Upon a crowded gaming stage featuring Battle Royale hits Fortnite and Apex Legends, Sam goes under the hood on the tech running these squad team ups and deathmatches with MSI marketing leaders to find just what is running their premiere gaming experiences in 2019, with their upcoming laptop models stocked with RTX cards and their desktop sporting Intel Core 9 Series processors, which means you’ll begin seeing that Core i9 in prebuilds in addition to the i7 and i5s.
Sam Carpenter, TYF Staff Writer: How has your PAX been going so far?
Trident X Plus 9th | Copyright © 2019 Micro-Star Int’l Co.,Ltd.
David Chang, MSI Channel Marketing Manager: It’s been going pretty well, we’ve had a very busy event so far, but we’re here showing off a couple of our new products that we showed last CES, so nothing super new. But especially for people who could not make it out to our last shows, they get to have a whole gamer experience and see some of the cool gaming products we have on display.
Sam: So what kind of products are you guys showing off this time? I know there’s the Trident X and the G Sync are some of the new models?
David: Yeah so we do have our G Sync monitors and a Trident X pre-build desktop here. The Trident X is our latest addition to our small form factor pre-built desktops. It can have up to a GeForce RTX 2080, this one is configured with an RTX 2070 Armor model though.
Sam: you talked a little about the GeForce RTX, how are you trying to incorporate those into all your new laptops?
David: When my associate Michael comes to talk to you, he’ll get more details on that. Like our desktops, Nvidia is bringing new parts to the laptops with RTX and Ray Tracing abilities.
Trident X Plus 9th at MSI’s PAX East 2019 Booth
Sam: That’s very impressive. I’ve been noticing that all of them have some very nice intel processors in them, as well.
Advertisement
David: Yeah, we’re soon to have all our products updated to the current generation intel processor. So that’ll be 9th generation core processors, including i9, i7 and i5.
Sam: And with all of these, the GPU and the CPUs, what kind of capabilities are those going to bring to your laptops and desktops?
David: Definitely high performance, anything. Whether it be content creation or gaming, you’ll have it with these processors. They have a lot of threads due to the cores, [up to 16 cores for i9 chips, 8 cores for i7 and 6 cores for i5] and multithreading… you’re looking at a lot of parallel processing capabilities for content creators, and Single Threaded performance for gamers, especially. But what matters, especially for gamers, is going to be the graphics card, or in the case of laptops our integrated GPU. And all this is gonna have the latest and greatest Nvidia GeForce RTX parts, all the way up to our desktops with 2080, 2070 and 2060.
Sam: Could you talk a little more about the monitors (that we see on your stage)?
Advertisement
David: you might have noticed that amazing, smooth gameplay. Those laptops are all running 144hz, but our latest monitors the Oculux G Sync monitors. They’re 24”, unlike our other gaming monitors these are not curved, they’re flat panel, but they do have G Sync, and with that they also have 240hz refresh rate, so that’s very fast, and .5 second response time… all this, if you have a consistent cable outputting very high frame rates, it’s going to look very smooth.
Sam: How has your PAX been going so far?
Michael, MSI Marketing Manager: It’s been busy, extremely busy, and uh… crowded! But, it’s always a pleasant experience seeing everyone here.
Sam: Yeah, every time I walk by the MSI booth there’s just always more people.
Advertisement
Michael: Yeah man, super crazy. I understand you want to go over laptops real quick?
In total we have six or seven different laptop lines. Over here we’re kind of focusing on our three flagship ones; going from top to bottom we have our GT series: so our GT series is a no-compromise kind of laptop. You’re getting a big laptop, and the ultimate performance in a laptop. You can get the GT series in a 17” and a 15” and that comes with everything from a Core i9 to a full RTX 2080 card.
15.6″ GT63 Titan (intel 8 series Nvidia RTX) | Copyright © 2019 Micro-Star Int’l Co.,Ltd.
Moving down the line, you have the GS series which is really focused on being portable… being able to take it anywhere. But we’re not compromising on power as well, so you get a 144hz panel, both in 15” and 17” variants, and you can get those with RTX 2080s as well, but those will be Max-Q. So they have different strengths.
On stage, which we’ve got playing Apex Legends, those are using the GE series, those kind of sit in between the GS and GT line, it’s kind of a balance of both. It’s not as thin as a GS, but you’re getting a non Max-Q RTX card. So you’re getting a little more performance.
Sam: I got a chance to play on one of the laptops before, and so they can all ship with RTX cards in them?
Michael: They do, all the ones we have here, and we’re running Battlefield V on two of them and and Metro on the other one to kind of give you the experience of RTX enabled games.
Over on MSI’s website you can see more news about their product lines for desktops, laptops, monitors and individual parts for custom builds, as well as drivers and services and Enterprise solutions.
Advertisement