Dream Laptop

GT80 2QE TITAN SLI

Performance

The MSI GT80 Titan is more than a gaming juggernaut. It can hold its own on the CPU front, crunching spreadsheets, and multitasking with the best of them. The laptop's 2.6-GHz Intel Core i7-4720HQ processor with 16GB of RAM streamed an episode of Black Mirror from Netflix while running a full system scan with 16 open tabs in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer.

On Geekbench 3, which measures overall performance, the Titan's score of 13,368 easily outclassed the Asus G751JY's 2.5-GHz Intel Core i7-4710HQ CPU and its score of 12,582. However, the MSI fell a little behind the Origin Eon 17-S' 3.1-GHz Intel Core i7-4910MX CPU, which scored 13,913.

The Titan is mighty fast, using its pair of 128GB mSATA SSDs in RAID 0 configuration to duplicate 4.97GB of multimedia files in 16 seconds. That's a transfer rate of 318 MBps, enough to zip past the 268.9 MBps average and make Hermes more than a little jealous. The Eon 17-S (dual 128GB SSDs with a 1TB 5,400-rpm hard drive) posted 255MBps while the G751JY (256GB SSD) produced a blistering 393.3MBps.

When the Titan ran the OpenOffice Spreadsheet Macro test, the laptop took 3 minutes and 47 seconds to pair 20,000 names and addresses, beating the 4:58 average and the G751JY's time of 3:53. However, the Eon 17-S was several seconds faster, at 3:31.