Powerful MSI GS70 Stealth gaming laptop revealed

MSI has announced the launch of the GS70 Stealth Gaming notebook, a 17-inch laptop that is far more serious about portability than ever before, and still gives more than a nod to good performance. It’s essentially a larger version of the GE40 with a few more features making it suitable for gaming and work use as well.

MSI South Africa has not made any announcements of pricing or retail availability. MyGaming has contacted representatives for comment, but they did not respond to queries by the time publication. There isn’t even an international pricing point at this stage.

The GS70 ships with a 17.3-inch LCD boasting 1080p resolution and an anti-glare finish to minimise reflections. There’s also Intel’s latest Core i7-4700QM quad-core processor with boost speeds of up to 3.4GHz, as well as 16GB of DDR3-1600 memory, and Nvidia’s Geforce GTX765 with 2GB of GDDR5 memory.

: MSI GS70 front shot

: MSI GS70 Display Matrix feature

: MSi GS70 backlit keyboard

: MSI GS70 full specs sheet

The keyboard is once again made by Steelseries and features a customisable LED-backlit layout with several separately customisable zones. There’s improved onboard sound thanks to some tweaking from MSI and Creative Labs, Killer NIC wireless and wired networking, and support for up to two mSATA SSDs in RAID 0 or 1 along with a third 2.5-inch hard drive for storing the rest of your data that doesn’t need to be sped up.

A rather unique feature among gaming laptops is the ability to support triple monitors. The GS70 has two Displayport 1.2 ports and one HDMI 1.4a port. These ports can feed an extra three monitors with resolutions up to 1080p at 60Hz refresh rates and can be used in addition to the monitor already built into the laptop itself.

MSI has no plans to make a docking station for the GS70, but having to plug in three video cables, a power cable and a USB plug for your wireless keyboard and mouse isn’t that much of a pain.