These days its easy to build up your own gaming machine, ordering the correct parts and getting them all together to form your ultimate gaming machine, but the main disadvantage is usually gaming machines come with very very heavy non-mobile cases, meaning simply you can only enjoy your games in the comfort of your room/office/man cave. Well that’s where the MSI Dragon Edition 2 Comes in!
A 17″, 3 Output capable solid gaming machine, with gamers as the segment the manufacturer intended.
Beautifully designed in red, with dragons etched in the red aluminum panels that cover the device, a SteelSeries keyboard which can give the gamers an amazing hold of things, Dynaudio sound, which is quite an amped up sound quality for a portable machine with built in speakers, kind f reminded me of my older Toshiba Satellite with Harmon/Kardon Speakers, its that good!
Lets start off with my un-boxing video! Everything that came in the box with the device :
http://youtu.be/XRTo-xrfWoQ
First lets look at the specs on the MSI Website for the Dragon 2 Edition :
- Windows 8.1
- The latest 4th generation Intel® Core™ i7 Processor
- 17.3″ Full HD (1920×1080) anti-glare LCD in LED backlight
- Enthusiast level NVIDIA® GeForce GTX 780M discrete graphics card provides great performance and ultra images quality
- Exclusive Super RAID 2 with 3 SSD RAID0 gives over 1500MB/s storage speed! (option)
- Exclusive Cooler Boost 2 technology improves 15% cooling performance with lower fan noise
- Exclusive NOS design enhanced 10% GPU graphics performance
- Matrix display with max 4 displays to expend the vision for extreme gaming experience or multi tasks
- Killer™ DoubleShot combines high-performance Ethernet and Wi-Fi for superior speed and lower latency of online gaming and streaming
- Keyboard by SteelSeries with full color LED back light and solid feedback design
Secondly lets have a look at the screen shots of the device specs after we’ve powered the beast up (you can get these in all windows computers, and you can compare your computer to it!)
As you can see the specs are quite amazing, and the configuration is more than enough to handle nearly any game you put it through! (Although windows doesn’t really show both graphic card drivers, i tried to search for a solution but couldn’t find any)
I also put it through some very cool benchmark tests to check out the graphic card’s performance and It gave quite satisfying results (Check out the video below of the recording of the actual 3DMark benchmark test) then read on for the results!
According to the 3D mark test, the device scored 51% better than all the results, and was way better than the average gaming laptops! The Snapshot below shows you the graphic card’s properties and specs:
Now lets do an inspection covering the physical dimensions of the device :
First, is the beautiful steelSeries LED customizble backlit keyboard, you can also specify specific areas to light up for different games ! A full sized keyboard comes with great comfort, as well as having a full sized num-pad ! My only remark was that they removed the windows key on the left hand side, but when I read reviews, they said it was to make sure that it wasn’t clicked by mistake during the game!
These are a remembrance of what’s under the hood (like you can forget :P)
The mouse pad also very well designed, the clicks are a little too loud for my liking, but I still love it! It wasn’t illuminated however, which sometimes can be an advantage, since the trackpad’s illumination can be distracting at times.
Here’s what the beautiful machine looks like when its powered up!
Here is an overview of the upper easy touch keys, where you can modify things like airplane mode, brightness, open a browser, and modify the gaming mode as well as many others.
Like any other windows 8 machine, the metro style boxes, which are customizable, this was straight out of the box without any modifications! The LED screen is full HD, and the anti-gloss surface makes it great for using anywhere, unlike my current m14x alienware which reflects almost anything!
Here we have the gold plated output jacks 2 fo audio out, one for the headset and one for the mic, as well as 3 USB 3.0 jacks and a memory card reader slot!
On the other side we have 2 USB 2.0 drives, and a CDROM DRIVE.
On the back is where all the action is, power, ethernet, and 3 display ports which you can connect to and display on all simultaneously, add your 173 inch screen and you end up with 4 screens to multi-task on !
I really really liked the device, I never thought I’d like a 17 inch screen, but you can do almost anything with it, without needing to connect it to another screen, its great for movies, and the sound quality is very impressive. The price tag.. A little expensive at 899 KWD (price might have changed in the time of writing), but then again you are getting really high quality specs for what you’re spending and with all the power it has you can do anything with it! Although the large size the weight it at around 4 KG which for those specs and screen size are bearable!
Overall I would recommend it for anyone seeking to buy a great quality gaming laptop, they are now sold exclusively by BEST Electronics, and they are the official distributors for MSI products in the Kuwaiti market now.
For more information visit their website at www.best.com.kw or call them at 1832323.