Old-school mechanical keyboards may be a hit or miss among PC users these days, and even among today’s gaming community, but there’s no doubt that they remain one of the most accurate and responsive types of keyboards out there. Today, MSI forges new ground as it integrates a mechanical keyboard into a laptop!
The MSI GT80 Titan is an 18-inch portable gaming behemoth from the looks of it. A mere look at it sends the message across; this isn’t for the light of heart. Its unusual design puts a proper mechanical keyboard with Cherry MX switches at the very edge of the laptop’s base, the touchpad seems to be sitting right on top of the number pad (see image below).
The keyboard is provided by SteelSeries and does add weight to what is probably a heavy laptop to start with, but these are desktop replacements PCs, so weight shouldn’t be that much of an issue. The keyboard is backlit and features cloud-based software developed by SteelSeries.
Despite the weight, MSI claims that the GT80 Titan is “the world’s slimmest and lightest 18-inch gaming laptop, measuring 17% thinner and 22% lighter than its closest competitor”. Your guess is as good as mine as to what its “closest competitor” is.
Other specs include an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M graphics card, “Intel’s best and latest mobile CPU”, and Windows 8.1. No other specs were mentioned in the press release, as MSI is clearly pushing the mechanical keyboard as the stand out feature of the GT80 Titan. The company hasn’t yet released any details about pricing or availability, but we can expect a holiday release at the latest.
