MSI Quality and Upgrading?

[Airgunner]

How's MSI's reputation for making a good product? I was looking at buying a GE60 for gaming(Civ V, BF3, hosting Minecraft server, etc.) and running AutoDesk Simulation.

Also, in the future would it be possible to upgrade this laptop's CPU,GPU, & RAM by the end user? I'm pretty mechanically inclined(mainly in the firearm/airgun area).

 

[peebles08]

Yes you can upgrade the ram and in some higher end laptops GPUs can be upgraded. But GPUs for laptops are expensive, I could be wrong but look at any graphics card for a desktop and times that price by two or three times for a laptop. As for a CPU you could upgrade it but it matters if the motherboard would support said chip. By the time you want to upgrade it probably wont. MSI is a good brand with good internals, I've been doing a lot of research about the GE60 and compared to other models it has good cooling and hardware. I'm actually about to purchase one myself for gaming. For the games you play the 670m in the GE60 should be perfect.

 

[C12Friedman]

For the games you play the 670m in the GE60 should be perfect.

I believe you're thinking of the GT60
The GE60 is the thinner little brother with a 650M or 660M, it does appear that ram and CPU are "upgradable" but, because it is thinner, does not appear to have the swappable GPU feature of the GT60
Here's a good review I think.
http/www.notebookcheck.net/Review-MSI-GE60-i789W7H-Notebook.77855.0.html
Happy reading

 

[peebles08]

Thank you for a the correction I was thinking of of the GT60. Good review too.

 

[Airgunner]

I believe you're thinking of the GT60
The GE60 is the thinner little brother with a 650M or 660M, it does appear that ram and CPU are "upgradable" but, because it is thinner, does not appear to have the swappable GPU feature of the GT60
Here's a good review I think.
http/www.notebookcheck.net/Review-MSI-GE60-i789W7H-Notebook.77855.0.html
Happy reading

I've already read that review, but I'll reread it for anything I might have missed. What I was looking for what common consumers think of the build quality; things like the hinges,wobble, and any overall shortcuts in manufacturing.

Looked at the GT60 and wow I'm going to have to consider this as an option!

Thanks for the replies so far!

 

[robertbhart]

I've already read that review, but I'll reread it for anything I might have missed. What I was looking for what common consumers think of the build quality; things like the hinges,wobble, and any overall shortcuts in manufacturing.

Looked at the GT60 and wow I'm going to have to consider this as an option!

Thanks for the replies so far!

I just got a GT60 and replaced the gtx 670m with a quadro 4000m and it works ok but not without some problems. It took me a while just to find a driver that would recognize the card. MSI don't sell this model with a quadro 4000m so they obviously didn't have a driver for me to download. The latest driver from Nvidia didn't work but when I let it do a smart search on the Nvidia site, it found one that worked.
I then replaced the 3610qm with a 2760QM. The quadro 4000M was $250 on ebay. The 2760qm was $250. I then sold the 670M 3GB for $400 and the CPU for $250. I paid less than $1000 for the laptop on Ebay. In the end I got a laptop for less than $900 that I couldn't find for less than $1800 at the time I bought it.


My advice on this laptop is don't attempt to upgrade the GPU, HDD or CPU unless you are ok with spending a day on troubleshooting issues. The raid configuration it comes with causes a lot of issues for people trying to reinstall windows. The optimus setup doesn't like other GPUs except the 675m and 680M which are supported by MSI.

Doing it again, I would have spent the extra money and got what I wanted out of the box. The time I spent fixing it up wasn't worth it. I haven't tried myself but my understanding is that other brands are easier to upgrade like the Clevo and Alienware.