Anyone familiar w/ MSI GT72 Dominator Pro-445 17.3" notebk?

This seems to provide the biggest bang for the buck I could find but it's $3k. Advice needed!

It's for (1) getting started with Resolve and doing not-too-heavy editing and grading (from H.264 HD and H.265 HD & 4K, then fatter originals up to RAW , and, (2) as a real-time HDMI field monitor for movie & still photography. I want it to remain useable as field monitor for years to come.

SPECS:
i7 4980 HQ, 2.8 GHz (+boost), 6 Mb L3; twin fans, cooling plan looks solid
32G 1600 MHz DDR3L ram (maxed out)
GTX 980M with 8G memory (so nice)
IPS panel (17"), 1920 x 1080 only, anti-glare
Storage:
(1) 4 x m.2 128G SSDs in Raid 0 (seems an odd arrangement). The OS, apps and scratch will fit there, though I'm not sure if it's wise to mix the last part in.
(2) 1 TB 7200 HD (replaceable with SSD. Whether the m.2's can be separated into discrete -- and maybe also larger -- volumes later on, I hope but don't know).
I/O:
6 USB 3.0 (A)
1 HDMI, 2 x mini DisplayPort
3.5mm mike in, phones out
SD, SDHC, SDXC

BlueRay burner, Steel brand keyboard, etc etc
8 lbs! 230W! Two hrs only on the battery.

Do you suppose this have the muscle to run an external (HD) grading monitor, until desktop materializes in future for heavy lifting? I realize I could customize a Sager/Clevo better in some respects but it always works out to an extra $1k+ for comparable and means giving up IPS for LED. A 2nd 980M would add $650.

No 3.1, no TB. Is a new gen just over the horizon, with lightning I/O upgrades and NVMEs everwhere inside?

Thanks!

You might want to take a look at the Sager NP9772-S. It has an IPS screen, and uses a Desktop 4790K CPU so is more powerful than the MSI. It has 2 M.2 slots as well as 2 normal HD slots. I just went through the specs, and set one up with the GTX 980M, 2 x 512GB M.2 drives, 1 x 1TB Harddrive, 32GB RAM and a 4790K CPU and it came in at $2840, although you do have to buy an external Blu-ray/DVD writer.

I use one of these myself, although over here we don't seem to get the IPS option. I've tried encoding using x264 and the CPU encodes at 100% and stays at 4.16Ghz throughout the whole encode.

If you want to run an external grading monitor in Resolve you would need to connect a USB 3 shuttle on this and the MSI model. I know on the Clevo/Sager that it works for output, but if I wanted to make sure it was 100% stable it's better to buy a mains powered USB 3 hub and connect through that.

Thanks a lot for this Adam! Clearly this is a big improvement.

One American customizer tells me that the Samsung 951 PCIe version for m.2 will more than double the read/write speeds, to over 1G/s, so long as the 2nd m.2 slot remains unpopulated. That upgrade and substituting a Samsung 850 Pro for the storage hdd, brings it over $3k -- do these seem worthy improvements to you? It leaves the boot drive with lots of room after OS & apps, and possibility of a 2nd storage drive.

Personally I'm not touching the faster m.2 drives at the moment, they get very hot, and when they start to overheat they throttle the speed

Thanks Adam