Unless you needed type C/TB4 ports, or wanted the 2k screen-even though its questionable how well a 95w 3070m could handle 2k gaming (it does worse than a 130w 3060in all games except ones where you exceed the 6gb vram) or really care about the ~300g of extra weight and slightly larger dimensions. This is the a better deal raw performance wise than the other deal.
For the record, the 11th gen tigerlake chips are based on the 10nm superfin process node, and unlike 11th gen desktop chips, they definitely go toe to toe with equiv. amd chips productivity wise (albeit maybe at the cost of power consumption) and would actually see some improvement in gaming thanks to the bigger L3 cache (24MB vs 16MB).
Of course, lets not kid outselves here. In this day and age, one would be foolish to think that 3.3k is enough dollaroos for a full fledged rtx3080 mobile. This isnt to say this machine is too shabby since at this pricepoint this is the highest powered 3080m you can find. At 140w with 8gb vram instead of the 16gb variant. It leads the pack compared to 130w on the strix scar, aorus 15p yd and 125w on the m15r6. The GP66 also have a mux switch so thats a major plus.
- If you are willing to pay extra for full performance 3080m, the cheapest was the legion 7 for 3.9k last month, but it had been going down to 3.6k on the lenovo edu store back in September. Since you are prepared to pay top dollars, I would also advice waiting-if you dont need one urgently- for Feburary next year when we will be getting our first shipment of new laptops annouced at CES 2022, with both intel 12th gen and zen3d mobile looking at major gains and equipped with 30 gen mobile TI cards.
One thing stands out with this laptop, and while its not much-it is good to see the unit been shipped with a pcie gen4 ssd-since quite a few of intel 11th gen laptops even at around this price ships with pcie3.0 ssd in the 4.0 slot (since its the 'default' m.2 slot) even though thats a selling point for intel 11th gen compared to zen3 mobile.
Not much to say else about this laptop, its a pretty standard 1080p 'near 100% SRGB' 240hz panel, with a per key rgb keyboard and no other rgbs bars anywhere (it is a 'value' model compared to some of MSI's other gaming laptops). It doesnt get type c/TB4 ports-as I mentioned at the start-as it seemed to be reusing an older chasis. CPU cooling also doesnt seem that adequate but giving its intel, a bit of an undervolt does the job perfectly and MSI's bios is very good for the job.
This is the only review that I found with basically the exact make and specs on this machine, if you are so interested.
Oh and last but not the least, do take some time to shop around though, since this deal runs for a whole month.
Specs:
CPU
- Tiger Lake i7-11800H
OS
- Windows 10 Home
DISPLAY
- 15.6" FHD (1920*1080), 240Hz, close to 100%sRGB
CHIPSET
- Intel® HM570
GRAPHICS
- RTX3080, GDDR6 8GB
MEMORY
- DDR IV 16GB*2 (3200MHz)
2 Slots Number of SO-DIMM Slot
Max 64GB Max Capacity
STORAGE CAPABILITY
- 1TB NVMe PCIe Gen4x4 SSD (new)
WEBCAM
- HD type (30fps@720p)
KEYBOARD
- Per-Key RGB Backlight Keyboard
COMMUNICATION
- Gb LAN (Up to 2.5G)
Killer ax Wi-Fi 6E + Bluetooth v5.2
AUDIO JACK
- 1x Mic-in/Headphone-out Combo Jack
I/O PORTS
- 3x Type-A USB3.2 Gen1
1x RJ45
1x (8K @ 60Hz / 4K @ 120Hz) HDMI
1x Mini-DisplayPort
BATTERY
- 65 Battery (Whr)
AC ADAPTER
- 280W adapter
DIMENSION (WXDXH)
- 358 x 267 x 23.4 mm
WEIGHT (W/ BATTERY)
- 2.38 kg
COLOR
- Core Black
+1 for the write-up