It may be a bit of a stereotype, but nothing says I love you more, than a huge rock placed on your finger while your loved ones (or random strangers, whatevs) watch on. It’s an old tradition but still very significant in this day and age. It’s also tradition for the man to propose to the woman, and I’m not ok with that. Why should the man propose? Why do we have to sit around waiting for him to look up from the footie (or, more likely, the latest Tomb Raider offering) and realise we’re waiting for a ring. I’m not happy sitting around and waiting. I also think there is better things to blow money on… like laptops. Seriously.
I recently got to spend some time with a little 14″ notebook from MSI.
The MSI GS40 Phantom Notebook to be more precise.
I’ve never been a fan of notebooks if I’m honest, the idea of not being able to replace components on the fly was always a deal breaker for me and I’m sure many avid gamers out there would agree that if your GFX card was outdated replacing an entire computer was pretty lame.
Maybe because I’m getting older, or now seeing the amazing new gadgets coming out of the tech giants (external graphics cards anyone?), I was actually rather excited to pop the lid of the MSI GS40 Phantom and give it a whirl. After less than a day – my mind was changed. I looked at my once revered desktop with contempt and loathing, mostly because taking it to LANs is a mission.
The GS40 isn’t even the top of the range MSI offering (that honour belongs to the upcoming VR ready notebooks) and yet the GS40 blows most desktops away. The little shiny beauty is packed with a GTX 970M, 16Gigs of ram, i7-6700HQ, Solid state OS drive and a terabyte storage space. It’s hard to believe that it fits in to such a small space (a bit like a shiny expensive diamond on a ring). I found the battery lasted surprisingly well when you consider all the high-end components packed within the interior of the notebook. It is also rather quiet (much how I like my men) making very little noise that we could detect while it was running. I’d take a chance and say hardware won’t be an issue for a good few years on this baby.
Another notoriously annoying thing with laptops is all the unnecessary software manufacturers add to the mix. I don’t want my 30 day trial of X software that I’ll never use to start harassing me daily while taking up precious processing power JUST to tell me my trial is about to expire. Don’t mistake me here, the MSI notebook does have some of that “but I didn’t ask for it” software…. but it is actually rather rad. Dragon Gaming Centre gives you real time stats of your notebook’s performance: everything from Battery percentage remaining to power consumption to GPU and CPU performance. There’s also an easy to use backup manager to ensure you never lose any data in case of theft or damage.
Strangely enough the feature that impresses me the most has nothing to do with the notebook – which alone is absolutely awesome, but rather with the tech giants producing these new notebooks. They have begun to understand why gamers didn’t want notebooks and have tweaked the notebook design accordingly – offering external graphics cards, easily changeable hard drives and the like.
I know my next upgrade will be to a gaming notebook, which is something I never thought I’d say.
The only real kick in the gut (and it is far worse than him not proposing) is the cost of these sexy little gaming notebooks. They aren’t cheap. Actually they aren’t expensive either – they’re absurdly priced. I loved this notebook but it costs in the region of that God awful fruit product our editor loves so much and that makes me sad.
So, if you’re still waiting for the ring possibly forgo it in exchange for a gaming notebook. You’ll benefit, he’ll benefit (well, if he buys himself one as well he will). They cost much the same as a diamond ring and, with the new VR range on the way, are probably a better investment anyway.
Disclaimer: Tech Girl was given the MSI GS40 Phantom notebook to review. We kept it for a period of one week and then it headed back to the manufacturer.
