What is this odd looking machine in front of you? An old-fashioned typewriter or the kind of computer preferred by “a moral vacuum“? Or is it the kind of gaming notebook that catches our eye?
MSI’s latest and greatest gaming notebook, the GT80 Titan will be there to wow tournament attendees. What makes it special is that it’s apparently the world’s first gaming notebook to have a mechanical keyboard.
It also has an 18.4-inch Full HD screen and NVIDIA’s incredible GeForce GT980M mobile graphics chip, along with a quad-core Core i7 processor which promises incredible performance and delicious visuals. Since the GTX980M graphics chip is even faster than the average desktop gaming rig’s discrete graphics card, the frame rates will be flying even at 1080p and above.
MSI has collaborated closely with peripherals-maker SteelSeries on the GT80’s mechanical keyboard, a decidedly unusual, but entirely welcome move that brings the pleasure and reliability of mechanical key presses to the portable PC form factor. It also incorporates SteelSeries’ keyboard control software that ensures accuracy and provides cloud storage for key configurations.
The design is a bit odd-looking, though, with the keyboard packed right at the bottom of the notebook, right where the trackpad and wrist rests of other notebooks are normally found. Maybe that makes it more comfortable; we’ll only find out once we get one in for review, which may not happen for a while.
The Titan uses Cherry MX Brown switches. Like MX Reds, they’re the ones which don’t click when activated. These are generally preferred for gaming as it means a faster action and less effort to press, which Blacks and Blues are preferred for touch typing as you can feel when the key has been activated and thus (theoretically) reduce the chance of a mistake. They say Browns and Reds are quieter as a result. They are wrong (our editor will only use MX Red keyboards for work, and his machine gun typing has the rest of us ducking for cover).
There’s also red backlighting to each key that lets gamers type and game more accurately in the dark.
It’s so good to see notebooks being developed with enough power to challenge even high-end desktop rigs, but of course their power and portability comes at a price, and is always more expensive than a comparable desktop machine.
MSI hasn’t talked price yet, but honestly I’d be surprised if the GT80 Titan went on sale in South Africa for anything less than R30 000 when it gets here.
