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The ground trembles as MSI's GT80 Titan launches locally

By Salehuddin Bin Husin - on 21 Jan 2015, 5:37pm

The ground trembles as MSI's GT80 Titan launches locally [Updated]

The MSI GT80 Titan in all its glory.

Updated 23/01/15: Pricing changed to more accurately reflect the product

It seems like it was just a couple a weeks ago when MSI unveiled their GT80 Titan notebook to the world at CES. Oh wait, it was! It's impressive then that said notebook is already available in local stores.

As we mentioned in our CES article, the GT80 Titan is noteworthy because it's the first notebook ever to have a mechanical keyboard. It'll use Cherry Brown keys, a choice MSI says is due to Brown keys having the best balance between gaming quality and normal typing quality. Of course, if you have regular Cherry keycaps, you can still use them on the machine. The notebook will also come with a set of metal keycaps, meant to easily highlight the W,A,S,D keys, which are some of the most important keys in gaming.

The metal W,A,S,D keys come free with the GT80. That cute dragon sadly doesn't.

We've finally gotten our hands on it and can happily report back there's virtually no difference between using the mechanical keyboard in the GT80 and a regular mechanical keyboard. Another benefit to having a mechanical keyboard is that the keyboard's cooler (as in temperature) than what you'd expect from a notebook keyboard. Due to the hardware being shifted up, there's no heat being generated behind the keyboard, making it one of the coolest (again temperature) notebook keyboards we've ever had the pleasure of using.

As mentioned earlier, the mechanical keyboard means shifting the whole hardware bits of the notebook to the top, which resulted in MSI coming up with a novel way for hardware removal and upgrading. The dragon design on the upper part of the base isn't just for show, it's actually a removable cover that you can easily slide off (not so easily that an accident can remove it of course) to reveal the hardware inside.

You can access everything by simply removing the top panel.

Right now, only the GT80 Titan SLI will be available. There's a version of the GT80 Titan that doesn't have the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M in SLI but MSI is unsure when or if that version will make it to local shores. Even if it does, expect it to hit a few months down the road.

The GT80 2QE Titan starts at $4599, just $200 more than the GT72 2QE Dominator Pro.

While we don't have the complete specs for the base (or recommended) set of the GT80 Titan, we do know that it'll be going for a cool $5699.

Unfortunately, we still don't have our hands on a review unit yet (though MSI promises we'll get one in the next few days), so we can't really give a detailed breakdown on its performance. From all initial indications though, this might just be the notebook to get if you're a gamer who prefers to game on mechanical keyboards. Of course, it's the only notebook with a mechanical keyboard, but it's also one of the most powerful. Win win, right?

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