MSI GS70 Stealth Pro Silver Elite Pack Review

While we have checked out the GS70 before, this 970m version, with the Elite Pack, is definitely worth a read! The GS70 hasn’t changed too much, but they have made a few changes and improvements, that I am very happy with. I’ll cover the physical overview, the elite pack, performance, usability, features and a few other bits and pieces – so stick around!

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Let’s start off with the physical overview. On the top, you’ll find a very good looking brushed aluminium back, with a glowing MSI dragon logo that lights up when the laptop is on. If you put this on a table, you’ll find that it is 21.8mm thick. Yeah, just over 2cm. Wow. Anyway, if you look at the front, you’ll find lots of LEDs to tell you it is on, charging, Wifi on, HDD activity and more. MSI GS70 Stealth Pro Silver Elite Pack Review.00_00_44_24.Still004

On the left side, you’ll get some Ventilation, Gigabit Nic, HDMI, 2x Mini Display Port, a charging USB 3 port, for fast charging phones or tablets (awesome) and a standard USB 3 port, and finally 3 microphone and headphone and line in jacks. On the right you’ll get more ventilation, a kensington lock hole, DC in, SD card reader and two more USB 3 ports.

I want to use this space to mention the Dynaudio Speakers included here. They are awesome. Fantastic quality and very loud when needed. There seems to be a subwoofer in the joint of the screen too, which was awesome! If you didn’t have headphones, this makes that not a problem! (although since the elite pack has headphones in it, so you do have headphones…).

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Lets talk about the keyboard. It is awesome. Steelseries, as usual for MSI laptops, worked to design this cool keyboard – but it does have a few problems. Personally, having the windows key on the wrong side, makes more trouble than sense for me. Also the function (fn) key being on the left makes it impossible to change the volume with one hand – something I would kinda like to do. Finally, the Non-ISO layout for this means the Enter key is WRONG. WRONG. WRONG! I’ve been complaining about this for a while, but it annoys me as a british person that I can’t have a keyboard in the right shape… Anyway, onto the cool stuff.

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This keyboard has three zone RGB colouring, which can be used in many modes, my favourite is audio mode – where the keyboard changes colour and brightness depending on the audio coming from the speakers/headset. Watch the video review to see an example of this.

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While we are on the topic of inputs, the track pad is much, much better than the last GS70 we checked out. This could be due to the settings in the driver, but damn this is the best trackpad – with fantastic two finger scroll – that I have ever seen on a windows PC! Again, watch the video for more info on that.