23Dec New Video Editing laptop MSI GS60 Ghost pro 4k-080
My old editing laptop managed to eject flames from the side vent after an afternoon of editing on the deck of a local bar in Eureka’s foggy winter weather. Taking my old Dell XPS 15 apart I found the GPU portion of the motherboard completely fried. Three solid years of use was a good run for the 11 pound monster but now it’s time for an upgrade.
There aren’t really a lot of high end windows laptops designed specifically for video editing. Most of them are marketed towards gamers which means glowing lights, crazy logos, and names like “Ghost”, “Stealth”, and “Razer Blade” that scream FPS domination. While I don’t do a lot of gaming the qualities that make a great gaming laptop tend to provide a great editing experience.
After doing a lot of research and talking to some other editors, I decided to pull the trigger on the MSI GS60 Ghost pro 4k-80. At just over $2000 (on ebay), the MSI GS60 sports a 2.5 Ghz i7 processor, GTX 970M GPU, 16GM of ram, 128GB m.2 SSD, 1TB storage drive, full size keyboard, and a 4k IPS display. All of this in a 4.2 pound 15 inch form factor.
You can raise the price another $350 and get the same laptop with a 512GB m.2 SSD, or you can buy a 512GB m.2 drive for $240 and upgrade it yourself (i’ll be doing that in a future post). If you want to save some money, downgrading the 4k screen to 1080p drops the price to around $1800 and moving to the model with 12GB of ram brings the price down another $100 or so. No matter what options you choose editing laptops are always pricey and the GS60 is no exception.
I’ve been editing on the MSI GS60 for about 5 weeks now, so far playback has been very smooth and rendering times are in the ballpark of a GTX 680 or 770. The 4k screen is nice, but it can actually be a problem at times. By default the GS60 comes with windows icon scaling set to 200%. I was able to scale that back to 150% without causing problems, but any smaller than that and I have trouble reading the tiny text. Things are nice and very crisp at 4k but with that kind of scaling I almost wonder if I’d have been better off with the 1080p version of the GS60. Also some apps don’t react to windows screen scale settings (adobe update for example) so you end up having to get very close to the screen in order to read things.
The design and build quality of the GS60 is good with brushed aluminum covering pretty much everything. The keyboard is responsive and once you deactivate the glowing keys it’s about as good as it gets for a laptop keyboard. There is very little bloatware installed on the GS60 other than some MSI battery life, keyboard, and game streaming software, it is pretty much stock windows.
For cooling the MSI GS60 uses two fans located at the top of the keyboard. It can get noisy while rendering, but they don’t seem to really ramp up during normal editing and they aren’t nearly as loud as my old system. It isn’t really a problem for me since I edit with headphones, but if you are relying solely on the laptop speakers fan noise could be an issue.
I was a little disappointed with the size of the power supply. Other manufactures have started to slim down their 150 watt power supplies and added nice bits and pieces for cable management, but this is not one of them. The GS60’s power brick weighs almost a pound and the large flat shape makes it acquired to pack. There isn’t really a decent way to wrap the power cables around the supply so you end up sort of shoving them into a pocket in your backpack and untangling them later. It’s not horrible, but the rest of the unit is designed so well that it’s kind of a shame that MSI forgot about the power supply.
So far the MSI GS60 Ghost pro laptop has been a positive experience. I’ll be posting more on the upgrade process as well as the fit and finish of the laptop itself as I continue edit with it. So far so good.
December 23rd, 2014 at 8:45 pm
Welcome back.. Just read about this laptop online as well, it said it is 48hz refresh rate, did you have an issue while editing?
December 23rd, 2014 at 9:12 pm
You’re right the RGBW PenTile display is locked at 48hz. I haven’t run into any problems so far. Doesn’t seem to effect video editing. I might try and load bioshock infinite and see how it effects that. The seiki 30hz panels made mouse movements feel sort of strange, 48hz is fast enough of a refresh rate that it doesn’t seem to have that problem. I played around with the GS60 4k for about an hour at a store before I felt comfortable with ordering the 4k model. Had trouble hunting down a 3k version to play around with, but i’m told that doesn’t suffer from the 48hz limit.
December 24th, 2014 at 2:34 pm
[…] been doing a bit of research on the MSI GS60 Ghost laptop and I think i’m just about ready to start upgrading. From what I’ve gathered in forums […]
December 24th, 2014 at 3:22 pm
How does it whole up with after effects for motion graphics
December 24th, 2014 at 3:45 pm
I’ve only had to do minor after effects work so far, but ray tracing and CUDA support worked right out of the box. If you have a AE project you’d like me to test, give me a link and I can give you some rendering times and play back frame rates.
December 30th, 2014 at 12:50 pm
I picked up this laptop for post-production work as well a few weeks ago. The GS60 may be the best option if you’re looking for a thin laptop with a decent GPU. I chose a model with a different GPU (GTX 860M), but it handles 4K material quite well.
December 30th, 2014 at 1:43 pm
I strongly considered the GTX860M models, the price was very tempting. But the reports on the GTX 970M GPU were showing gains of 30 to 40%, I figured I might be able to squeeze an extra few years out of it for the jump in price.
December 31st, 2014 at 7:55 am
Hi i’ve had this laptop with the 970 gpu and 12gb ram for like two weeks and i don’t know if i’m doing things right, but i was especting something more than a 4fps preview (not ram preview) on after effects. Also i was using a multi camera sequence with three 1080p mov files and it worked just like my old asus rog g55 with gtx 660m. I’ve done everything i’ve found on the internet about activating the cuda. But i still don’t get the expected results.
PD: if you’re going to buy one of these, go with the 970 version, is nvidia’s new maxwell construction, lot’s of improvements in temperature, which is always an issue in this kind of laptops and i’ve had it just great with this version.
can someone advice me on what to do to improve performance?
December 31st, 2014 at 10:33 am
Are you running unplugged or plugged in?
January 2nd, 2015 at 9:00 pm
[…] finally had a chance to sit down and film the M.2 hard drive upgrade on the MSI GS60 editing laptop I picked up. The total tear down and reassembly time was a little less then an hour and I only […]
April 24th, 2015 at 7:52 pm
Just purchased this laptop but the 1080 GTX 965 version and one question I have is rendering when I queue a project to Adobe Media Encoder CC from Premiere CC render seems to be taking an absurd amount of time, wonder if I’m doing something wrong? Otherwise everything works perfectly with no dropped frames. Any suggestions?