Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/889023
www.postmagazine.com 37 POST OCTOBER 2017 REVIEW a pretty good showing for rendering on a laptop. PassMark CPU results were in the 86 th percentile, which is a solid showing. Now the GPU timing is where it made its biggest impact. Clocking in at 2:41, the P3000 in this W63 laptop was on par with a desktop running two GeForce GTX 690 cards or one Quadro M4000 (8Gb) desktop card. This, especially in a thin and light notebook, is nothing short of terrific. I'm quite impressed with this performance from a $2,300 machine. My older thin and light laptop (just over a year old now), with a Xeon CPU and an M1000M card ran the GPU render in more than twice the MSI's time — no contest! There is no reason to settle for a low- er-end GPU in a thin and light machine. The system's battery life is pretty standard; nothing surprising at around five hours of normal use. But I never use a computer normally. I unplugged the ma- chine and put it under heavy GPU use by run- ning SPECViewPerf on a loop till the battery whimpered and died. But hey, you wouldn't do that on just the bat- tery, would you? But if you did, you'd get about 1.5 hours like I did. Seems fair enough on that kind of load. Powering the sys- tem is a not-too-large 180W power brick. It's form factor works well since it's thin and not heavy. I've seen some serious laptop bricks in my day, so for this being a 180W, it's not bad at all, but not quite dainty either. Unfortunately, it plugs into a bit of an odd place: on the right side, smack in the middle. I prefer the power toward the back so it's out of the way. With this middle placement, if you are right handed, you'll have to manage the cable when you're using a mouse in tight quarters. Only in this case, and in the sport of fenc- ing, are where lefties have an advantage over us righties. Touché, good sir! As far as expandability, the WS63 has a very good array of ports to keep you connected without toting around an octopus of dongles (Apple, I'm looking in your direction): A gigabit Ethernet, three USB 3.0, SD card reader and head- phones/mic ports on the left side, which is good as you'll want external speakers or headphones as the built-in speaker sounds flat. On the right side are a USB 2.0, a USB-C/thunderbolt, one full size HDMI 2.0, a miniDisplayPort and the power connector. All that leaves a lot of room to expand with external peripher- als to plug in and out of. The SteelSeries keyboard looks great and feels good to type on, with a subtle blue backlight to it, and good responsive travel to the keys. Not too crisp, not too mushy; Goldilocks would be happy to write her great American novel on this keyboard. The trackpad has an integrat- ed finger print sensor and is quite large and responsive. I prefer to tap to click, which this trackpad offers, but for those who like to press down to click, the trackpad is a little work; the travel to get the click is a bit further than I'd like. IN CONCLUSION Only time will tell how durable this machine is, but with a three-year warranty, I'm confident it will last. In the end, this is a solid workhorse of a machine. It has an elegant look and a sturdy feel, and it is a beast on the inside with terrific performance from the Quadro P3000 GPU and solid results from the Kaby Lake 2.8 Ghz quad core CPU. Good battery life and thin and light portability rounds out this workstation to be a good performer for those needing workstation class performance with a solid color display on the go. VITAL STATS MANUFACTURER: MSI PRODUCT: WS63 7RK workstation PRICE: $2,300 WEBSITE: https://us.msi.com • Gunmetal magnesium-lithium body • Intel Core i7-7700HQ @ 2.80 Ghz with maxed out 32Gb of DDR4 memory • Nvidia Quadro P3000 GPU This thin and light workstation features gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.0, an SD card reader and headphones/ mic ports on the left and USB 2.0, USB-C/Thunderbolt, HDMI 2.0, miniDisplayPort and power connector on the right.