Although MSI has been building high-end notebooks for years, nearly all of them have targeted gamers and few if any have been specifically designed for intensive production. That's about to change as the company has announced plans to enter the mobile workstation market, with its first system expected to ship next month.
With its colorful backlit keyboard and aggressive black aluminum case, the GT60 resembles MSI's gaming systems on the outside, but the company says it's a whole different beast on the inside. For starters, it's packing Nvidia's Quadro K2000M workstation graphics processor with 2GB of GDDR5 RAM, which offers the following:
- Scalable Geometry Engine -- Dramatically improves geometry performance across a broad range of CAD, DCC, and medical applications. This enables you to work interactively with models and scenes that are an order of magnitude more complex than ever before.
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Fast 3D Texture Transfer -- Allows fast transfer and manipulation of 3D textures, resulting in more interactive visualization of large volumetric datasets.
- Hardware 3D Window Clipping -- Enables hardware-accelerated clip regions for faster data transfer between a window and the frame buffer to improve overall graphics performance.
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16K Texture and Render Processing -- Provides the ability to texture from and render to 16K x 16K surfaces. Beneficial for applications that demand the highest resolution and quality image processing.
- OpenGL Quad Buffered Stereo Support -- Provides a smooth and immersive 3D Stereo experience for professional designing applications.
The Quadro K2000 GPU carries 384 CUDA cores, offers up to 29GB/s of memory bandwidth and according to MSI, it greatly outpaces the GeForce GTX 675M in several OpenGL SPECviewperf 11 GPU tests. The K2000 scores 10 times faster in ProE-05, four times faster in SolidWorks-02, and six times faster in Catia-03.
The system will also be available with several quad-core Intel Core i7 Ivy Bridge processor options, up to 32GB of DDR3 RAM, two 64GB mSATA SSDs in RAID 0 alongside HDDs in RAID 0 or RAID 1, a 1080p anti-glare display that covers 95% of the NTSC color gamut, 2.1 audio and the above-noted SteelSeries keyboard.
Given its close relationship to MSI's gaming notebooks, it's no surprise that you'll also find features such as a Killer network chip, hardware cooling controls, and support for up to two additional displays with various output connectors. Pricing is unknown, but that shouldn't be the case for long if the GT60 is due in December.
