ASUS is the best option. Money wise the Asus will run you $300 cheaper then the MSI. Some benefits I see are a single SSD instead of 4x128GB for better reliability. MSI gt72 was made for cooling in mind, both of them come with an IPS screen and top notch cpu's, can't go wrong with either one.
The MSI laptop will offer better game performance because it has the GTX 970m. There is not much of a performance improvement going from a 5th generation Intel CPU to a 6th generation Intel CPU. Especially when most games are limited by the GPU rather than the CPU.
See below link to benchmark results between the GTX 970m and GTX 960m from Notebookcheck.net. Benchmark results are an average of all laptops tested with the specific GPU. These laptops can have different Intel CPUs; generally they are all Core i7 CPUs as far back as the 4th generation such as the i7-4720HQ.