MSI GT63 Titan 8RG-046 (i7-8750H, GTX 1080, FHD) Laptop Review

Six Phillips-head screws secure the bottom cover to the device, and once removed, nearly every major replaceable component is accessible. That’s hardly inconvenient, but CUKUSA’s sticker obscures the sixth and final screw at the bottom. Whether or not warranty terms are voided if this sticker is broken is a topic we’d recommend addressing with the retailer before opening it up.

It’s unfortunate that only a single M.2 slot exists within the GT63 given the board real estate available within. We fielded this complaint back in 2016 with regard to the GT62VR, and it unfortunately still applies today.

Keyboard

The SteelSeries keyboard is as good as ever, and yet again, it appears mostly identical to its predecessor. The chiclet-style keys are highly visible thanks to the contrast between their black backgrounds and white labels, and in the dark, they now sport per-key RGB-LED backlighting (as opposed to the previous three-zone backlighting approach of the GT62VR). Key travel is medium with reasonable, consistent feedback and quiet operation; it seems good for fast typing. The keys are tightly affixed with no clatter.

The layout hasn’t changed, and it’s immediately familiar. Only the number pad off to the right is horizontally compressed slightly (and with it, the Insert/Delete/PgUp/PgDown/Home/End keys). The arrow keys, by contrast, are fully-sized.

Touchpad

The 107x60 mm Synaptics touchpad is reasonably large, and pointer movement is subject to very little lag. It isn’t a Precision Touchpad out of the box, though it can likely be transformed into one using some fancy driver-oriented tricks. The basic gestures still worked without any technical sorcery, so perhaps most users won’t mind regardless. The biggest complaint we have with the touchpad is actually the two physical buttons below it: they’re incredibly loud, especially the left button, which also sounds rather hollow. The pitch of the noise and the feel of the click also change depending on where the button is pressed.

The GT63 offers a couple of different 15.6-inch panel options: a 4K IPS display, and an FHD (1920x1080) 120 Hz 3 ms response time TN LED screen. Our review unit came configured with the latter, which subjectively appears only moderately bright, but which also possesses immediately obvious color rendering proficiency.

We measured 275.8 cd/m² brightness with a distribution of 80%, both of which are merely average numbers. Contrast came in at 830:1 (on the heels of a 0.37 cd/m² black level), which is decent. Some minor clouding on black screens is visible.

Accuracy is similarly good, with average pre-calibration DeltaE2000 results of just 2.82 for ColorChecker and 1.7 for Greyscale. Total gamma of 2.194 and the CCT Average of 6893 are also impressive results. MSI’s helpful True Color app provides full control over the tone and gamma of the panel, and provides handy preset profiles to match common settings (sRGB, Development, Gaming, Blue Light Filter, etc.).

The MSI GT63 fares well in our general system performance tests with a very good score of 5961 in PCMark 10—some 7% above the third place finisher, the Acer Predator Helios 500, but around 11% below the 6607 posted by the Asus ROG Chimera. Results are similar in PCMark 8 Home Score Accelerated (5445), though it loses out slightly to the Razer Blade 15 and Acer Predator Helios as well in Work Score Accelerated, a test which is far more dependent on storage speeds than the other tests (and the PM961 bests the CUK 500 GB SSD, as we’ll see in the next section).

The GT63 offers two internal drive connections, an M.2/NVMe slot and a conventional 2.5-inch SATA drive bay. It’s disappointing that by now MSI hasn’t added a second M.2 slot (for RAID or otherwise), as a laptop of this size can absolutely support it.

Nevertheless, our review unit shipped with both ports populated—a 1 TB 7200 RPM storage drive in the SATA bay and a 500 GB “CUK Cyclone” NVMe SSD in the M.2 slot. The SSD turns in a good performance overall, with an AS SSD overall score of 3040 and Read/Write scores of 1433/902. In our comparison field, only the two Samsung SSDs beat this result (the PM961 thanks to a superior 4K-64 Write speed of 1203.91 MB/s—versus the CUK 500 GB’s result of 647.89 MB/s; the SM961 across the board). As mentioned previously, replacements and upgrades of either of the two storage drives are easy thanks to their accessibility directly beneath the bottom cover.

The MSI GT63 easily ranks near the top (just below the Asus ROG Chimera) in most of our GPU benchmarks thanks to its combination of the GTX 1080 GPU and very fast six-core CPU. Our 3DMark Fire Strike Graphics test awarded the machine a 21058—a very respectable score—and Cloud Gate Graphics, 133548. Both of these are the highest in today’s field. 3DMark 11 shows the GT63 below the average for GTX 1080-equipped machines in Performance Combined, but in Performance GPU, it’s slightly above average (and 18% above the Max-Q variant in the Alienware 15 R3).

As we noted earlier, in spite of its strong overall performance scores, the GT63 struggles a bit with heavy CPU loads. Under full synthetic CPU stress, we witness the details of that struggle, which involve the expected initial jump up to full clock rates for a few precious seconds before core temperatures plummet from the 90s down to roughly 75 °C average. Correspondingly, clock rates remain stable at just 3.0 GHz across all six cores—some 0.9 GHz below the max turbo target, though still well above the base clock frequency of 2.2 GHz. On the other hand, full GPU stress provides no such challenge, with GPU clock rates stable at 1772 (near max turbo) and temperatures hovering around the 90 °C mark.

Combined system stress seems to favor CPU, with GPU clock rates at around 1 GHz on average and CPU reaching 3.1 GHz. GPU core temperatures we measured at 66 °C while the CPU reached a blistering 96 °C. The more realistic Witcher 3 stress test resulted in CPU/GPU temperatures of 87 °C / 90 °C respectively, which are more in line with what can be realistically expected during typical gaming sessions.

As mentioned earlier, Cooler Boost only marginally improves the thermals and corresponding clock rates. It staves off the frequency drops for a very short period, but ultimately sustained performance is more or less the same.

After taking into account ambient noise levels of 28 dB(A), the GT63 is technically among the loudest of all of the tested machines at max stress levels—50.8 dB(A). However, average load values are considerably lower at just 35.5 dB(A), which isn’t really all that bad. Idle values, meanwhile, are higher than most of the rest of the laptops we’re comparing, with an average of 31.4 dB(A).

The MSI GT63 features a 4.1 (4 speakers, 1 subwoofer) sound system that’s relatively loud, reaching 87 dB in our measurements. In spite of the woofer, there’s still hardly any bass, but frequencies across the board are fairly linear (including low frequencies). Mids are a bit higher than ideal, but for the most part, the results aren’t bad. As of this writing, some 38% of gaming notebooks achieve better numbers.

Unsurprisingly, apart from the absolutely decked-out Asus ROG Chimera, the MSI GT63 is the most power-hungry of all the machines in our comparison field. We measured some 225 W max under load (compared with 215 W for the Alienware 15 R3), with an average of 90.4 W. Witcher 3 provoked an even higher reading of 255.6 W—again, quite a bit higher than anything else against which we’re comparing today.