MSI GT77 Titan Gaming Laptop Review: Performance Supremacy
The MSI GT77 Titan has four fans inside its chassis to keep its internal components cool. One of the fans inside the systems runs constantly, but at idle or when the machine is under a light workloads, you cannot hear it. You have to put your ear up against the bottom of the system to hear anything at all when the MSI GT77 Titan is idle. As such, nothing would register on our sound meter in the lab, which has a sound floor in the low 30dBa range. During basic tasks, the MSI GT77 Titan is surprisingly quiet.
MSI GT77 Titan Thermal And Acoustic Performance
The fans in the system will spin up considerably when under load, however. So, to get a sense for acoustics and thermals under load, we fired up the 3DMark Stress Test and looped it for 20 iterations after running multiple in-game benchmarks, to fully warm up and saturate the system's cooling hardware. The heat and noise generated by the MSI GT77 Titan with these tests should be indicative of what a typical, prolonged gaming scenario might produce.
When under load, the fans in the MSI GT77 Titan spin up and get considerably louder, but that's expected for a powerful, high-end gaming laptop of this caliber. When we held the sound meter about 12" from the display, we measured approximately 55.6 dBA. That's pretty loud relative to some other gaming notebooks we tested (it's about 3dBA higher than the Razer Blade 17). Thankfully, despite the relatively high volume, the noise character has a low pitch and is not particularly hard on the ears. The fans emit a throaty whir as hot air is exhausted from the chassis, which is somewhat louder than some other notebooks in this class, but not off-putting in our opinion. And if you game with a headset on, it won't matter much at all.
The vast majority of the body of the MSI GT77 Titan does not get too hot to the touch. The hottest we could find on the surface was near the back, above the GPU at the top right-corner of the keyboard. Here we measured about 116.5°F. Once we moved down to the keyboard though, the keys typically registered in the upper 80s or lower 90s.
PCMark 10 Hardware Health Data
The hardware health data gathered during a PCMark10 run, which features content creation and gaming workloads, shows how well-mannered this system is thermally. As you can see, unlike many Alder Lake-based systems which will often peak in the high 90s before throttling, the CPU in the MSI GT77 Titan never broke the 70°C mark. The system's good cooling performance helps keep CPU frequencies from swinging wildly due to thermal throttling when under load.
3DMark Hardware Health Data
With a gaming / graphics workload, that taxes both the CPU and GPU, CPU temps in the MSI GT77 Titan creep a little higher, but still remain relatively cool. During a 3DMark run, both the CPU and GPU peak just below 80°C, which is impressive for when you consider the level of performance offered by this sub-25mm laptop.
MSI GT77 Titan (2022) With RTX 3080 Ti: Our Verdict
If it’s not painfully obvious at this point, the MSI GT77 Titan is a high-performance monster. The combination of hardware inside the machine, in conjunction with the powerful cooling and well-designed chassis, culminates in what is ultimately the fastest gaming notebook we have tested to date. Although there are obvious considerations to make with a 7.2lb machine packing a 17.3” display, and sacrifices to portability and battery life which exclude the GT77 Titan as an option for some users, for its intended audience, this machine rocks. Our overall experience was exceptionally positive and we suspect anyone shopping for a machine of this type will be more than pleased by the GT77 Titan.There are a multitude of configurations available for this laptop, spanning a couple of generations, at prices starting around $2,800 and peaking north of $5,000, which is where the particular configuration we tested lands (we couldn’t find the exact setup on Amazon at the moment). That is premium pricing territory for sure, but this is a premium machine through and through, from its 360Hz display, to its mechanical keyboard, multiple M.2 NVMe SSD, and of course NVIDIA's mobile GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and Intel's Core i9-12900HX. The performance of this machine is stellar, and so was the overall experience.
If you’re shopping for a powerful, larger form factor gaming and desktop replacement laptop like the MSI GT77 Titan, by all means give this machine serious consideration. It is an absolute beast, and we mean that in the best possible way.
