Gaming notebooks are largely expected to be the Godzilla’s of the PC world, and the MSI GT70 2PE Dominator Pro happily obliges.

While thinner and lighter has become vogue in notebook circles, every so often it is reassuring to see a gaming machine that departs from convention to claim the honour of being unabashedly monstrous by comparison. The 17.3” GT70 2PE Dominator Pro machine, which sports a brushed aluminium finish, is both thick (55 mm) and solid, and particularly designed for long gaming sessions. This profile though is not without good cause, as it allows better airflow from the back and sides.

More than a name

Along with a name that is quite a formidable mouthful, the GT70 2PE Dominator Pro’s specs do in fact smell as sweet. The components onboard include the high-end quad core Intel Core i7-4810MQ (up to 3.8 GHz) CPU, and a superb graphics card in the form of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 880M with a significant 8 GB of dedicated memory. As for system memory, users will find 8 GB, which can be upgraded to a whopping 32 GB to ensure everything runs smoothly and that the Dominator Pro chews through general tasks for breakfast.

As for the always-important screen, the Dominator Pro sports a 17.3" Full HD (1920x1080) anti-glare screen with LED backlight. This offers wide horizontal viewing angles, vibrant colours and an anti-glare coating to keep distractions to the bare minimum.

Steel yourself

Additionally users can either enjoy the default capacious 1 TB hard drive, or instead opt for three MSATA SSD’s which support Super Raid. Along for the ride is the versatile SteelSeries keyboard. This enables users to customise the multi-colour backlighting to their hearts content, as well as customise each key to their liking, to suit their individual play style. Gamers can freely choose any key as a launch application button, and take advantage of virtually unlimited keypress macro creation capabilities. Anything you can do on a mouse or a keyboard can be programmed along with specific event timing. You can even program mouse events into keyboard macros.

Along with an SD slot and  Blu-ray drive, the Dominator Pro further offers a plethora of ports. These include two USB 2.0 ports and three USB 3.0 ports, HDMI VGA and a DisplayPort, which enables users to connect three monitors simultaneously.

No one trick pony

Not only is this a superb gaming notebook, but thanks to the combination of the powerful processor and the monstrous graphics card, more intensive tasks such as video and photo editing will be handled well within the Dominator Pro’s ambit. The MSI GT70 is fully expected to live up to its name, dominate the market and provide performance that can exceed those of many desktop gaming PCs. According to Evetech, users can expect stable 60 fps on games like BF4 and Bioshock Infinite. Additionally, the Nvidia Kepler GPU should further reassure players of an excellent gameplay experience for years to come.

To sweeten the deal the notebook comes with a few free extras, the likes of the Steelseries Kinzu V2 gaming mouse, MSI gaming backpack, 16 GB Sandisk flash drive, as well as a MSI Gaming mouse pad. It is available from Evetech for R24 000 by visiting www.evetech.co.za or calling 010-786-0044.