What's most surprising about the GT70 is its battery life—5 hours and 10 minutes. That's positively Methuselah-like for a desktop replacement this powerful—and is partly due to a capacious 87 watt-hour battery and a less voracious third-gen Intel Core i7-3610QM CPU. Our $2000 test unit also sported 16GB of memory, dual U100 60GB solid-state drives configured in RAID 0, a 700GB hard drive, and a Blu-ray burner. Other, cheaper configurations are differentiated only by more sedate storage options.
The GT70's ports and connectivity are state of the art: three USB 3.0 ports, eSATA, gigabit ethernet, and Killer 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi (450 megabits per second), HDMI and VGA video out, an SD card slot, and surround audio. The latter is output via two additional jacks sitting beside the normal headphone and microphone jacks. All are gold-plated, which makes them less prone to oxidation and offers a slightly firmer connection, but doesn't improve sound quality.
Speaking of which, while the GT70's 17.3-inch, 1920-by-1200-pixel display and video playback are top-notch, the audio is significantly less so. Through headphones the sound was decent, but from the speakers it was muddy and seemingly distorted at higher levels. I wasn't in love with the signal output to external speakers either. Call the audio just passable, despite all the marketing hype and the onboard subwoofer.
The gaming frame rates delivered by the GT70's Nvidia GTX670M GPU are very playable, if not quite all the way up the scale. At 1920 by 1080, Crysis 2 dragged a bit when set to high or ultra detail. Dirt 3 was just barely workable at maximum settings. You'll probably need to dial down the detail slightly for smooth game play at the screen's full capacity with most modern titles.
The MSI GT70 also turned in a score of 145 on WorldBench 7, which is very fast, though 55 points off the pace set by the , a far pricier unit with an unlocked, overclocked Core i7-3920XM CPU that runs almost 2GHz faster. Still, the feel of GT70's Windows 7 OS and applications is snappy and them some. Our test system also had one of the quickest Windows boot times we've yet seen from a laptop—a mere 25.8 seconds. That includes the initialization of the Intel Rapid Storage RAID controller as well as the network boot utility.