Well I've been touring around my new
MSI GT75 Titan 8RG for a couple weeks now.
I absolutely love it, but have been plagued with some technical hurdles along the way.
1. The wireless network card (Killer brand) was outdated out of the box. So I got intermittent wi-fi during setup and then the laptop would completely "forget" there was a network card installed. A bit of investigation revealed that the last Win 10 update that shipped with the laptop (1709) doesn't handshake well with the Killer software so I had to do a clean driver install to get wi-fi up and running. THEN I had to update to the latest Win 10 1803 version. Thankfully the wi-fi has been running fine since though.
2. When I installed the most recent NVIDIA drivers, I got a pop-up saying it was installing Nvidia-branded "HD Audio" drivers so I have no idea if my laptop is now using them instead of the "Hi-Res / DynAudio / Nahimic3" suite. It feels like the audio field is not as wide or deep now, but I can't tell if that's just my mind playing tricks on me.
3. This one is my goof, but apparently there's a custom Dragon Control Center that lets you tweak all kinds of laptop settings including Performance (power) Modes. There's like 4 settings for how much juice you want to feed the machine (Eco, Comfort, Sport, Turbo). I didn't even know this was a feature and the laptop's shipping default setting is Sport, which has the fans spinning at an alarming volume...you know like a jet taking off. For a hot minute I thought it was gonna be a deal-breaker as my wife and I enjoy hanging out on the couch and in bed browsing our laptops and the Sport volume level of the laptop is no bueno in regards to distracting other people in the room. Thankfully I saw you could switch the power mode to Comfort and that was MUCH better. Making fan noise a non issue.
4. My biggest problem atm, is that I
can't enable G-sync on my sexy new 17" 120Hz (3ms) screen. This is a HUGE deal that has had me Googling for the past 10 days trying to find a solution. I know there's a toggle in the Nvidia Control Panel to turn G-sync on, but there's simply no listing for it anywhere. Nothing. I've read that this is a known issue that
may be caused by the latest Win 10 updates, but it's kinda infuriating based on the amount of solution research I've done vs. actual solutions. I'm left wondering if I should just start over and do a factory refresh on the laptop or even worse, flash the BIOS (which terrifies me as I've never done this).
The worst part is that when the machine is up and running games look and feel absolutely glorious. Camera movement on a 120Hz screen is liquid smooth compared to my old 60Hz screen (shockingly so). And running with a 1080 GTX as opposed to my old potato 860m has me giddy like a school-girl as I flagrantly set all my game's graphics options to Ultra straight out of the gate. The mechanical keyboard with individual key lighting is completely baller.
BUT...just knowing that my rig is advertised as having a G-sync monitor and having ZERO access to it or ideas what to do has taken a lot of the wind out of my sails. I've read that this is a know issue with MSI laptops...I've seen several reports just like mine, but maddeningly there's no concrete solution. Maybe I'll try the BIOS trick or do a factory reset or something. Which is a drag 'cause it takes days to get any laptop up to specs with customization (settings, games, apps, etc.).
Still happy with my purchase for the 17" 120Hz / 1080 GTX / i7 8th Gen alone, but man has it been work acclimating to it. Anyone run into similar issues with new rigs?
