The Intel Core i7-10875H at 2.30 GHz is one of the most popular high-power CPUs, prized for its stability, and that is supported in the creation of visual media by Nvidia's GeForce RTX 2070 Super, the near-top mobile variant of it's latest ray tracing RTX graphic chips. Please deactivate your ad blocker in order to see our subscription offer. © But overall, the screen truly shines, literally with around 1000 nits of brightness, and also by preventing light leakage so blacks stay beautifully solid. MSI is showing off its Creator 17 laptop at CES 2020, which it says is the “world’s very first” laptop to feature a Mini LED display. Normally we take a dim view of crapware installed on PCs masquerading as value adds, but the bundled suite of Cyberlink software for video effects, audio production and image colour correction is on par, or better than, other leading freeware widely used by creatives. Related: Intel 10th Gen H-series processors. Otherwise the plastic deck is almost featureless but for the pinprick texture pattern above the keyboard which could easily become an unhygienic dirt trap. Despite its solid reputation in the gaming community MSI seems to be mis-stepping in the pricing of this products, specifically in the notoriously price sensitive South African market. The Creator 17 will come equipped with Intel’s latest and just-announced 10th Generation H-series processors. Related: Nvidia launches RTX Super graphics for laptops. Here is the MSI Creator 17 A10SFS configuration sent to Tech Radar for review: CPU: Intel Core i7-10875H 2.3GHz The older MSI Creator 15 A10 with a 15" HD panel and the lesser Nvidia 1660i is available from Evetech for ZAR 32,000. And horsepower it has in abundance. This may also explain why this model is not available from any other mainstream retailers, including Evetech, which is usually a reliable MSI stockist. Many variants are available with more … We’ll put the jaw-dropping specs to the test once we get our hands on a review unit – but, if it lives up to our initial perceptions, the MSI Creator 17 could end up at the very top of the performance pile. From the 10th Gen i7 to the Nvidia RTX 2070 and the whopping 32GB RAM, expect to play everything on high and ultra-settings, and the large 1TB SSD means no need to archive old games to a slower HDD. On paper, the MSI Creator 17 looks like it will be a performance beast, aiming to give creative workstations such as the Razer Blade 15 Studio Edition and MacBook Pro 16 a run for their money. The Creator 17 is also touted as offering military-grade durability. Many variants are available with more basic screens, lesser graphics, less RAM and storage. The level of sturdiness will help protect this pricey laptop should it suffer any unwanted drops. Unlike other sites, we thoroughly review everything we recommend, using industry standard tests to evaluate products. So we like that MSI places emphasis on cooling in all its high-spec laptops, and this is no exception with no less than 7 cooling pipes (most PCs have 3 or 4) and redesigned fans sporting the thinnest blade designs ever seen on a laptop. An official UK release date for the MSI Creator 17 is yet to be announced. We’ll always tell you what we find. Price: ZAR52,000 (£2443). Right now, the base configurations start at $1799 in the US, with a 144 Hz display and RTX 2060 GPU. The backlit keyboard has conspicuously large labelling using an exceptionally heavy font. Camera: HD type 30fps@720p The 4K displays are particularly significant for the new Mini-LED technology. The MSI Creator 17 is a fine example of a new category of creator notebook that fall between hard core gaming rigs and high-powered workstations. Beyond its size, the MSI Creator 17 looks like a fairly unassuming laptop. Sure, this will render all your amateur creative endeavours effortlessly, but you could achieve very similar results with a gaming-grade PC for half the price. As such it uses sheer processing power to render out video frames or manipulate high resolution bitmaps. Then the extraordinary mini LED display panel, with its awesome rich and accurate colour reproduction makes  the most sense. This doesn’t mean you should disregard the rest of the lineup, however – this laptop is a spec-wonder across the board. Weight: 2.3 kg NY 10036. Being a 17-inch titan, you’d expect this laptop to have plenty of room for ports, and indeed it does. This wide colour gamut is crucial for the creative arts, obviously, and the brightness allow for confidently working outdoors in sunlight. The laptop comes with 3 x USB-A 3.2, USB-C, Thunderbolt 3, Ethernet, microSD, mic-in, headphone-out and HDMI-out – which is a huge selection. Size: 396.1 x 259.4 x 20.25 mm We’ll have to vet these specs ourselves come review time, but they’re truly fascinating figures, and a potential dream for creatives. The keycaps of the keyboard are boldly labelled and have very decent travel and enjoyable tactile feedback. It's backlit for working in darkened environments like control rooms, edit suites and recording studios. We’ll have to vet these specs ourselves come review time, but they’re truly fascinating figures, and a potential dream for creatives. In our tests adjusting the brightness and contrast settings resulted in a silken and subtle changes across the entire panel that were a wonder to behold. Here’s how the MSI Creator 17 A10SFS performed in our suite of benchmark tests: 3DMark: Sky Diver: 34,144 ; Fire Strike: 16,738 ; Time Spy: 7,192, PCMark 10 Extended: 4 590 Essentials, Photo 11,251, Video 3,967, Rendering 3,260, Digital Content Creation 5,259, Gaming 13 530, Cinebench R15: CPU 1736cb, OpenGL 128.67fps. which matches up with MSI's claim of 7 hours of "productivity". MSI claims that the Creator 17 (2020) is “the first notebook in the world with a Mini-LED display” and you can read more about it here. There's a decent set of ports including two USB-C, one of which also supports Thunderbolt, for even faster transfer of very large files. Which means more beer money, naturally. The Creator 17 will happily look at home in any workplace. Sporting only a solitary MSI logo, the lid of this device looks classy. Receive mail from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors? It presents a simple design that won’t have onlookers recoiling from any flickering RGB lighting. Finally, on a large multimedia-oriented we were disappointed to find no dedicated media control keys. It will likely cost less too. The result is that backlighting is far more even, far brighter with nearly 1000:1 contrast and, most important of all, consistently provides close to 100% RGB colour palette. It's the first laptop we've ever seen using micro LED screen technology at full UHD resolution: that's an array of more than 200 tiny LED's distributed around the screen area to create a for more even backlight than that created by the handful of full-size LEDs found on most other laptops. The difference in the price of your chosen model will depend on the display, GPU, RAM and storage, of which more details can be seen in the spec table below. MSI is pushing the boundaries of creative laptops with the new Creator 17 – a laptop sporting top-end specs and some killer new display tech. Ports: 3x Type-A USB 3.2 Gen1, 2x Type-C USB 3.2 Gen1 (1x Thunderbolt), 1x (UHD @ 60Hz) HDMI, 1x RJ45, 1x microSD card reader