I write this as there are not many people rating this item. I got the new Elder Scrolls game Skyrim for Christmas. My older MSI laptop was so overwheled by it's need for power, both computing and electric, that it would overheat and shut down within half an hour. So, this purchase was a forgone necessity for me. I was not looking forward to this kind of purchase since my old MSI laptop had been holding up very well, until now that is. I was pleased with my older laptop from MSI so I was looking forward to this one; I haven't been disappointed.PROS: Attractive aluminium shell, decent sound from the speakers (see below), a mousepad shutoff button for those times when typing or gaming can be screwed up with a casual swipe across the mousepad, 17" screen that is just gorgeous (shiney, not glare resistant, so, be aware if you are taking this outside or to a cafe or something), LOTS of memory (16 gigs RAM and 1Tb (2ea.-500Gb, RAID 0 array) HD, 3 Gb video RAM), last but not least: the keyboard. The keyboard from my old MSI felt , well, skwishy. It would flex in the worst way while typing and was not comfortable. The old one also had the lefthand Function and Control buttons reversed and I was constantly making typing mistakes with it. Both of those problems have been fixed. The keyboard no longer feels like it's flexing, nice and solid with nice key pressure, and they fixed the key layout as well. This has a beautiful keyboard with backlit keys from Steelcase. The keyboard is divided up into 3 sections across the face and you can change the colors to your choice in a lot of different ways to suit your taste in visuals. For me it was actually too much unless you are trying to show off for the crowd of onlookers that you'll get when you pull this baby out for something like a LAN party or clients that you may be meeting with. That said, lets get to the CONs.CONS: This thing is a monster. It looks good and feels good but, it's heavy!!! It weighs in around 9 lbs. and the power brick really is a brick sized block. It ALSO weighs a lot. Transporting this thing around is not going to be something that you want to do a lot of. That said, when you get it around somebody else who has not seen or has a laptop like this one with the almost pyrotechnic keyboard its going to make them very envious. Until they have to pick it up. Thankfully, I use mine mostly as a desktop replacement with portable capabilities than as a go everywhere machine. I think most will think the same after having to move this many times. Now as for the speakers. The speaker setup on this machine is much better than the last MSI I had. The last one you had to almost put your head against the machine in order to hear the sounds, this new one is much more clear and sounds much better, but, it's still a set of small speakers and just can not put out the sound level that you'd like to hear if there are any background noises in the area. You aren't going to be bothering the neighbors with the sound level out of this machine. I've heard many complain about the fan noise out of the MSI series of laptops but I have to say that that has not been a terrible problem with this one. Since it has such an expanded computing capability I may have not pushed it to it's limits that it engages much. It does go on and off periodically but not for long and I don't find it to be terribly bothersome. For all that, I don't notice it putting out a tremendous amount of heat either, even when playing a heavy computing game like Skyrim.CONCLUSION: This is one beautiful machine with muscle, and storage, to spare. The keyboard is great for games playing in the dark, trying to keep the loved one still loving you. It's a real gamers machine. BUT, it's not something that you want to lug around with you often. It's a great desktop replacement, but not a great portable machine unless you're the Hulk trying to keep in shape while computing at the same time.
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