MSI GX 610 review

Gallery

Verdict:

MSI's GX 610 is fast enough to play the latest games, but poor design choices dent its appeal. This is the best laptop in the group for games and has a great screen, but its cooling fan is annoying and the keyboard is poor.

Review Date: 11 Jan 2008

Price when reviewed: £715

Supplier: http://www.lambda-tek.com/componentshop

Reviewed By: Alan Lu

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

The GX 610 has an attractive glossy black lid, but the same material is also used on the wrist rests below the keyboard, which easily picks up smudged fingerprints.

The distractingly loud cooling fan is audible even when there aren't any demanding applications running.

Those doing lots of typing will find the spongy keyboard uncomfortable. A numeric keypad is built in for easy number entry in spreadsheets, but other keys have been made narrower to accommodate it. The large touch pad feels accurate and the buttons have plenty of feedback.

The glossy 15.4in widescreen display is one of the best screens here. Colours looked bright and the backlight was evenly lit. Our colour transition test was reproduced smoothly, although there was some banding in our greyscale gradient test.

Performance

Thanks to its ATI Mobility Radeon HD2600 graphics chip, this was the fastest laptop in our Call of Duty 2 test, scoring just under 21fps. It can play the latest games, although you'll have to lower the graphical detail settings or resolution.

It wasn't as impressive in our application benchmarks. It's the only laptop here with an AMD processor, the Turion 64 X2-TL58, and lagged behind its Intel-based competitors in our image- and video-editing tests. Thanks to its 2GB of RAM, it did better in our multitasking benchmark, coming third with a score of 152.

Battery life is three hours and four minutes, which is enough for an afternoon's work.

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