an anti-glare finish which is perfect for well lit rooms or using outside during the day. (Yes, gaming and art look wonderful on this mobile beast machine's screen.) To top it all off, the laptop's build feels solid and is aesthetically appealing!Cons:Now for my very MINOR cons or issues.. When the fans kick in (and they will if you're using it how it should be used), they can get loud. That's to be expected from a system where you push the GPU and CPU (and this is entirely fine by me for all my gaming laptops have done this. The laptop can also get quite warm.) Furthermore, the bloatware (eg. Image viewing tool, wonky sized desktop icons, etc) on this desktop cripples it, and in fact, in my opinion the system requires a fresh install of Windows 7 if you want to really see it shine.. (Which I planned on anyway.) And you can find all the essential utilities that you DO want from MSI on their site (such as the THX utility or LED utility). Also, keep in mind, the current OS setup will NOT allow you to make a system recovery disk, instead it only offers to do a factory refresh.. You need to provide your own Windows Home Premium Boot disk to run the install, which I found off of Microsoft's site or you can simply find a torrent.. Which is legal because you own a legal copy of the OS. (They give you a cd-key which is on the inside of the battery slot that will work as long as you have a CD to boot and install from). Also, the keyboard LED's don't seem to handle plain 'white' well, as some of the lower bottom right green and red LEDs will stay illuminated making the 'white' look messy or cloudy (purple and green hues seeping into white). The area directly around the keyboard is glossy, which can leave fingerprints, the rest is matte finish, but it is always annoying to see finger smudges on a pristine piece of hardware. And the AG coating is a bit heavy IMHO, leaving what is known commonly as a 'shimmer' effect on whites. During gaming it's unnoticeable, but sometimes during static reading of text you will notice it.. Being my last laptop had a high quality glossy screen it's a biased first impression that will more than likely dwindle over time. Lastly, a big annoyance for me is that the EJECT button on the keyboard WILL NOT work if you DO NOT install their S-Bar upon a reformat.. It will work prior to boot, and in the BIOS and such.. But when you're at the OS level, unless you have the MSi S-Bar Utility, the hardware 'eject' will NOT function. And the reason why I dislike this is that the S-Bar leaves a silly little blue star hovering dead top-middle of your desktop. -- To get around that I simply run the S-Bar Utility when I need it and close it out when I'm finished ejecting the disc drive.Additional Notes:And although you may void the manufacturer's warranty (opening up the laptop), I recommending getting a Crucial M4 SSD to bring the entire package together. (Remember there are two drives already in RAID 0, that require you to reformat one of them to make it use-able as a slave). -- (What to do with the additional HDD? Put it in your old laptop, or grab a 2.5" Desktop bay adapter and throw it in there!) As an aside, you should also be warned, the 'Overclock' Button also known as the F1 button will not work unless your laptop is PLUGGED IN. It took me a while to figure that one out.Given these minor quibbles, which is REALLY just to set-up your expectations, I am extremely happy with this laptop! Most of my initial poor impressions were EASILY taken care of with a Windows Disc. And with the SSD, playing games with long load times isn't something I ever want to be subjected to. And imagine, no hefty computer or need to set-up anything but a mouse when you want to be mobile!Personal Score: 90/100

I bought this to do two things: play games and compile stuff (I write software). Neither of these tasks were fun, and mostly not even possible on my EeePC netbook which this is almost entirely replacing. At some point I will probably do some video editing with the machine, but I am currently too busy playing games that I would not even dream of trying on the old netbook.Pros:- Fast. The processor is actually faster than the one in my desktop machine. The "Windows Experience Index" of my machine is sitting at 7.3, with the video card being the only score less than 7.5. I don't know how the original hard drive performed, but my added SSD brings the responsiveness of the system way up.- Plenty of memory. With 16GB RAM and 3GB video RAM, this has enough for almost any common current desktop use, and is sufficient to run a few virtual machines without impacting system performance, should the need arise.- It has a button to lock the track pad to prevent accidental clicks or mouse movements. Every notebook should have this feature.- Decent keyboard layout. All of the keys are in standard locations except for the arrow keys (which I am still not used to).- Good sound. It is very pleasing to hear sounds coming out of a laptop that do not sound like they come from a laptop. The base response is significantly better than any laptop I have ever heard. While I'm not sure it is deserving of the "THX" sticker they place on the machine, it does make for a decent gaming experience or even just simple movie watching.- USB ports. In this age where everything uses a USB connection, is there any excuse for other machines to not have 5 ports? Yes, I'm still annoyed by only having 2 USB ports on the Macbook I use at work and those I purchased for family members.- Better than advertised battery life. I took this to a conference and managed to squeeze out about six hours of battery life. Yes, I did have the brightness set on minimum and the swap of a hard drive for the SSD also helped.Cons:- Raid 0. Anyone who gets one of these machines should *immediately* remove the raid 0 from their system. All of the complaints about data reliability could be at least partially explained by the striping of the two hard drives which will lead to double the failure rate (failure of either drive will cause loss of all data).- Weight. This is a very heavy machine. I did a little comparison, and even the power brick alone (with cord) weighs a bit more than a 15 inch Macbook. Adding in the machine makes for some good exercise if you plan on carrying it around all day (which I did for a week while at a conference).- Screen resolution. For a 17 inch screen they could surely do better than the 1920x1080 that everyone is pushing for these widescreen displays. Although it is perfect for full-resolution HD video, the lack of vertical pixels can be a bit frustrating. I have a higher resolution desktop monitor and really like the extra pixel density for image editing of even just displaying more text on screen at the same time.- Lack of a hardware eject button. As I reinstalled after removing the raid 0 (dual booting Ubuntu 12.04 and Win7 x64), I did not install the software to control the key bar or the programmable keyboard LEDs. In windows, this means that I don't have an eject button for the optical drive. In Linux, it was easy to map the button to the command "eject". As cool as the colored LEDs were, I don't need them. The wireless/bluetooth buttons still work, as does the fan speed control, but the eject isn't useful without additional software control. There is probably some less intrusive software out there which would let you map the eject to actually do it, but I have not really had the need, as I can right-click the icon when needed and eject.- The plastic on the sides of the screen is slightly sharp and seems to grab a little if you brush something along it (perpendicular to the screen). I suspect that someday this will grab something hard and take a chunk of plastic from around the screen.Suggestions:- Since you need to remove the raid 0 for data safety anyway, you should try for an SSD. I put a 256GB Crucial M4 in mine and it completely blows away the raid 0 performance. I have yet to do anything with my extra drive, but I'll probably throw it in a USB enclosure for use as a backup/data transfer drive.Conclusion:If you want to play some of the latest games on a mobile PC, this would be a strong choice. For use in compiling code, this is also a good choice. Mine has been going strong for two months now and I have no regrets about buying it.If you cannot manage to carry around 12+ pounds, you probably will want to look elsewhere. It won't be long before something this powerful is in a smaller form factor.