Workstation Review: MSI WS60 is Thin and Powerful

Thin is in. MSI (Micro-Star International) recently sent us one of its latest mobile workstation. The MSI WS60 20J 3K-004US clearly takes a page from Dell’s playbook, sporting a thin, lightweight case reminiscent of the Dell Precision M3800 mobile workstation, which in turn bore striking similarities to Apple’s 15 in. MacBook Pro. While imitation may be the most sincere form of flattery, the thin, lightweight mobile market does carry some compromises.

For those not familiar with MSI, the Taiwan-based company—with offices in the U.S., Canada, Europe, the Middle East and Asia—was founded in 1986 as a motherboard and graphics card manufacturer. Today, it produces its own consumer and commercial electronics including notebooks, all-in-one PCs, servers, workstations, industrial PCs, household appliances, car infotainment products, multimedia systems and communication devices. In the U.S., MSI systems are sold by various national and regional distributors, and well-known retailers including B&H Photo, CompUSA, Fry’s and Staples.

Last year, we reviewed the MSI GT70 20L mobile workstation, and came away impressed. The new WS60 20J proved equally impressive.

The MSI WS60 comes housed in a thin, sculpted black brushed aluminum case with a glowing MSI workstation logo centered on the lid. The case measures 15.35 x 10.47 x 0.78 in. (W x D x H) and weighs 4.5 lbs. Its 6.5 x 3.25 x 1 in. external power supply is equally light, adding 1.5 lbs including all cables.

Unlike many other OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), MSI offers only two choices when configuring a WS60: a full HD eDP 1920x1080 display or a WQHD+ 3K display. The higher resolution adds $300 to the cost of the system. Otherwise, what you see is what you get, but what you get is a mobile workstation with a fast CPU, high-end graphics, a gorgeous display, lots of storage and plenty of memory at a very attractive price.

Both versions of the MSI WS60 mobile workstation are powered by a fourth generation quad-core 2.5GHz Intel Core i7-4710HQ CPU with integrated Intel HD Graphics 4600. This mobile processor has a maximum turbo boost speed of 3.4GHz, a 6MB cache, and a frugal thermal design power rating of 47 watts. The system also comes standard with 16GB of DDR3L 1600MHz memory, installed as a pair of 8GB SO-DIMMs in the two memory slots.

Also standard is an NVIDIA Quadro K2100M mobile GPU (graphics processing unit) with 2GB of GDDR5 memory and 576 CUDA cores. This mid-range mobile discrete graphics card enabled the WS60 to deliver some good graphics performance. The system also comes standard with Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 and Bluetooth.

Quirky Keyboard

Lifting the lid reveals a beautiful 15.6 in. backlit LCD display. Since we received the WS60 model with the WQHD+ 3K display, our system came with an IPS panel with a native resolution of 2880 x 1620. A 1080p webcam is centered above the display with a single microphone to one side. An LED adjacent to the webcam glows white when the camera is active.

The SteelSeries keyboard provides 102 backlit keys, including a separate numeric keypad. The main keyboard has large keys with an excellent feel, but unfortunately we found both the layout and the appearance of the keys themselves to be somewhat problematic. MSI used an overly-stylized font for the keyboard graphics, some keys were in awkward locations, and there was only one Windows key. Function key combinations let you quickly toggle between various power saving modes, control the webcam, toggle Wi-Fi, control the keyboard backlight, adjust speaker volume and so on. There’s even a function key combination you can program to launch a user-defined application.

The touchpad also raised some issues. Rather than being centered below the keyboard, the 4 x 2.75 in. panel was shifted about 2 in. to the left, resulting in less space to rest your left palm. The touchpad’s multi-touch capabilities also did not feel as smooth as those on the Dell M3800 or MacBook Pro.

A pair of stereo speakers are located above the keyboard, beneath a perforated grill. A round power button centered above the grill glows white when the system is using the integrated graphics and amber when the discrete NVIDIA GPU is active.

Bright LEDs along the front edge of the case indicate the sleep state, hard drive activity, number lock, caps lock, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and battery status. With its slim design, all ports are located on the sides. The right side of the case houses a USB 3.0 port that can continue to charge external devices even when the computer is in power off mode. Here you will also find an SD card reader for XC and HC cards, an HDMI port, an RJ45 connector for the Intel Gigabit LAN and a Thunderbolt Gen2 port that can be used to connect fast external storage or external displays.

The left side sports a pair of audio jacks for headphone and microphone for the built-in Sound Blaster Cinema 2 sound system, two additional USB 3.0 ports, a Kensington lock slot and the connector for the external power supply.

Ventilation ports are locked near the rear on both sides with additional ventilation ports on the bottom. The bottom of the case provides two additional stereo speakers. As is true with other slim systems, there is no battery compartment. While the bottom cover can be removed to access the fan, hard drive and battery, the slim manual (which we had to download from the MSI website) does not address any user-serviceable components.

While there is no optical drive, MSI does equip the WS60 with some impressive storage. Our system came equipped with a pair of 128GB SSDs (solid-state drives) in a RAID 0 array as well as a 1TB 7200rpm SATA hard drive, all standard in the base price.

In spite of the preponderance of solid-state components, the WS60 exhibited some pretty excessive fan noise. The fans are active all the time, with noise at a pretty constant 40dB, climbing as high as 56dB during compute-intensive tasks. In spite of this, the system ran quite cool, but battery life proved somewhat disappointing. The integrated 6-cell battery kept the MSI system running for 3 hours and 13 minutes on our battery run-down test. While that’s not bad compared to most other mobile workstations we’ve tested, it pales in comparison to other thin, lightweight solid-state systems.

Winning Performance

The minor issues we encountered all but disappeared, however, once we began our benchmark tests. On the SPECviewperf test, the MSI WS60 outperformed the Dell M3800 on every dataset. In fact, on this graphics-intensive test, the WS60 was only beaten by mobile systems utilizing much higher-end GPUs and costing considerably more.

On the SPECapc SolidWorks 2013 benchmark, which is more of a real-world test, the MSI WS60 mobile workstation was even more impressive, turning in test results that placed it in the upper echelon of mobile workstations we’ve tested recently. In fact, only the MSI GT70 we reviewed last year surpassed all of its SolidWorks results.

We also ran the new SPECwpc benchmark. Although we still have limited results with which to compare, the WS60 outperformed the Dell M3800 on this test, and even beat out several desktop systems on many of the tests in this extensive benchmark.

Finally, on the AutoCAD rendering test, a multi-threaded test where the edge definitely goes to systems with fast, multi-core CPUs, the MSI WS60 turned in great results, completing our test rendering in just over 63 seconds.

MSI preloads Windows 7 Professional 64-bit and backs the system with a two-year limited warranty. And unlike many other lesser-known brands, this MSI mobile workstation is ISV (independent software vendor) certified for major CAD/CAM programs such as SolidWorks.

The price was also impressive. At $2,600 as configured, the MSI WS60-20J 3K-004US is one of the most affordable mobile workstations currently available. The same system with a 1920 x 1080 display is $300 less. At that price, we can forgive the few shortcomings. Once again, MSI has delivered a winning mobile workstation.

More Info

• Micro-Star International

Single Socket Workstations Compared

		MSI WS602.5GHz Intel Core i7-4710HQ quad-core CPU, NVIDIA Quadro K2100M, 16GB RAM	Dell Precision M38002.2GHz Intel Core i7-4702HQ quad-core CPU, NVIDIA Quadro K1100M, 16GB RAM	MSI GT70 2OLWS2.4GHz Intel Core i7-4700MQ quad-core CPU, NVIDIA Quadro K4100M, 16GB RAM	Eurocom Racer 3W2.4GHz Intel Core i7-4700MQ quad-core CPU, NVIDIA Quadro K1100M, 16GB RAM	BOXX GOBOXX G27203.6GHz Intel Core i7-3820 quad-core CPU, NVIDIA Quadro K5000M, 16GB RAM	Eurocom Panther 4.03.1GHz Intel Xeon E5-2867W 8-core CPU, NVIDIA Quadro K5000M, 16GB RAM
Price as tested		$2,600	$2,887	$3,200	$2,172	$5,895	$6,800
Date tested		1/17/15	3/13/14	11/25/13	11/10/13	5/28/13	4/20/13
Operating System		Windows 7	Windows 7	Windows 7	Windows 7	Windows 7	Windows 7
SPECviewperf 12	higher
catia-04		21.26	14.74	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
creo-01		19.98	13.37	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
energy-01		0.32	0.28	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
maya-04		17.90	12.79	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
medical-01		5.71	3.72	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
showcase-01		10.63	8.50	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
snx-02		22.05	14.74	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
sw-03		32.32	19.43	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
SPECviewperf 11	higher
catia-03		45.66	33.56	72.47	28.97	73.23	65.87
ensight-04		24.09	17.50	50.62	17.38	61.24	61.01
lightwave-01		64.37	58.84	64.39	31.53	78.03	65.85
maya-03		77.78	61.83	112.33	51.20	111.58	102.18
pro-5		18.26	15.37	18.38	9.43	16.06	13.82
sw-02		47.80	39.48	55.00	24.95	63.26	55.06
tcvis-02		36.95	28.69	60.63	27.70	60.91	59.28
snx-01		31.85	23.76	59.76	23.17	63.57	64.62
SPECapc SolidWorks 2013	higher
Graphics Composite		3.08	2.41	5.27	3.63	2.72	2.26
RealView Graphics Composite		3.23	2.71	6.27	3.97	2.93	2.42
Shadows Composite		3.23	2.34	6.26	3.95	2.93	2.42
Ambient Occlusion Composite		3.51	2.20	13.00	5.35	6.09	5.14
Shaded Mode Composite		2.96	2.31	5.78	3.83	2.66	2.41
Shaded with Edges Mode Composite		3.21	2.51	4.80	3.44	2.78	2.12
RealView Disabled Composite		2.55	2.40	2.62	2.55	2.02	1.72
CPU Composite		3.06	2.41	3.74	3.99	3.61	3.72
Autodesk Render Test	lower
Time	seconds	63.60	71.42	60.33	55.83	79.20	57.33

Numbers in blue indicate best recorded results. Numbers in red indicate worst recorded results.