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OK, it's provocative strapline but as the benchmark scores and FCAT analysis began to roll in, by and large it turns out to be a fairly accurate description of what this staggering piece of technology is capable of. MSI's frankly monstrous GT80 Titan SLI is a massive desktop replacement computer, which - in the case of our review sample, at least - features a Core i7 4890HQ quad-core processor, 32GB of RAM and two GTX 980M mobile GPUs working together in SLI, back by quad RAID-0 SSDs. It's a lavish, frankly immense spec, housed in an equally remarkable chassis.The centrepiece of the GT80 Titan's casing is a back-lit, full height, SteelSeries mechanical keyboard, using Cherry MX switches. Good for 50 million button presses versus a conventional membrane keyboard's five to ten million, there's an exceptional durability about the design, but that's not really what makes this special - it's the feedback you get from using it, the feel of the keys as you press them and even the remarkable sound they make as they're pressed. For those of us of a certain age who've used a high-end 1980s workstation will know the feeling offered by this kind of keyboard. Functionally speaking, we daresay there's an advantage to this beautiful hardware in terms of accuracy, but this doesn't really excite us as much as the feeling of returning to a truly 'proper' keyboard after years mostly typing on our laptops. It's the sort of keyboard you'd use every 108 minutes in order to save the world.
Next to the keyboard sits the trackpad, capable of transforming into a back-lit number pad at the press of the button, but otherwise exceptionally responsive and backed by actual proper, clickable buttons at the bottom. There are only three other buttons - power, GPU, and fan. The first is self-explanatory, while the second is used to switch between discrete and integrated graphics, requiring a reboot (the software Optimus solution doesn't work on SLI set-ups). Finally, the fan button turns up the cooling solution to the max - which didn't seem to make a whole lot of difference to performance, but certainly kicked up a ton of mini-vac style noise.
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