VR – Virtual Reality

VR is coming on strong, and with more than a little purpose. While the most well-known VR project so far is Oculus Rift, a lot of other actors on the market are racing to get in on the action as well. No consumer products have really made it onto the consumer market, except maybe Google’s somewhat humble and playful project Cardboard.
2016 seems to be the year when we finally start seeing the VR projects come to fruition and launch in consumer versions. However, with “only” your vision and hearing immersed in virtual space, and having your hands on a keyboard and mouse, for example, will be extremely confusing – as your brain will want to act on what you see as if you were doing it in real life.

To combat this, Valve, running the Vive VR project along with HTC, has created hand-held controllers to let you do just that. In an initial demo, the controllers are actually precise enough to let you do things such as juggling, as you would in real life. Check it out for yourself:



Somewhat ironically, the demo is done in a game titled Job Simulator, but the technology remains impressive. Question is – will VR be the future, or will it become yet another niche market? Only time will tell.

Broadwell vs. Haswell – part 3: wPrime

Part 3 in our article series of highlighting the advances on the CPU market brings us to yet another benchmark – wPrime. Basically, wPrime calculates prime numbers for the fun of it, much like SuperPI calculates decimals of Pi. It is a synthetic benchmark, meaning it necessarily has no bearing on real-life

The benchmark is multi-threaded and will use all available CPU threads – once you let the benchmark know. In our case, we set the thread count to 8, which both our Haswell and Broadwell CPU has, and run a 1024M calculation.



Two things become apparent – one is that the newer Broadwell is a lot faster. We’ve seen this before in Cinebench and WinRAR, but not by these margins. Another thing is that the older Haswell-based i7-4720HQ is a bit more inconsistent over three runs, although not by much at all.

In any case – the victory is a walkover. The i7-5700HQ cuts almost 40 seconds from the calculation time of its predecessor. Once more though, it should be stressed that the wPrime benchmark is completely synthetic, unlike our previous benchmarks. It’s still three out of three for i7-5700HQ over the i7-4720HQ.

GeForce Experience: Gamestream co-op

Our gaming notebooks are exclusively sold with NVIDIA GeForce graphics, which means added benefits of NVIDIA software. One such benefit is GeForce Experience, which up until now has been perhaps most useful for optimizing your in-game graphics settings to match your system’s hardware.
Now though, with the latest version of GeForce Experience, NVIDIA are opening up some more options worthy of your attention. First of all, the new version of GFE is equipped with a new overlay, for easier access to controls in game. One part of this is ShadowPlay, which basically enables you to record gameplay (much like our bundled six-month trials of XSplit Gamecaster), but the second, way cooler (if you ask us) feature, is Gamestream co-op.

Gamestream co-op lets you stream your gameplay to a friend using an Internet connection, instead of broadcasting on for example Twitch, but actually invite said friend to help you out in-game(!) – or play co-op. See how NVIDIA demonstrates this in the video below:



You can also choose to completely relinquish control to your friend, who will play on your system, over the Internet, should you be playing a title without local two-player co-op capabilities. Apparently, all this requires is a “modern GeForce GTX graphics card” (read: any newer MSI Gaming notebook) and we’re guessing some decent bandwidth. Apart from that, we obviously also recommend a friend to play with.
A beta version of GeForce Experience with these features is set to hit your GeForce GTX-equipped system by the end of September, with a final version to be released before the end of 2015.

Super RAID 4

Super RAID has since its first incarnation been at the forefront of storage transfer speeds – starting with peak transfer speeds of around 800MB/s with two SSDs in RAID0. As SSD technology has improved, transfer speeds have gone up, and the ability to package several SSDs into one system has also become possible. This led to the developments Super RAID 2 and 3, both available in our current lineup of notebooks. Basically, Super RAID 2 is three mSATA SSDs in a RAID0 array, and Super RAID 3 is an additional SSD on top of that, still RAID0.

This has yielded transfer speeds in excess of 1500MB/s or 1.5GB/s – this means for instance that you can open your applications instantaneously and that your in-game maps will load lightning fast. However, we’re not ones to rest on our laurels – having long had the fastest storage solutions, used in both our Gaming systems as well as our Workstations, we’ve taken the opportunity to introduce Super RAID 4 with our new refreshed notebooks – for even higher, slightly dizzying, transfer speeds of up to 3300MB/s – over 3GB/s.



Super RAID 4 consists of two PCI-E 3.0-based NVMe SSDs in RAID0 and is available on the Skylake-equipped versions of the Gaming systems GT72 and GT80.

DDR4 benefits

The launch of Intel’s new mobile 6th Gen Core CPU family has brought along a bunch of changes – of course we will see the usual barrage of small improvements in gaming performance and power consumption, but it’s also a paradigm shift. For the first time in a very long time, we’re seeing a shift in memory technology, going from DDR3L to DDR4.
First of all, unlike the shift from DDR2 to DDR3, there is not a huge price premium to pay as a consumer – pricing on DDR4 technology is already made affordable by desktop systems and competition among DRAM manufacturers – meaning it’s surprisingly affordable to be an early adopter this time around.

Of course, it’s not a change just for the heck of it – DDR4 is going to be the memory standard to be reckoned with for years to come, meaning it makes sense to go for a DDR4 platform if you want to add more RAM. Maybe most importantly, the performance is obviously also up – frequencies are higher, and while timings are seemingly more relaxed, overall latencies are significantly lower.



The result of this is plan to see in our graph above – going from DDR3L at 1600MHz (which is the standard speed used in MSI Gaming systems) to DDR4 at 2133MHz gives improvements in the neigbourhood of 35% on average. The benefits of this vary from application to application, but a lot of compression software relies on high memory performance, as do certain games. One thing that is clear is that it will improve your productivity, even in daily tasks.
To secure a system that comes with the memory of the future, look out for systems with the 6th Generation Core CPUs from Intel, available in our Gaming lineup of notebooks.

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