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The first laptop with clicky mechanical keys will make everyone at Starbucks hate you

Gamers and hardcore typists love mechanical keyboards for their accuracy, durability and satisfying “click,” but their bulk has also kept them safely quarantined to desktops. Until now.

MSI will let you take your clickity show on the go with the GT80 Titan, which will be the world’s first gaming laptop with a mechanical keyboard. The 18-inch behemoth will feature a SteelSeries gaming keyboard with Cherry Brown MX switches — the same type used in many desktop gaming keyboards. It will also be back-lit, an common feature on gaming laptops, and include a number pad.

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Strangely enough, the MSI GT80 Titan’s deck won’t be engulfed by the keyboard. As you can see in the image above, it will take up roughly half of the deck’s space. But the view from above doesn’t tell the whole story. MSI says it will employ keycaps that are 27mm thick — about five times thicker than a typical laptop keycap.

If the keyboard isn’t enticing enough, MSI also claims that this will be the slimmest and lightest 18-inch gaming laptop in the world, measuring 17 percent slimmer, and 22 percent lighter than its nearest adversary. However, it’s unclear what MSI is comparing the GT80 Titan to here, and didn’t provide us with exact measurements for the rig.

MSI is opting to stay mum on most other specs too, but we do know one tantalizing fact: This beast will sport two GPUs, which is not common to gaming laptops at all. A source at the company informed us that the GT80 Titan will sport Nvidia’s newest GPU in an SLI configuration. We take this to mean that the GT80 Titan will feature a pair of Nvidia GeForce GTX 980M GPUs in it, but we won’t know for sure until MSI dishes out some more precise information. It could also pack a pair of 970Ms, but either way, those are the two newest Nvidia GPUs out there right now, which were both launched at the same time.

It’s unclear how much the MSI GT80 Titan will cost, or when it will be released. But with a dual-GPU configuration, you should expect to pay plenty. If you want to stay up to date on all related developments, refresh this official MSI page early, and often.

Konrad Krawczyk
Former Computing Editor
Konrad covers desktops, laptops, tablets, sports tech and subjects in between for Digital Trends. Prior to joining DT, he…
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