MSI showing off their new goodies at Computex

[jasong]

Computex 2015 is now happening in Taiwan and as usual, MSI have used it to showcase their most exciting new hardware developments. They've brought some brand new notebooks and some amazing upgrades to existing models.

We've also got one of the MSI SA guys over there who will feed back some hands on pics and news, and I'll post that when I get it. Here's a preview:



The official showing starts tomorrow so I'll be updating as I get information.

 

[jasong]

MSI showed off a serious upgrade to the GT72 - Tobii's eye tracking technology!

http://www.engadget.com/2015/06/02/msi-gaming-laptop-concept-eye-tracking/?ncid=rss_truncated

Although it's not a new concept on its own, the idea of using eye-tracking on a gaming laptop is something quite novel. In the near future, games are expected to react to eye contact, bringing immersion to a whole new level in games, and MSI is apparently ready with the GT72 when that happens.

How does playing Assassin's Creed with your eyeballs sound?

The trio of short-range infrared sensors monitor your eye movement, which (at least how they're utilized in this particular game) allow you to adjust your field of vision to where you want to in the game. Instead of rotation the camera with a mouse or buttons, you simply look to where you want to, and the detection software kicks in and sweeping the camera to where you (more often than not) wanted it to.

The software is still in an early stage of development, but it's being integrated into MSI's notebooks.

G-Sync

In addition to the motion tracking software, the GT72 will now feature a G-Sync ready display capable of matching the refresh rate to any given frame rate between 30-75 Hz.

i7-5700HQ processors

Going forward, MSI will be equipping all new gaming laptops with the latest mobile Intel Core i7-5700HQ processors. They'll offer 7-10% more performance than previous gen processors.

 

[jasong]

There were quite a few additional announcements from MSI yesterday (source):

Smaller external gaming docks

The gaming dock concept introduced in the GS30 has been slimmed down considerably so that it doesn't look much bulkier than a standard notebook dock.

It'll still use the proprietary x16 connector that gives full PCI-E bandwidth when it's plugged in, and enough power to support a Titan X.

All-In-One with GPU port

The AIO X264 was also revealed with a GPU housing placed at the back of the screen.

You can slot in any GPU and transport it one handed with the handle to LAN parties.

 

[jasong]

Tomshardware has a cool writeup on MSI's Nahimic audio software shown off at Computex. This stuff can get lost in all the noise when there's so much cool stuff to see but it's a very nice feature:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nahimic-software-audio-enhancement-msi,29320.html

One of the most crowded booths at Computex 2015 was MSI's, which is fully justified as the company showed off a plethora of new products including its latest graphics cards, mainboards and gaming laptops. One item that caught our attention, though, was an innovative sound technology from Nahimic software.

MSI teamed up with Nahimic, a company created in 2004 by two French engineers, to bring a new audio experience to its gaming products.

Simply put, Nahimic has implemented sound enhancement software that offers a virtual surround experience even through plain headphones and speakers, meaning that no special hardware is necessary for it to work. In addition, the software uses frequency leveler abilities, including a bass boost. On top of that, it enhances voice clarity in order for the user to be able to hear voices better, whether that's in-game or over Twitch or Skype, using noise gate and noise reduction.

At MSI's booth, we had the chance to experience firsthand the Nahimic software while playing a game using a SteelSeries gaming headphones set. With the Nahimic in action, the difference in listening to the game's sounds was impressive. However, the most notable part was the ability to record our own voices with most of the background noise removed.

Nahimic is already embedded on MSI GE and GS series notebooks, and on many MSI All-in-Ones. It is compatible with Windows 8.1 and needs an MSI device in order to run.

The Nahimic software doesn't actually do anything to the audio signal that you or I couldn't do manually using free audio software. In fact, when we asked to see a representation of the audio waves, a booth rep simply pulled up Audacity to show us. (Audacity is a free audio editor that's been around for years.) If you know what you're doing, you could reproduce Nahimic's results with free software and a few clicks.

The thing that Nahimic brings here, though, is an automated and -- most importantly -- real-time process. The software performs those simple tweaks instantaneously, and going from the demo we experienced, the company's claims are justified. The results before and after were dramatic.

 

[jasong]

Nahimic 3d audio

One of the most buzzed about features shown off by MSI at Computex 2015 was a piece of audio software they’re offering to owners of MSI hardware called Nahimic. Check out some of the quotes:

All we can said that it is an impressive software where you can enhanced your cheap onboard audio hardware and cheap headphone to become something that you cannot imagine. It can change your cheap hardware becoming an expensive audiophile system. With the audio enhancer feature you can make most everything to become clearer... Once they switch On the Nahimic the sound changed drastically. More clearer than the default setup and the sound became more realistic. The chopper sound, guns and etc.

Source

The differences the Nahimic audio enhancement made were sensational, from the frequency range to the overall volume level, without any added distortion. It was simply amazing to hear what this technology could do!

Source

The thing that Nahimic brings here, though, is an automated and -- most importantly -- real-time process. The software performs those simple tweaks instantaneously, and going from the demo we experienced, the company's claims are justified. The results before and after were dramatic.

Source

So what is Nahimic? It’s an incredibly advanced audio enhancement tool, originally designed for training military combat, which has been adapted for PC gamers, and can transform standard stereo equipment into a convincing 7.1 surround sound experience. Get ready to Hear Beyond the Limits!

Military Technology

In the same way that aircraft pilots need to know the direction of a threat in order to respond immediately, gamers rely on directional audio cues to stay competitive.

By turning on the Nahimic software, you can immediately tell exactly where your enemies are coming from and react to them faster than anyone else.
Click here to experience the difference it can make.

Audio enhancement
On top of the surround sound, Nahimic does some amazing work to sharpen and improve the quality of the sound in the game. Explosions, voices, weaponry, you name it; everything is intelligently tweaked to heighten the quality of the game’s audio. The software dynamically responds to the environment, improving every sound with no tweaking required.

Noise cancellation
Not only does Nahimic enhance in-game audio, it also has some very effective noise cancellation techniques that can eliminate up to 90% of background noise. The software constantly monitors the environment and cuts down on interference dramatically. In addition, your own voice recordings through Nahimic are also filtered so that the background noise is eliminated – meaning that in-game “chat” will be so much clearer.

 

[jasong]

MSI Rewards

It is with pleasure we announce our new initiative – MSI Rewards. As the name suggests, it is a reward program for users of the MSI Gaming forums. In short, you will earn points for being active and helpful, registering your products online and sharing your experiences of your MSI products as well as games.

Once you’ve gathered enough points, you’ll be able to claim your rewards – the prize table is changeable, but includes both games and hardware. Currently, we have copies of Far Cry 4 and The Elder Scrolls: Online to offer, in addition to the GTX 960 GAMING 100 Million Edition as well as the GE62 Gaming Notebook.

To sign up and for more info, see the MSI Rewards website.

 

[jasong]

i7-4600M Overclocking

Overclocking is something we don’t talk about a lot when it comes to mobile gaming systems. We don’t usually encourage it either, but at least you can usually overclock your graphics card via software, and especially in our GT series, there is a little bit of headroom, due to a beefy thermal design.

The regular Core i7 CPUs were never intended for overclocking, yet despite this, Thai overclocker “0.0” has found a way to push a Core i7 4600M CPU to a full 4800MHz in a GE60 notebook, using a bit of creative hacking. This 4800MHz frequency is not only stable enough to run Intel’s XTU Benchmark, but the high frequencies manage to propel it to the top of the worldwide leaderbords for dual-core CPUs - with 602 points.

While 0.0’s chosen method is a modified firmware, this overclocking method is obviously out of reach of most people, but more info on the world’s fastest dual-core CPU in Intel XTU can be found over at HWBOT and 0.0’s result discussion thread.

 

[jasong]

Up to 12% performance enhancement of the Intel 5th Generation Core i7 5700HQ on new MSI gaming notebooks.

The main difference from Broadwell CPU architecture and Haswell CPU architecture is the process technology, the 5th Generation Core i7 of Broadwell comes with latest 14nm from wafer manufacturing process, so that will comes with less heat and TDP for notebook CPU platform. The default clock of Core i7 5700HQ is 2.7GHz, and boost up to 3.5GHz when heavy loading calculation. We could take a look on the CPU-Z table.

How is the performance enhancement?

It’s not easy to see the pure performance enhancement of CPU scores, but I still try from different programs to figure out.
Let’s take a look of the 3D Mark 06 pure CPU score, the comparison as below table, 7724 points is 10% faster than 4th Generation Core i7 4720HQ, and if compare with low voltage Core i7 5600UM which is only dual cores of i7, the REAL QUAD CORE i7 5700HQ is over 2x faster, so that’s why the MSI gaming notebook only use standard version of Core i7 with Quad Core architecture, because Core does matter!

Rendering calculation enhanced 12% on CineBench R15 CPU Multi 64bit

Then we comes to rendering calculation for professional usage, the CineBench SERIES is a great reference of pure CPU score from professional usage of rendering and engineering calculations. Core i7 5700HQ got 722 score, and current Core i7 4720HQ is 642 score, 5700HQ is 12% faster than 4720HQ, we could see it’s real performance boost from architecture enhancement, and it helps a lot on the multi cores calculations.

3D Mark 11 Performance Score Enhancement

Than we take a look on 3D Mark 11 performance score, 3D Mark 11 is more related to graphics card, but still need powerful CPU to push the 3D performance to higher level, we could see around 6% improvement here if we used same GTX980M 8GB graphics card, the performance difference is not big, but Core i7 5700HQ still got 6% higher than same graphics with GTX980M 8GB, I think this is still works when in most of the gaming experience, especially on ultra-heavy loading games, or games with 3K or 4K resolution gaming experience.

Conclusion:
Since the Code name “Broadwell” of Core i7 5700HQ gaming notebooks has just arrived in the market, I think there are still lots of models with 4720HQ or 4710HQ, but 5700HQ will brings real benefits for multi cores calculation or gaming experience. So you could consider this latest powerful platform, the newer the better.

 

[jasong]

MSI Collection

We have previously highlighted our bundle items in a YouTube video, which resulted in a lot of requests for more info on the products.

Therefore, we’ve taken a further step to show off our bundled items, including backpacks, palmrests, keyboard skins and what have you – they are all visible at our MSI Collection page, which can be found here: http://www.msi.com/collections/pages

Currently, none of the items are for sale to the general public, but they just might become in the future if we see enough hits on the page.

 

[jasong]

Windows 10 upgrade

Windows 10 is drawing close. Very close. If you’re running a consumer version of Windows 7 SP1 or 8.1, you will have noticed a message in the right end of the taskbar with a Windows logo – if you click this, you will be prompted to upgrade to Windows 10.

Due to Microsoft’s eagerness to have a lot of people upgrade to their new operating system, they are offering a free upgrade if you have a valid license for Windows 7 or later, meaning this is essentially a no-brainer if you want the latest and greatest.

 

[jasong]

Broadwell Updates

We’re sure you haven’t missed the new Broadwell CPUs – also known as the 5th Generation Core CPUs from Intel. As ever, the new CPU family brings out performance increases and improved battery life due to a new 14nm manufacturing process. We’ve already established that the new CPU family beats the old Haswell (4th Gen Core), but in case you’ve missed this, Bit-Tech has conducted an independent test of the PE60 and its Core i7-5700HQ CPU.

The i7-5700HQ is a direct successor to the i7-4720HQ, widely used across our range of notebooks, and the performance increases are clear to see, despite a 100MHz turbo boost deficit compared to the older CPU. In fact, Bit-Tech points out that “the Intel Core i7-5700HQ was an even match, even for the Intel Core i7-4800MQ” which is a notch higher up than the i7-4700HQ series. Or, to put it another way: “Thanks to the addition of hyper-threading, the Intel Core i7-5700HQ was able to topple desktop quad-cores such as the Core i5-4670K convincingly in Cinebench R15”.

Broadwell therefore shrinks the gap between mobile and desktop CPU performance even further, and we’re extremely happy to announce that our Gaming and Prestige series are both being shipped out with Broadwell CPUs as you read this. Also, the transition couldn’t be simpler - see the very handy guide below.

 

[jasong]

Broadwell vs. Haswell – part 1: Cinebench

As we’ve previously mentioned, we are rapidly phasing in 5th Gen Intel Core i7 Broadwell CPUs across our range instead of the previously used 4th Gen Haswell CPU – as seen below.

On paper, the differences between the CPUs mainly used aren’t very large – they’re of similar specifications, same power levels (47W TDP), and support the same kind of things. In fact, the biggest differences comes down to the i7-5700HQ Broadwell chip having a 100MHz higher base frequency, as well as a 100MHz lower boost frequency than its predecessor, the i7-4720HQ, as well as support for 1866MHz RAM, as opposed to 1600MHz. For casual users, Intel are steadily improving its graphics solutions, so Broadwell comes with Intel HD Graphics 5600, whereas the Haswell offering comes with HD 4600.

With everything looking very similar specification-wise, we decided to take the CPUs for a head to head spin in a few benchmark applications, the first of which was the CPU test Cinebench R15. The benchmark utilizes all CPU threads, and both our CPUs have 4 cores and 8 threads.

We ran the benchmark three times on each CPU, both with dual channel memory, and recorded the results as seen above. Clearly, the newcomer is a big step up, with a consistent performance over 10% higher than that of the older i7-4720HQ. This is fairly impressive, considering the fact that the i7-4720HQ is actually able to perform at a 100MHz higher boost frequency than the i7-5700HQ.

The Broadwell CPU absolutely walks away with the victory in Cinebench, the first of our benchmarks we’re looking at over the upcoming few weeks.

 

[jasong]

Broadwell vs. Haswell – part 2: WinRAR

Part 2 of our Broadwell vs. Haswell series brings us to more real-life performance increases. This time, we’re looking at compression, and the WinRAR benchmark. Now, as a reminder, the table below is to give you an overview of the transition to the 5th Generation Broadwell chips, the i7-5000 series, and which CPU replaces which.

Just like with last week’s Cinebench test, the WinRAR benchmark supports multi-threading, and will therefore be using all 8 threads of both our i7-4720HQ as well as the i7-5700HQ.

Just like last time, we put both systems, both with dual-channel RAM at the same frequencies and timings through their paces in three runs. The result is clear to see, with the Broadwell CPU edging ahead with a reasonable margin, adding another comfortable win over Haswell in real-life performance.

 

[jasong]

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 performance.

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.

 

[jasong]

MSI Rewards Program

Sign up to the MSI forum and participate to earn points that you can use towards your purchase of MSI related goods. Post articles, offer feedback, review hardware and generally contribute in a positive way to qualify for some amazing discounts.
https://forum-en.msi.com/

For details see here: gaming.msi.com/rewards

Initial rewards on offer include one GE62 Gaming Notebook, one GTX 960 Gaming 100 Million Edition graphics card as well as 50 downloadable copies each of two games (Far Cry 4 and Elder Scrolls: Online). These are some pretty serious gifts.

 

[FarligOpptreden]

Well, seeing as I just got a GS70 I can register and review it to earn a quick 100 points. Dunno how I'm gonna make up the rest though...

 

[jasong]

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.