MSI’s has started shipping the Destroyer series GX70 and GX60 gaming laptops with the latest top-of-the-line AMD Radeon R9 M290X 2GB GDDR5 dedicated video card and currently the fastest AMD laptop processor – the A10-5750 quad-core at up to 3.5GHz. Select retailers are offering through their websites the 17.3″ GX70 and 15.6″ GX60 Destroyers starting at $1,300 and $1,200 respectively. According to the product pages, the laptops are “in stock”.
That’s significantly less than the price of another laptop available with the M290X – the Alienware 17, which sells for above $2000 for a configuration with the video card included. However, the Alienware has a much faster Intel Core i7 quad CPU and its version of the M290X has 4GB of GDDR5 video memory instead of 2GB.
The offered MSI models have 1080p displays, 1TB of storage space, from 8 to 16 Gigabytes of RAM memory, and DVD burner or Blu-Ray combo drives, depending on configuration.
The Radeon R9 M290X replaces the Radeon HD 8970M, but both GPUs have similar performance since they have the same specs. The Radeon M290X, as same as other R9, R7, HD 8000, and HD 8000 series GPUs, is in focus of gamers’ attention, since they’ll support AMD’s Mantle graphics API. Judging from the first benchmarks done on desktop PCs with Beta versions of driver packages with Mantle, the new API will bring a noticeable performance boost over the traditional DirectX API on same hardware. However, games supporting Mantle are rare at the time of this writing. Currently only Battlefield 4 supports it, while the latest gaming title Thief is expected to get support for it very soon.