My GS30 life with not 1, but 2 docking stations.

Question

Recently I purchased an MS30 with included docking station, plus a spare docking station, plus  GTX 760 + GTX 970 graphics cards.
Reason being, I wanted a superlightweight PC for work with plenty of grunt, that I could use at work and home without having to use 2 seperate machines.
At work I have the unit with the GTX760 with dual screen plus various accessories, and at home the GTX970 single large screen plus accessories.
This system works pretty great, really. There is a slight pause of a few extra seconds on boot when you first connect the main notebook into a dock after it running on the other one, as it has to essentially 'reinstall' the new video card, even though it's been plugged into that dock before. Other than that, everything works flawlessly.
A couple of notes for those considering buying a GS30, from a bit over a month and a half of using it for 8 hours a day at work then 2-4 hours at home :
- Lots of reviews say the setup is noisy. Out of the box, it is. But you can chop the noise a massive amount by opening the docking station, and looking for a little switch with LOW-MED-HIGH written above it. It's the fan speed controller, and by default it's on HIGH. Switch it to LOW, and in all but the most heavy overclocked load times the unit will be no noisier than any other home desktop machine or even many notebooks.
- Some complaints in reviews I read mentioned that the inbuilt screen doesn't work when it's docked. This was true, as docking disabled the inbuilt Iris Pro video - however I applied the latest BIOS update v105 which apparently removes that limitation, and it now allows you to use both external monitors and the internal screen when docked. Only complication I've found so far is f.lux doesn't like the dual simultaneous video cards and flickers like mad when it's loaded.
- Lots of people have said re the GS30 that it's expensive for the performance you get, compared to buying a seperate laptop and desktop. Maybe they're right, but there's something very handy about just having to worry about 1 PC no matter where you are. Plus the boss paid for it
- MSI - Please add the option to disable the front light strips on both the laptop and the dock! The laptop light pulses in sleep mode, so obviously it's controllable and not hardwired to always be on.
- Overall, extremely pleased. When I'm at home I can game on a nice 27" screen, I can then undock my notebook and carry on working on the couch  on an ultralight notebook while watching a TV show with my wife, and then plug it in at work and do some extremely intensive calculations - all without the GS30 breaking a sweat.

Answer 1

Quote from: blackrazornz on 29-April-15, 13:23:59
- Some complaints in reviews I read mentioned that the inbuilt screen doesn't work when it's docked. This was true, as docking disabled the inbuilt Iris Pro video - however I applied the latest BIOS update v105 which apparently removes that limitation, and it now allows you to use both external monitors and the internal screen when docked. Only complication I've found so far is f.lux doesn't like the dual simultaneous video cards and flickers like mad when it's loaded.
Looks like I jumped the gun on this one. While the screen worked on the dock for 1 or 2 boots, now it either totally fails to initialise and causes boot issues, or it activates and by doing so disables the video output via the external monitor. Highly annoying. And only problematic since v105.
See https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?topic=255363.0 for further detail.