GamingDock Features and Performance
Now let's focus on the portion of this product that really makes it unique, the MSI GamingDock that allows you to connect and utilize a full-size discrete graphics cards with your GS30 notebook.
The base station is about the size of a bread box – no seriously, it is. It measures 364mm x 209mm x 197mm (14.3" x 8.2" x 7.7") and weighs 4.2 kg / 9.25 lbs. without a graphics card installed. The purpose of the device is multi-fold: it provides a resting place and connection through PCIe with the GS30 notebook, it provides a full-size PCIe x16 slot for a discrete GPU, it has a standard power supply to provide juice for said graphics card and it also has the ability to hold a 3.5-in hard drive and provides accessory connections.
The GamingDock is actually pretty big and bulky and will take up a noticeable amount of space on your desk. It's not unattractive but it's also not designed in a way that makes it blend in with the style I assume most PC enthusiasts are going for.
The GS30 Shadow does NOT include a discrete GPU with the dock and notebook – you'll have to bring your own to the party. There are currently some sales and promotions going on that do, in fact, add a discrete GPU to mix, but make sure you double check before purchasing.
The front grill also hides a speaker though honestly, not a very good one. Hopefully, if you are investing in this kind of hardware, you will also have some high quality external speakers to go along with it.
On the top of the GamingDock is the receiving end of the PCI Express connection between the notebook and the rest of the hardware. There are two clips that help to lock it in place.
When you place the GS30 on the GamingDock you actually move the lever on the right hand side down to slide it back into the PCIe slot and lock it in place. It has a very mechanical feel to it and honestly I like it. It's not a modern take on connecting to products (no magnets, no electronic locks with LCD indication) but it has me reliving my days with toys and action figures. Odd, I'm sure.
On the left side of the GamingDock, you'll find the power supply input as well as the discrete graphics card display connections. The GS30 Shadow ships with a standard power cord for the PSU, a 450-watt model that appears to be unbranded. That should be more than enough for just about any discrete GPU on the market.
On the right is where you'll find the intake fan to help provide cool air to the GPU and power supply and a power button that will be used instead of the notebook button once the two parts are docked together. There is also a pair of 3.5mm jacks for headphones and microphones, a Gigabit Ethernet connection and a set of four USB 3.0 ports for keyboards, mice, headsets or even storage devices. The GamingDock has the functionality of most other laptop docks with the added benefit of that handy discrete GPU.
Opening up the GamingDock requires the removal of about 9 screws, giving you access to the componentry inside. If you have ever installed a graphics card before, then the process will be straight forward and simple. The necessary power supply connections are readily available.
Behind the power supply is a mounting location for a 3.5-in hard drive that will show up as an internal drive when the GS30 is properly docked. This is great if you want to add some more storage to your system for games without taking up space on your notebooks internal SSD when on the go.
Here you can see a GamingDock configured with a GeForce GTX 980 Gaming, one of the fastest discrete GPUs you can buy today.
Once configured and installed, using the GamingDock with the GS30 is simple. Simply place the notebook on top and it will settle into a couple of dimples on the top surface. Pull the lever to lock it in place, physically attaching the PCI Express connection on the back of the notebook to the dock. Hit that power button on the side of the dock and you are up and running. You'll have to install new drivers for your discrete graphics card of choice, of course, but it will behave as if you have installed a new graphics card in a typical desktop PC.
What you cannot do, however, is utilize the integrated display on the GS30 while docked – it's simply disabled. So while we would expect every gamer buying a GS30 Shadow system to have a decent external display for gaming purposes, this fact basically demands it. With the power of a card like the GeForce GTX 980 you can invest in a 4K or 2560×1440 monitor, and obviously that's the point of an external discrete GPU.
Performance benchmarks with the GamingDock and a discrete graphics card are going to be essentially identical to those found in our reviews of the individual GPUs themselves. The GTX 980 we used for our review, for example, is capable of gaming at the same resolutions and frames rates that we saw with our GTX 980 review. If we compare the integrated Iris Pro graphics to the GTX 980, you can immediately see the benefit of using a discrete GPU for gaming purposes.
But obviously you aren't limited to 1080p gaming once you have the GS30 installed on the GamingDock. For example, we had the LG 34UM95 handy and attached it to the GS30 with all of its 3440×1440 IPS glory. Games like Shadow of Mordor, Battlefield 4, Crysis 3 all ran fantastically. The combination of hardware supplied by the system was more than adequate for the job.
That does bring up one final point: the inclusion of the Core i7-4870HQ was mostly to ensure that the bottleneck of gaming on the GS30 and GamingDock was not a dual-core CPU integration. So while the 4870HQ definitely result in lower than desired battery life, you can see that its real purpose was to provide the optimal gaming experience for enthusiasts.
Didn’t mention that you’ll
Didn’t mention that you’ll have to use it standing up all the time if you were to dock it.
You will need to have serious flex ability in your legs to be sitting spread eagle all the time to use it.
A Thigh Master is cheaper if your looking for added flex ability.
Why would you have to stand
Why would you have to stand up to use it while it is docked? lol, you obviously did not read nor watch the video!
Actually got one of these
Actually got one of these myself. The only real complaint is that it is indeed loud. Battery life isn’t that important to me, but it is indeed on the low side, with 3-4 hours max under a light load.
I’m thinking of fabricating a small furniture piece to place it under the desk, so I can both free up space and reduce the noise levels that reach my ears. This is a performance beast though. CPU actually holds the maximum turbo clock speeds quite well, even during Blender renders and such, something most HQ CPUs don’t. The fan will be spinning at 6000rpm though, so you can imagine the noise.
I have everything connected on my desk, so that when I reach home, I simply dock the laptop (the power adapter can stay on the bag, the dock charges the laptop). Monitor, mouse and keyboard are already connected, and it’s extremely fast to boot up, so no big issue with needing to turn it off.
I know it isn’t a cheap machine, but I needed a nice quadcore laptop anyway, and since I didn’t want another brick like device (my previous laptop was a 4kg monster), this seemed the best option.
Eh….I think I will continue
Eh….I think I will continue to stick with a desktop. And I sure as hell won’t deal with a noisy lawnmower like that. Its the price you pay, you have to get the heat out, but at the same time they obsess with keeping the laptop thin and light. SO you get to put up with a lawnmower cooling system. I wonder how long the fan will last before it completely dies. For me “gaming” laptops will never work. This reminds me of the silly monster 20″ “laptop” HP had come out with years ago, called the “Dragon.”
It needs to be 15″, have
It needs to be 15″, have proper dissipation, a way to keep the laptop vertical (for even better dissipation), capability of using the iris pro and the discrete gpu at the same time (for that juicy quicksync encoding) and full support for undervolt and underclock for cpu and igpu before I consider it.
Oh, and lower price. With 1600€ i can buy a clevo with a 970m.
I could definitely see the
I could definitely see the use case here since this system would describe quite a few users. Portable laptop for browsing on the couch and a gaming powerhouse at your desk. Why have two completely separate devices? Just more hardware sitting idle when you are using the other. I would have to agree with you, that a Dell XPS13 + Gaming dock would be very compelling.
Though, would the i5-5200U be a limit in gaming? Maybe upgrade it to a i7-5600U? It is kind of hard to find benchmarks showing mobile GPUs paired with desktop graphics. Exception being the Brix GB-BXi7G3-760 but that is still only kind-of…
Any U SKUs is going to be of
Any U SKUs is going to be of use only in the underpowered ultrabooks, the U series will not game well compared to the regular laptop form factor quad core i5s or i7s, and you are going to want a quad core i7 when DX12, and Mantle/Vulkan become the standard. Hopefully there will be a quad core Zen version dual threaded APU and HBM memory laptop derivative of that 16 Core dual threaded AMD HPC APU SKU that AMD is rumored to be developing.
The only way an Ultrabook would ever be able to game well is if AMD developed a PCI card based complete gaming APU, and that rumored HPC APU could provide the standard with which a full PCIe card based complete gaming system on a card could be derived. You would the be able to dock a weak laptop based U series, or any other weak SKU based laptop that came with a 16x PCIe connector in the back to the dock, and the dock with a gaming APU on a PCI card in its PICe slot would be a complete PC in its own right, able to run that game while the laptop provided the control input for the game. It would not be hard to stream the game right back to the laptops screen, wired, or wirelessly.
That Rumored AMD HPC APU fits the bill for a revolution in gaming, and we all know that that is where the consumer SKUs are derived from, so AMD could take that HPC Zen APU, and derive a PC/Laptop line of APUs for gaming, it could even go to the next level with a complete gaming system on a PCIe card and allow PC users to add CPU power, along with GPU power and merge the discrete GPU with some CPU cores, and the motherboard CPU would be almost relegated to a service role, as the real gaming would be done on the PCI based Gaming APU, with its HBM, and ability to host the game, gaming engine, and Gaming OS on the PICe card.
Just imagine having a complete gaming APU on a PCIe card, and have the ability to plug one or more of the cards into a PC’s available PCIe slots, you would have essentially a gaming/computing cluster with each card, or additional card adding more CPU cores to your gaming cluster, or a dock like device as in this article for laptops able to host one or more gaming APUs and doing all the gaming work, while the laptop’s CPU does not even factor into the gaming equation, hell you would not even need a full PCIe x16 slot, you could just connect up with a cable and have the laptop control the gaming APU/system through a PCI-SIG PCI Express® External cable, or thunderbolt/other.
Most OSs would already be able to plug and play PCI Card based APUs, or CPUs. There is not much difference between having only a GPU on a PCI card, and having an APU on a PCIe card, as log as the motherboard’s BIOS/UEFI, and OS had the proper settings for multi processing/multi OS set. there is really very little difference driver wise, and PCI standards wise, to having a CPU on a PCIe card, APU, or a discrete GPU, the signaling and Bus mastering protocols are the same. You just need to look at the PCIe based SSDs and see that the controller for the SSD is a complete CPU, running an embedded OS, and it’s using the PICe and bus Mastering control lines to communicate with the motherboard’s CPU/SOC with the help of its installed drivers.
LOL what the hell hahahaahaha
LOL what the hell hahahaahaha some people really WILL do anything to game on a laptop.
Why is this even being
Why is this even being compared to any ultrabook SKUs, what is the reasoning. This is a specialized gaming laptop/external discrete GPU combo, why not compare it with a competing product. Hell at least throw in one regular form factor laptop, like an HP probook with quad core i7, and even at that, this reviewed system offers a 16x PCIe connection. If the next iteration comes with a expansion box that sits behind the laptop that would be better for desktop use. I’m wondering just why the laptop portion has to sit on top of the expansion box, it just seams like a kludge of a design. Certainly this type of arrangement has its uses, and maybe some way could be found to get a video signal back into the laptop portion and to the laptop part’s built-in display. The lack of engineering on this is definitely evident. This concept if carried a little further, and offering PCIe external GPU a PCIe pathway to output to the laptop portion’s display, this inability to send the output back to the laptop’s display appears to be a driver issue, or lack of properly written drivers to achieve this. There certainly is enough bandwidth over that PCIe x16 slot to do this.
MSI should work on a portable workstation laptop/external GPU expansion device like this, and supply the laptop with a Xeon SKU, and ECC memory, and let the users choose their brand of pro graphics card, as long as the system is able to send the GPU output back to the laptop’s screen the engineers would be all over an SKU like that for on the road work that required a bit more than mobile GPU power. That expansion box needs to be made to sit behind the laptop portion not under it.
Is the dock compatible with
Is the dock compatible with the titan Z since its a dual gpu card.
I think the biggest limiting
I think the biggest limiting factor of all of this is the proprietary connection. If it was a standard the prices would go down and adoption rate would go up.
Really! It’s a PCIe standard
Really! It’s a PCIe standard connection you can’t get any more hardware open standards than PCIe!
You need to do some research, you have really made and egregious error with your post!
look at the way it is
look at the way it is implemented perhaps? just because it is using PCIe doesn’t mean it is a standard way of implementing it. Alienware is doing something similar, but they use a cable that implements a PCIe connection.
Two different implementations of PCIe and neither are interchangeable.
What we all want, including you, is for a standard connection implementation that I can hook up any laptop I want to any external gfx box I want.
That is because the
That is because the Alienware’s cable/plug is propitary, not so for the MSI, the MSI is a straight up bog standard PICe x16 connector that would slot right into a motherboard’s PCI slot, is the space was made available. If They were to use the PIC-SIGs standard external PCIe specification cable standard instead of a proprietary connecter that Alienware chose things would be different. For that matter there is no stopping any aftermarket company for developing a 16x PCIe cable for the MSI device, or any other external box, it would be just a matter of MSI whitelisting the drivers, and external hardware. Hell Thunderbolt would be fine for most, but Intel, Apple and the laptop OEMs put the Kibosh on that, except for a few modders using windows on their Apple Macbooks, and some driver/configuration magic!
Good point. The connection is
Good point. The connection is a standard PCIe connector, but try and find a PCIe to something you can plug into a laptop adapter cable. If the connection was over Thunderbolt the base station could be used on any thunderbolt equipped laptop.