Monday, 4 April 2016

MSI's new 4K workstation is a 'VR Ready' powerhouse

MSI has revealed its new WT72, a beefy notebook which it's billing as the world's first professional Nvidia 'VR Ready' workstation.

As you can imagine, there's some serious power under the bonnet here with a choice of either Intel Core i7 (6700HQ or 6920HQ) or Xeon (E3-1505M v5) processors, up to 64GB of DDR4 system RAM, and on the graphics front an Nvidia Quadro M5500 with 8GB of video RAM is running the show.

The latter is the fastest mobile GPU available with no less than 2048 cores and a promised 35% performance increase over the previous top dog.

There's a 17.3-inch screen with two options on the resolution – either a standard full HD anti-glare IPS display, or a full-blooded 4K screen with a resolution of 3840 x 2160.

Super storage

On the storage front, we are talking four 256GB SSDs in RAID backed up with a 1TB spinning disk. You also get a Blu-ray burner, and 'audiophile-grade' Dynaudio speakers/subwoofer plus a SteelSeries backlit keyboard.

And when it comes to connectivity, MSI has provided plenty of ports including Thunderbolt 3 and six USB 3.0 connectors.

This workstation is designed to make light work of VR content creation, and comes with Nvidia's VRWorks suite which includes features such as 'Multi-Res Shading', a rendering technique that offers substantial performance improvements, the graphics giant promises.

Now comes the price tag for the WT72, so brace yourself – MSI's notebook starts at $5,499 (around £3,850, or AU$7,200) for the basic model with the full HD screen, rising to $6,899 (around £4,830, or AU$9,050) if you want the top-end laptop with a Xeon CPU, 4K screen and 64GB of RAM.