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MSI WS75 Review | Daxdi

Here's a laptop that punches above its weight.

Virtually all the 17.3-inch mobile workstations we've reviewed, such as the Lenovo ThinkPad P72 and Dell Precision 7730, weigh about 7.5 pounds.

The MSI WS75 ($3,999) is a design and engineering professionals' rig with an array of independent software vendor (ISV) certifications and a 17.3-inch full HD display, but it weighs just 5.03 pounds.

It's also one of the fastest mobile workstations we've tested, perhaps because it's the first with Nvidia's "Turing" architecture Quadro RTX graphics.

If it doesn't persuade you to give MSI a look alongside HP, Lenovo, and Dell, nothing will.

Potent and Portable

My WS75 test unit is model 9TL-496US, equipped with an eight-core, 2.3GHz (4.8GHz turbo) Intel Core i9-9880H processor, 32GB of DDR4 memory, a 1TB NVMe solid-state drive, an 8GB Quadro RTX 4000 ray-tracing GPU, and a 1,920-by-1,080-pixel non-touch screen.

I'm disappointed that the last isn't a 4K (3,840 by 2,160) panel; MSI's website says that the WS75 is available with a 4K screen, but the listed configurations are all 1080p for now—4K units are due later this year.

Clad in matte black aluminum (except for a plastic bottom), the MSI measures 0.74 by 15.6 by 10.2 inches.

That's positively svelte next to, say, the HP ZBook 17 G5 (1.3 by 16.4 by 11.3 inches), though the latter is more expandable if you need gigatons of memory and storage.

Some classy gold trim on the hinges and around the touchpad joins a tasteful logo (not MSI gaming laptops' rampant dragon) on the lid.

The workstation has passed MIL-STD 810G tests against shock, vibration, and temperature and pressure extremes; however, there was noticeable flex when I grasped the screen corners or pressed the keyboard deck.

The left edge holds an Ethernet port, a USB 3.2 Type-A port, a microSD card slot, separate headphone and microphone jacks, and the power connector.

On the right, you'll find a USB 3.2 Type-C port, two more USB 3.2 Type-A ports, one Thunderbolt 3 port, an HDMI video output, and a security lock slot.

Most of the MSI's rivals offer two or more Thunderbolt 3 ports, but I won't quibble.

Bluetooth and 802.11ac Wi-Fi handle wireless connections.

Well Equipped for Workflows

The 720p webcam captures averagely well-lit and detailed images with a small amount of grain or noise, but clear edges and accurate colors.

It's not a face recognition camera, but Windows Hello users can skip typing passwords thanks to a fingerprint reader in the top left corner of the touchpad.

The rectangular scanner is a bit smaller and fussier than the square fingerprint readers I've been seeing on laptops lately, but it works well enough.

The WS75's stereo speakers can fill a midsize room when cranked to maximum volume, but they fall off quickly if you dial it back to 80 or 90 percent.

Sound is somewhat hollow, and it can be difficult to distinguish overlapping tracks; highs such as rock pianos travel well, but there's little or no bass.

A Realtek Audio Console utility lets you play with equalizer presets.

MSI describes the laptop's screen as an "IPS-level" panel able to show 100 percent of the sRGB and 72 percent of the NTSC color gamuts.

(An MSI True Color utility lets you adjust color temperature and tweak the screen with sRGB, designer, office, movie, gamer, and anti-blue-light presets.) It offers wide viewing angles and an effective anti-glare finish, along with decent contrast and fairly sharp detail.

On the minus side, it's not the brightest display in its class—backgrounds weren't dazzlingly white—and it frankly can't compete with some of the 4K screens offered by some competitors, not just in terms of resolution but in terms of colors that pop.

HP's DreamColor displays, for instance, offer hues more rich and saturated than the WS75's on their best day.

Let's hope MSI steps up to the plate when it ships its 4K version.

The brightly backlit keyboard is somewhat shallow but has a comfortably pliant, quietly clicky typing feel.

About my only gripe is that, while there are Page Up and Page Down keys above the numeric keypad, you have to pair them with the Fn key for Home and End.

Considering that the Fn key is to the right, not left, of the space bar, that makes for a finger-twister.

(To be fair, a software utility lets you swap the Fn and Windows keys.) The buttonless touchpad is arguably too wide—it stretches so far to the right that your palm rests on it—but glides and taps smoothly.

It takes a heavy hand to click, however.

An intriguing software bonus is Creator Center, which mixes gaming-laptop-style monitoring of CPU and GPU usage and fan speed with a battery health check and hotkeys to switch among performance, fan, and backlight level combinations.

It also offers optimizations or presets for a number of creative apps such as Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro.

MSI backs the Windows 10 Pro system with a three-year warranty.

A Professional Performance Brawl

In addition to the three 17.3-inch mobile workstations already mentioned—the Lenovo ThinkPad P72, HP ZBook 17 G5, and Dell Precision 7730—I compared the MSI WS75 to our 15.6-inch Editors' Choice Lenovo ThinkPad P52.

You can see the benchmark contenders' specs in the comparison table below.

The WS75 didn't win every benchmark—it narrowly lost our most important workstation-specific test—but make no mistake: This thing is a monster.

Whether you're into 3D rendering, 2D computer-aided design (CAD), video editing, or powering through giant scientific or engineering datasets, the MSI will satisfy your need for speed while helping you lose weight.

Productivity, Storage, and Media Tests

PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark).

The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows.

We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet jockeying, web browsing, and videoconferencing.

The test generates a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better.

PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a Storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system's storage subsystem.

The result is also a proprietary numeric score; again, higher numbers are better.

We consider 4,000 an excellent score in PCMark 10, so all these workstations are massive overkill for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

For what it's worth, the ThinkPad P72 copped the gold medal while the MSI took the silver.

Next is Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads.

Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image.

The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads.

Scores over 1,000 points indicate incredible processing power, so the WS75's score of 1,640 is just ridiculous.

Workflows wilt in the face of such strength.

We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark.

Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image.

We time each operation and, at the end, add up the total execution time (lower times are better).

The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, so systems with powerful graphics chips or cards may see a boost.

The five systems were fairly closely packed here, but the MSI finished the job nine seconds ahead of the next quickest contender.

Too bad its display doesn't match its image-editing prowess.

Graphics Tests

3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting.

We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems.

Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff.

The results are proprietary scores.

Gaming CPUs like Nvidia's GeForce series beat workstation GPUs like Nvidia's Quadro series in this test, but these scores aren't half bad.

Mobile workstations aren't meant for playing games, but it's certainly possible on these machines.

Next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp.

Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes.

In this case, it's rendered in the company's eponymous Unigine engine, offering a different 3D workload scenario than 3DMark, for a second opinion on the machine's graphical prowess.

As with 3DMark, the MSI was the fastest in this not-really-for-workstations contest.

The Quadro RTX 4000's advantage over the mighty Quadro P5200 was worth noting.

Battery Rundown Test

After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test.

(We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop into airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the Blender Foundation short film Tears of Steel—with screen brightness set at 50 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system conks out.

Big-screen mobile workstations, especially ones with 4K displays, aren't known for their battery stamina.

Its 1080p screen (only one-quarter as many pixels to illuminate) helped, but the WS75 still deserves credit for almost making it through a full workday.

Workstation-Specific Tests

We also run a few specialized benchmarks designed to simulate the challenges posed by common workstation tasks.

One of these is Cinebench's OpenGL benchmark, which presents an animated scene measured in frames per second.

Another is POV-Ray 3.7, which puts systems through a timed, off-screen rendering exercise that stresses multiple CPU threads and GPU compute units to the max (lower times are better).

Two more wins for the WS75.

Since POV-Ray is a ray-tracing exercise, I was looking forward to seeing the Quadro RTX in action for the first time, and the new GPU absolutely crushed it, finishing well ahead of the older Quadros.

Finally, there's SPECviewperf 13, which renders and rotates 3D and wireframe models based on popular ISV apps' viewsets; it's the most realistic and challenging workstation test we run.

By contrast, the older Quadros and older processors were able to keep up with the RTX 4000 and ninth-generation Core i9 in this real-world event.

Don't get me wrong, the WS75 was plenty fast, but it didn't dominate as I thought it might.

Light Lightning

The MSI WS75 isn't a perfect mobile workstation, mainly because its display is a minor letdown—it's not bad, mind you, but it keeps this from being one of our rare four-and-a-half- or five-star reviews.

But a 17.3-inch system that weighed so much less than its competitors would be tempting even if it wasn't blazing fast.

Since it is, the WS75 deserves an Editors' Choice in the mobile workstation category.

Cons

  • Less expandable than bulkier systems.

  • 1080p screen is merely adequate (no 4K display available at rollout).

  • Slightly awkward keyboard layout.

The Bottom Line

The MSI WS75 is a big-screen mobile workstation that weighs two and a half pounds less than its rivals, while packing eight-core CPU power and Nvidia's latest professional graphics.

The display's just average, but the laptop on the whole is impressive.

MSI WS75 Specs

Laptop Class Workstation
Processor Intel Core i9-9880H
Processor Speed 2.3 GHz
RAM (as Tested) 32 GB
Boot Drive Type SSD
Boot Drive Capacity (as Tested) 1 TB
Screen Size 17.3 inches
Native Display Resolution 1920 by 1080
Touch Screen No
Panel Technology IPS
Variable Refresh Support None
Screen Refresh Rate 60 Hz
Graphics Processor Nvidia Quadro RTX 4000
Graphics Memory 8 GB
Wireless Networking 802.11ac, Bluetooth
Dimensions (HWD) 0.74 by 15.6 by 10.2 inches
Weight 5 lbs
Operating System Windows 10 Pro
Tested Battery Life (Hours:Minutes) 7:03

Here's a laptop that punches above its weight.

Virtually all the 17.3-inch mobile workstations we've reviewed, such as the Lenovo ThinkPad P72 and Dell Precision 7730, weigh about 7.5 pounds.

The MSI WS75 ($3,999) is a design and engineering professionals' rig with an array of independent software vendor (ISV) certifications and a 17.3-inch full HD display, but it weighs just 5.03 pounds.

It's also one of the fastest mobile workstations we've tested, perhaps because it's the first with Nvidia's "Turing" architecture Quadro RTX graphics.

If it doesn't persuade you to give MSI a look alongside HP, Lenovo, and Dell, nothing will.

Potent and Portable

My WS75 test unit is model 9TL-496US, equipped with an eight-core, 2.3GHz (4.8GHz turbo) Intel Core i9-9880H processor, 32GB of DDR4 memory, a 1TB NVMe solid-state drive, an 8GB Quadro RTX 4000 ray-tracing GPU, and a 1,920-by-1,080-pixel non-touch screen.

I'm disappointed that the last isn't a 4K (3,840 by 2,160) panel; MSI's website says that the WS75 is available with a 4K screen, but the listed configurations are all 1080p for now—4K units are due later this year.

Clad in matte black aluminum (except for a plastic bottom), the MSI measures 0.74 by 15.6 by 10.2 inches.

That's positively svelte next to, say, the HP ZBook 17 G5 (1.3 by 16.4 by 11.3 inches), though the latter is more expandable if you need gigatons of memory and storage.

Some classy gold trim on the hinges and around the touchpad joins a tasteful logo (not MSI gaming laptops' rampant dragon) on the lid.

The workstation has passed MIL-STD 810G tests against shock, vibration, and temperature and pressure extremes; however, there was noticeable flex when I grasped the screen corners or pressed the keyboard deck.

The left edge holds an Ethernet port, a USB 3.2 Type-A port, a microSD card slot, separate headphone and microphone jacks, and the power connector.

On the right, you'll find a USB 3.2 Type-C port, two more USB 3.2 Type-A ports, one Thunderbolt 3 port, an HDMI video output, and a security lock slot.

Most of the MSI's rivals offer two or more Thunderbolt 3 ports, but I won't quibble.

Bluetooth and 802.11ac Wi-Fi handle wireless connections.

Well Equipped for Workflows

The 720p webcam captures averagely well-lit and detailed images with a small amount of grain or noise, but clear edges and accurate colors.

It's not a face recognition camera, but Windows Hello users can skip typing passwords thanks to a fingerprint reader in the top left corner of the touchpad.

The rectangular scanner is a bit smaller and fussier than the square fingerprint readers I've been seeing on laptops lately, but it works well enough.

The WS75's stereo speakers can fill a midsize room when cranked to maximum volume, but they fall off quickly if you dial it back to 80 or 90 percent.

Sound is somewhat hollow, and it can be difficult to distinguish overlapping tracks; highs such as rock pianos travel well, but there's little or no bass.

A Realtek Audio Console utility lets you play with equalizer presets.

MSI describes the laptop's screen as an "IPS-level" panel able to show 100 percent of the sRGB and 72 percent of the NTSC color gamuts.

(An MSI True Color utility lets you adjust color temperature and tweak the screen with sRGB, designer, office, movie, gamer, and anti-blue-light presets.) It offers wide viewing angles and an effective anti-glare finish, along with decent contrast and fairly sharp detail.

On the minus side, it's not the brightest display in its class—backgrounds weren't dazzlingly white—and it frankly can't compete with some of the 4K screens offered by some competitors, not just in terms of resolution but in terms of colors that pop.

HP's DreamColor displays, for instance, offer hues more rich and saturated than the WS75's on their best day.

Let's hope MSI steps up to the plate when it ships its 4K version.

The brightly backlit keyboard is somewhat shallow but has a comfortably pliant, quietly clicky typing feel.

About my only gripe is that, while there are Page Up and Page Down keys above the numeric keypad, you have to pair them with the Fn key for Home and End.

Considering that the Fn key is to the right, not left, of the space bar, that makes for a finger-twister.

(To be fair, a software utility lets you swap the Fn and Windows keys.) The buttonless touchpad is arguably too wide—it stretches so far to the right that your palm rests on it—but glides and taps smoothly.

It takes a heavy hand to click, however.

An intriguing software bonus is Creator Center, which mixes gaming-laptop-style monitoring of CPU and GPU usage and fan speed with a battery health check and hotkeys to switch among performance, fan, and backlight level combinations.

It also offers optimizations or presets for a number of creative apps such as Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro.

MSI backs the Windows 10 Pro system with a three-year warranty.

A Professional Performance Brawl

In addition to the three 17.3-inch mobile workstations already mentioned—the Lenovo ThinkPad P72, HP ZBook 17 G5, and Dell Precision 7730—I compared the MSI WS75 to our 15.6-inch Editors' Choice Lenovo ThinkPad P52.

You can see the benchmark contenders' specs in the comparison table below.

The WS75 didn't win every benchmark—it narrowly lost our most important workstation-specific test—but make no mistake: This thing is a monster.

Whether you're into 3D rendering, 2D computer-aided design (CAD), video editing, or powering through giant scientific or engineering datasets, the MSI will satisfy your need for speed while helping you lose weight.

Productivity, Storage, and Media Tests

PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark).

The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows.

We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet jockeying, web browsing, and videoconferencing.

The test generates a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better.

PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a Storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system's storage subsystem.

The result is also a proprietary numeric score; again, higher numbers are better.

We consider 4,000 an excellent score in PCMark 10, so all these workstations are massive overkill for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

For what it's worth, the ThinkPad P72 copped the gold medal while the MSI took the silver.

Next is Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads.

Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image.

The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads.

Scores over 1,000 points indicate incredible processing power, so the WS75's score of 1,640 is just ridiculous.

Workflows wilt in the face of such strength.

We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark.

Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image.

We time each operation and, at the end, add up the total execution time (lower times are better).

The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, so systems with powerful graphics chips or cards may see a boost.

The five systems were fairly closely packed here, but the MSI finished the job nine seconds ahead of the next quickest contender.

Too bad its display doesn't match its image-editing prowess.

Graphics Tests

3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting.

We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems.

Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff.

The results are proprietary scores.

Gaming CPUs like Nvidia's GeForce series beat workstation GPUs like Nvidia's Quadro series in this test, but these scores aren't half bad.

Mobile workstations aren't meant for playing games, but it's certainly possible on these machines.

Next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp.

Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes.

In this case, it's rendered in the company's eponymous Unigine engine, offering a different 3D workload scenario than 3DMark, for a second opinion on the machine's graphical prowess.

As with 3DMark, the MSI was the fastest in this not-really-for-workstations contest.

The Quadro RTX 4000's advantage over the mighty Quadro P5200 was worth noting.

Battery Rundown Test

After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test.

(We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop into airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the Blender Foundation short film Tears of Steel—with screen brightness set at 50 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system conks out.

Big-screen mobile workstations, especially ones with 4K displays, aren't known for their battery stamina.

Its 1080p screen (only one-quarter as many pixels to illuminate) helped, but the WS75 still deserves credit for almost making it through a full workday.

Workstation-Specific Tests

We also run a few specialized benchmarks designed to simulate the challenges posed by common workstation tasks.

One of these is Cinebench's OpenGL benchmark, which presents an animated scene measured in frames per second.

Another is POV-Ray 3.7, which puts systems through a timed, off-screen rendering exercise that stresses multiple CPU threads and GPU compute units to the max (lower times are better).

Two more wins for the WS75.

Since POV-Ray is a ray-tracing exercise, I was looking forward to seeing the Quadro RTX in action for the first time, and the new GPU absolutely crushed it, finishing well ahead of the older Quadros.

Finally, there's SPECviewperf 13, which renders and rotates 3D and wireframe models based on popular ISV apps' viewsets; it's the most realistic and challenging workstation test we run.

By contrast, the older Quadros and older processors were able to keep up with the RTX 4000 and ninth-generation Core i9 in this real-world event.

Don't get me wrong, the WS75 was plenty fast, but it didn't dominate as I thought it might.

Light Lightning

The MSI WS75 isn't a perfect mobile workstation, mainly because its display is a minor letdown—it's not bad, mind you, but it keeps this from being one of our rare four-and-a-half- or five-star reviews.

But a 17.3-inch system that weighed so much less than its competitors would be tempting even if it wasn't blazing fast.

Since it is, the WS75 deserves an Editors' Choice in the mobile workstation category.

Cons

  • Less expandable than bulkier systems.

  • 1080p screen is merely adequate (no 4K display available at rollout).

  • Slightly awkward keyboard layout.

The Bottom Line

The MSI WS75 is a big-screen mobile workstation that weighs two and a half pounds less than its rivals, while packing eight-core CPU power and Nvidia's latest professional graphics.

The display's just average, but the laptop on the whole is impressive.

MSI WS75 Specs

Laptop Class Workstation
Processor Intel Core i9-9880H
Processor Speed 2.3 GHz
RAM (as Tested) 32 GB
Boot Drive Type SSD
Boot Drive Capacity (as Tested) 1 TB
Screen Size 17.3 inches
Native Display Resolution 1920 by 1080
Touch Screen No
Panel Technology IPS
Variable Refresh Support None
Screen Refresh Rate 60 Hz
Graphics Processor Nvidia Quadro RTX 4000
Graphics Memory 8 GB
Wireless Networking 802.11ac, Bluetooth
Dimensions (HWD) 0.74 by 15.6 by 10.2 inches
Weight 5 lbs
Operating System Windows 10 Pro
Tested Battery Life (Hours:Minutes) 7:03

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