MSI GT60 and GT70 Laptops Upgraded with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680M

It seems fitting that we would end up writing about the GT70 and GT60 gaming notebooks just half a day after we documented an unexpected move on MSI's part.

And by “unexpected move” we meant, of course, the newly-discovered plans of Micro-Star International to enter the solid state drive segment. There, we gave GT60 and GT70 as the first examples of MSI products with the company's own SSD technology. Not MSI SSDs, but a MSI-developed RAID setup. The reason we are mentioning the gaming notebooks again has nothing to do with the alleged intention to enter the SSD segment though. Rather, Micro-Star International has issued a press release to announce the inclusion of a new GPU in the specifications list. The discrete graphics adapter is none other than NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 680M, with its 1,344 CUDA cores, 4 GB of GDDR5 VRAM, a memory interface of 256 bits and clock speed of 720 MHz. We suppose we should mention here that we actually saw the 680M-enabled GT70 back in June, during Computex 2012. However, the official launch took place only now.

The rest of the specifications aren't really different from before, but we'll make a summary of them, just in case interested users forgot them. The screen size is really the only distinctive feature available at a glance: 17.3 inch on the GT70 and 15.6 inch on the GT60. Everything else is the same. The memory, for one, goes as high as 32 GB (DDR3-1600), which is more than enough for any heavyweight title. Right on its heels is the storage capacity: two 2.5-inc bays let HDDs or SSDs be configured in Super RAID mode. Depending on the type of drives, read speeds can reach 1000 MB/s and writing can be done at 800 MB/s. As for the rest, the press release mentions USB 3.0 (three ports), USB 2.0, HDMI, VGA, Gigabit LAN, Wi-Fi, Blu-ray writer, HD webcam, THX TruStudio Pro surround sound and a 9-cell battery (up to four hours of web surfing, twice as much as other gaming machines).

MSI GT60 and GT70 laptops get GTX 680M
Image credits to MSI

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