MSi Mobile Workstation for Engineering Applications has Game Quality Graphics

MSi, known for motherboards and gaming computers, shows off its very attractive mobile workstations, "pro by day, gaming at night."

MSi, known for its motherboards, gaming and consumer computers, is coming out strong for the engineering market. We’re not surprised. How big can the market be for thousand-dollar, water-cooled gaming rigs for millennials on bean bag chairs playing Fortnite all day? While engineers and architects may not need the super high-power motion graphics of games, they can be counted on for steady paychecks.

Engineers love the Quadro card,” says Clifford Chun. He shows MSi’s WS65 mobile workstation and the P65 at SIGGRAPH2018. In silver, one of the workstations resembles a MacBook. This is probably not accidental. Engineers may never admit they buy a computer, a car or anything else for its looks. But all things being equal, why not something that also looks cool? We’re human, too. The WS65 is available in black, if you prefer the look popularized by ThinkPads.

Some graphics horsepower is requisite for a workstation, and one of the main distinctions between a workstation and an ordinary PC. The MSi WS65 will support a NVIDIA Quadro P4300 with 8GB of GDDR5 memory and the Quadro P3200 with 6GB. The newly introduced ThinkPad P1, in comparison, supports up to a Quadro P2000 with 4GB only.

Workstations also need power in abundance, and the MS65 supplies it with up to an 8^th generation Intel i9 processor. MSi is one of the first mobile workstations we’ve seen with an i9.

It’s 15” screen only has 1920 x 1080 resolution and does not have a touchscreen option, though. The ThinkPad P1 can have a 4K screen (3840 x 2160) and a touch screen.

At 14.08”x9.75”x0.69” and 4.14 lbs, the MSi unit follows the new wave of thin and light workstations that have come out from Dell, HP and Lenovo.

The WS65 could have been even thinner had it not been for the network connection and its RJ45 connector on the edge.

Thin and light and no nostril cam. Clifford Chun, System Product management Director of the Systems Platform Sales Group, shows the MSi P65 limited edition in white at SIGGRAPH2018.

And for all those design reviews and meetings, the MSi unit has a camera mounted on top of the screen bezel. We had the camera on the bottom, but that became known as “nostril cam,” a term Clifford may have coined.

MSI shows a long, long list of engineering software it supports, including SOLIDWORKS, Inventor, Creo and NX.