First, the 4k UHD screen is a let down. I was hoping that it was at least comparable to Apple's retina display and at best equivalent to Super AMOLED. Nope, it wasn't even close to the retina display. The brightness/contrast for one is worse than that of retina's or super AMOLED's and because of its poor contrast, the colors portrayed by the screen change notably depending on the ambient light. But my biggest gripe is with the viewing angles. See pics below
The view straight on, looks good :)
The view from top left, weeeiiiirrrddd ..... brightness overwhelms ........
Looking upclose, corners be bright ..........
The effects from the various angles shown above are not camera effects, they do look like that. Although I must say that based on the reviews on notebookcheck.net, even the 4k IGZO Sharp screen can't compete with the retina display, you can clearly see that Sharp IGZO exhibits the same off angle brightness weirdness just like mine (this is a unique value of notebookcheck.net's reviews, it has the pictures of the screen from various angles, although sometimes the shots are not great)
You might say that this rogue brightness is no big deal, but sometimes you need to see something up close (since 15 inch is not very big) and when you do suddenly the corners light up so to speak and it's annoying the hell out of me. This effect is more pronounced in darker rooms.
If you watch Xotic PC's review of GS60 4K 80 on youtube, you'd think that it has superb viewing angles. The laptop was put on a turntable and you'll see the screen from different horizontal and vertical angles. But that's where the problem lies. The brightness is stable as long as you see it from purely horizontal/vertical angles. If you see it from a mixed angle, say top right/left, the brightness changes dramatically. The screen suddenly becomes very milky, although the colors don't wash out. Even if you look at it from a short distance, say less than 3 inches, you'll see that the corners become very bright. This is something that doesn't happen with the macbook's retina display. Furthermore, the lightbleed is quite severe.
Some comments about XoticPC, you need to take their reviews with a grain of salt. Why? because they're selling the units they're reviewing. If you see enough of their youtube videos you'll see that they almost never say anything negative about the products under review, my favorite examples are: 1) the 27 second boot time of msi GT80 (a $3300 laptop with SSD) while my $900 lenovo boots in under 15 seconds with hybrid HDD, 2) the screen of lenovo Y50, it has very bad viewing angles, you can see that the colors wash out but the comment was along the line "it's no so bad". It's not just Xotic, it's true with anyone who has conflict of interest.
Second, I feel cheated by msi. In Xotic's review on youtube, the SSD used is Toshiba, when I received my laptop, they've switched to the inferior Kingston whose write speed is significantly lower than that of Toshiba's. As of RAID configuration, it doesn't help one bit with random accesses. Thus RAID 0 is not worth the risk in my opinion, since if one drive fails all data will be lost.
Third, the fans are loud, if you're new to gaming laptops you'll have a rude awakening. Also, there's a bug in the keyboard firmware. If you change the settings, like changing the backlight color or layers of the keyboard, the backlight sometimes stays on even after the laptop has completely shutdown. Speaking of the keyboard, the enter key area gets warmer than the rest of the keyboard since it is directly on top of the RAM heatsink.
Also, the 4K screen is based on the controversial pentile technology, look it up if you want to know more and I think the worse thing is that the battery is faulty. The wear level is around 15%, I've raised this up on NBR forum and turned out that other people experience the same thing, however, msi did not acknowledge or reply my inquiries either through NBR or email/phone call to their technical supervisor in California.
Other than that and some defects that only pertain to my unit, the laptop actually works fine. It plays game and other applications smoothly, except for 'injustice gods among us' which produces an insane amount of screen tearing. Also, it is interesting that IE runs more efficiently than FireFox or Chrome, especially when running adobe flash. IE has the least CPU utilization, almost half than other browsers.
