AFTER the tiny but very capable Wind mini notebook, MSI is back with a notebook from the opposite side of the spectrum — a big all-in-one gaming notebook with some pretty impressive specifications.
The GX620, as it’s called, is based on the new Centrino 2 platform, and comes with a speedy Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 processor which runs at 2.4GHz.
Of course, a gaming notebook is not a gaming notebook without a speedy graphics processor to support it.
The GX620 comes with an nVidia P9600M GT graphics processor, which means it’s about the best GPU you can get now for a notebook.
The icing on the cake, though, is that the GX620 comes with a Blu-ray drive, which means that it’s also a pretty capable high-definition movie player.
However, since the maximum resolution of the GX620 isn’t quite 1920 x 1080pixels, it’ll only display 1080p Blu-ray movies in effectively 720p resolution.
Aesthetics and practicality
In the box, the GX620 has a pretty good bundle — apart from the notebook and its charger, you also get an MSI gaming mouse and a game (Tom Clancy’s Rainbow 6 Vegas 2).
The notebook itself is a pretty large beast although unlike 17in desktop replacements, it’s still not too heavy to carry around.
Aesthetically-speaking, the GX620’s design is not particularly attractive, as it has an anodised black body (which is nice) but with some red plastic trim around it (which is not so nice).
SOFT TOUCH: The MSI GX620 has a row of touch-sensitive buttons above the keyboard that allow you to control multimedia playback as well as boost the performance of the notebook.
Overall, the GX620 is not great-looking, but on the upside, build quality is actually pretty solid.
The advantage of having such a large footprint, of course, is that there’s lots of space for a big keyboard, and the GX620’s is about the best you can get on a notebook — you don’t just get the normal keys, but also a separate numeric keypad, just like in full-sized desktop PC keyboards.
My only complaint with the keyboard is the usual one — just like all MSI notebook keyboards, the Ctrl and Fn keys have switched places, which makes it a pain for touch typists and gamers alike, since you tend to hit the Fn key when you want to hit the Ctrl key.
The screen quality is not bad, as the glossy screen produces some very nice colours and black levels (at the expense of reflections) and viewing angles are good.
Apart from being a gaming notebook, the GX620 has a couple of features that make it a worthy multimedia machine as well, namely a HDMI port and a Blu-ray drive.
Although the screen itself is more a 720p compliant display than a true 1080p (which requires at least a 1920 x 1080pixel resolution), you can easily output the video and audio to a 1080p HDTV using the HDMI port.
The Blu-ray drive itself only reads Blu-ray media, although it can burn data to DVD-R/RW and CD-R/RW discs.
Together with the drive, MSI has also thoughtfully included a Blu-ray capable software player, namely Corel WinDVD which does the job just fine.
Performance
Let’s get right down to the crux of the matter — since this is a gaming notebook, just how does it perform when playing PC games?
Well, to find out, I tried a couple of modern games on the notebook (namely, the Tomb Raider: Underworld demo and World in Conflict) just to see what I could or couldn’t run on it.
The GeForce 9600M graphics processor on the GX620 is DirectX 10 capable, so World in Conflict is a good example of a modern DirectX 10 game to test.
I won’t bore you with numbers here, as my testing was based on actually playing the game and tweaking the settings to see whether I could get a playable experience with it.
The verdict? Well first off, the Tomb Raider: Underworld demo ran just fine on it at native resolution and was quite playable at the recommended settings.
However, World in Conflict, a real-time strategy game that really stretches even desktop gaming systems, did not fare so well.
In DirectX 9 mode, the game was just barely playable with very choppy frame rates (about 20 frames-per-second) while DirectX 10 mode was practically unplayable.
To be fair, this is pretty much representative of most notebook gaming-capable systems — for the price you pay, you can only expect to be able to play most last-generation games well and some less-graphics intensive modern ones.
This pretty much rules out playing Crysis, for example, at its best settings, although you can probably play Command & Conquer III at pretty high settings.
By the way, the GX620 can dynamically scale up its performance when plugged in to external power and has an extra Turbo mode for better performance, as well as an Eco mode to eke out as much battery life as possible when not plugged in.
Unplugged, you can expect the GX620 to last about 2.5 hours on a single charge, with the brightness set to a comfortable level — again, not great but in line with most game-capable notebooks.
Conclusion
Buying a gaming notebook is always a balancing act — on the one hand, should one spend more money and get a major kick-butt gaming notebook, or spend just enough to get a machine that you can play some current games on.
The problem is that no matter how good your gaming notebook is now, it’s not going to be able to play games that will be coming out a year-and-a-half from now.
Such is the case for the MSI GX620 — in reality, it’s actually a good example of a very capable gaming notebook and one that can play most last-generation games well, but not all current generation games.
One thing it has going for it however, is that once its gaming life is over in about a year or so, it can still function as a pretty good Blu-ray player.
Pros: Nice large keyboard; good screen; relatively portable for a gaming machine; Blu-ray drive.
Cons: Notebook design could do with a bit of work.
Copyright 1995-2008 Star Publications (M) Bhd (Co No 10894-D)
