MSI GX600 GAMING LAPTOP REVIEW

Introduction
What all gamers want is a gamer laptop so they can easily take it under the arm and go to a lan party instead of driving their huge stationary PC. The question is has MSI finally made the perfect gaming laptop? We took a closer look and found many good and a few downsides with the machine.

Design
Overall the design is okay but you can clearly see that this is a gamer PC, and should be used only for gamers. Gamers are often young people and they would probably find the design awesome with flames next to the mouse pad and a huge “turbo button” etc. However I find the design more childish then cool and I think they overdone it a little bit. Up to the right you will see a speaker grill colored in red and a big Turbo button that increase the computers performance from 2 Ghz to 2,4 GHz. The quality of the keyboard and mouse pad is great the only bad thing here are the small buttons on the keyboard especially f1-f12 buttons. If you got chubby fingers you will have a hard time pressing these.







MSI GX600 TURBO BUTTON








Performance
The MSI GX600 Gaming laptop did actually quite good and when you press the turbo button the performance of the CPU increases with 20% and that helps a lot when you use programs and games that sucks up a lot of CPU power. On PCMark 05 we got 5600 score points with the turbo button on, once we switched it off and did the test again we got only 4900 score points.

For games the Turbo button won’t make a huge difference because of games today depends more on a good graphic card. On Unreal 3 Demo in 1024x768 we got an average FPS of 31 with no turbo and 30 FPS with the turbo switched on. This is fully playable but if you want higher resolution you may notice some lag here and there.


Overall
This is a good laptop and maybe the best gaming laptop out there with inbuilt automated clocking system, a 15 inch widescreen and a HD-DVD ROM which is simply perfect for this laptop. The laptop is very quiet but when you turn the turbo button on you will be able to hear it work especially if you are playing a high performance game like Unreal 3. Another bad thing about this laptop is that you are unable to upgrade the hard drive or memory without voiding your warranty is most definitely going to be a drawback for some people when they are considering buying this laptop, granted a 250GB hard drive and 2GB Ram is adequate for the time being, but it would be nice to have the ability to upgrade to a larger hard drive without voiding the warranty.

In the end the MSI GX600 Gaming laptop didn’t make me go “WOW”. But its probably the currently best gaming laptop out there and its really cool that they added a HD-DVD ROM. The turbo button works great but since the video card is only an 8600M GT you will still have problems running new games at high details. The laptop costs around $1400-$1700 and its an okay investment if you got the money because this laptop will grow old fast.

Pros:
+ Very good CPU performance
+ Build in HD-DVD Drive
+ Great and easy auto clocking

Cons:
- The flames make the whole laptop look cheap
- Unable to upgrade memory and hard drive without breaking the warranty

Value For Money

Our Rating