CES 2018 | MSI GT75VR to ship with Killer Wireless-AC 1550, Trident 3 gets Coffee Lake and GTX 1080 upgrades

In contrast to its boastful CES 2017 showcase, MSI is having a low-key exhibit this year at Las Vegas with fewer announcements and releases. Two of these are internal refreshes to its enthusiast-level GT75VR Titan and Trident 3 Arctic gaming systems. We recommend checking out our existing review on the GT75VR as its chassis and features are identical to the CES 2018 upgrade.

The update to the GT75VR is rather minor as it applies only to its wireless capabilities. Whereas lat year's model was limited to the 867 Mbps Gbps Killer 1535, the system will now ship with the recently announced Killer 1550 capable of transfer rates of up to 1.73 Gbps for twice the throughput. Killer, however, has told us that users can expect 1.3 Gbps when under more real-world conditions. On the software side, MSI's new Gaming Mode promises in-game optimizations for popular titles to squeeze out even more performance from the notebook.

Lastly, the Trident 3 mini PC will be shipping with Intel 8th gen Coffee Lake options and a removable GTX 1080 graphics card whereas older Trident 3 SKUs were limited to Skylake CPUs and the GTX 1070. Since Coffee Lake is not backwards compatible with Skylake, we can safely assume that MSI has updated the motherboard as well. It remains to be seen if the manufacturer will swap out of the existing 330 W external AC adapter for an even larger one in order to accommodate the more demanding GTX 1080.

Prices and releases dates have not yet been revealed, but we will definitely find out at CES this week.

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