The MSI GT83VR Titan Review: 1080 Times 3

Final Words

When MSI launched the GT80 Titan at CES in 2015, it was a big affair for them. The GT80 Titan really delivered a great system, with plenty of performance, in a relatively quiet design. The GT83VR Titan is certainly an evolution of that, with a slightly different name, reflecting the rise of VR in the past year. With a ridiculous amount of performance available, and the rest of the system relatively unchanged, this should be an easy win for MSI.

But those couple of years have been especially harsh on the 18.4-inch Titan, and while it has improved over the original in many ways, it has not kept pace with the rest of the large screen gaming notebooks. We’ve gone over this a few times in the review, but the 18.4-inch panel was a great choice in 2015, but in 2017, it has been surpassed by 17.3-inch panels which offer both higher resolution, and higher refresh rates, along with variable refresh technology. It’s an odd situation when MSI’s GT73VR Titan offers either a 120 Hz FHD display, or a UHD 60 Hz display, but the GT83VR Titan costs almost twice as much, and is stuck with a 60 Hz FHD panel. The biggest shame is that with SLI GTX 1080 graphics, gaming at UHD would be amazing on this notebook.

The new keyboard is also not necessarily an improvement. Moving from MX Brown switches to MX Speed Silver could be seen as a regression to many people, but that’s because mechanical keyboard switches are a very personal choice. It’s nice to see the new keyboard offer per-key lighting, but with the amount of light spilling out under the keys, it can make for a pretty muddy look if you aren’t consistent with the colors. The new lighting isn’t a negative, since the original only offered red, but it could be better, and since you can’t change any of the accent colors, you quickly get a mismatched color scheme.

But maybe you are someone who has bought into the VR aspect of the GT83VR Titan. There’s little doubt that this laptop has more than enough performance for VR applications, with an almost silly amount of GPU available. MSI does offer this with SLI GTX 1070, and that would still be easily enough for any current VR application.

Gaming on the laptop itself is to the point where there likely isn’t a single game where the GPU would struggle, assuming the game supports SLI properly. The mobile class Core i7-7920HQ is the fastest 45-Watt Kaby Lake processor available. Perhaps MSI should move to a desktop chip like Clevo to try and set the GT83VR Titan apart from its already potent GT73VR Titan, but regardless it will be held back by the display anyway. MSI really needs to include the wrist rest again though, or your hands will quickly tire.

The GT83VR Titan is an upgrade over the original GT80 Titan. The newer components are faster, and the excellent chassis has stayed the same, but the competition, even from MSI’s own gaming laptops, has simply moved quicker than this 18.4-inch behemoth could keep up with, and that’s a shame, because it’s still a well-built, powerful system. It just needs a better display to justify the price tag.