MSI’s Megabook GX600 isn’t the first and it definitely won’t the last products in its class; gaming notebooks are slowly taking centre stage with increasing numbers of vendors offering such products. Dell’s XPS range of mobile rigs have been tremendously popular in the Americas and customers aren’t limited to just gamers. Many users choose them for the fact that they are usually more powerful than ‘regular’ notebooks and most of them have trendier and bolder designs. MSI Megabook GX600 joins this growing list of high-performance PCs but it has several tricks up to its sleeve to stay ahead of the competition.
On paper, this rig is powered by Intel’s Core 2 Duo T7300 CPU which runs at 2.0GHz. What?! Only a T7300, I hear? Well, if you look carefully, there’s a large button with the word “TURBO” inscribed on it, located just above the right side of the keyboard. When this button is pressed, everything on the motherboard (well, the Front Side Bus to be exact) gets a 20% speed boost. So the T7300 suddenly adds 400MH, making it a T7700 but bear in mind the Front Side Bus is overclocked to 960MHz, while a plain vanilla T7700 runs at 800MHz. As if this wasn’t enough, even the 2GB installed memory gets the same speed boost. However, MSI choose to run the 667MHz DDR2 modules at 533MHz (with a 3:4 FSB:DRAM ratio), which even with an additional 20% speed increase only resulted in a clock speed of around 640MHz, which is shy of its normal operating speed. This probably due to the fact that overclocking 667MHz modules will produce a speed of 800MHz; although desktop DDR2 memory has surpassed 1200MHz, notebook SODIMMS have yet to go beyond 667MHz. So rather than use expensive, customized (or hand picked) high speed modules (and for stability’s sake), MSI chose to use more conservative settings. We’ll see the result of this later.
To ensure gamers will be satisfied with the MSI Megabook GX600 performance, MSI has chosen NVIDIA’s Geforce 8600M GT discrete graphics chip and paired it with 512MB of dedicated memory. The 8600 series of GPUs have been performing well, especially for mobile PCs, so I’m sure we can expect good scores out of it. The 15.4 inch screen widescreen LCD display has a resolution of 1,440 by 900 pixels, which is better than usual 1,280 by 800, especially for games. However, the screen isn’t of the high-contrast (or glossy) variety, which is a real pity. However, it is slightly highly usable and has good brightness and contrast. There was also no visible ghosting in games. For storage, MSI Megabook GX600 comes with a 250GB Western Digital hard disk drive. Up till recently, 160GB drives were still considered to be top end so it’s nice to see such a roomy hard disk. The Toshiba TS-L802A optical drive supports HD-DVD playback, in addition to its ability to read and write the various DVD formats. It’s too bad that the screen doesn’t support full HD though.
In terms of ports, MSI Megabook GX600 users won’t feel short changed. There are four USB 2.0 ports (two on each side), a four pin Firewire port, HDMI, S-Video Out and also a 15-pin D-sub connector. So if you have full HD-DVD player, you can output high definition playback through the HDMI port. There’s also a 1.3 Megapixel webcam and a flash card reader. Wireless connectivity is provided by the Intel 4965AGN chip and there’s Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR support as well. For wired connections, there the Gigabit Ethernet and analogue modem. MSI Megabook GX600 has a full (notice I didn’t say full-sized) keyboard. The keys are far from being full-sized, no thanks to its form factor. As MSI wanted this notebook to cater to gamers, it had to have a numeric keypad. Due to this, the keys are extremely cramped, especially those on the right side of the keyboard (e.g the arrow keys, the right Shift and Enter keys) to the point that they were uncomfortable to use. Instead, they should have shrunk the numeric keypad keys slightly (they are full sized) and made those keys I mentioned slightly. Gamers don’t just use the WASD keys and if they have to do any typing on the MSI Megabook GX600, it won’t be a pleasant experience.
On to performance! For starters, the overclocked T7300 CPU behaved as we expected – on par with a Core 2 Duo T7700. The memory score of 4,874 is right at the top of the charts, despite being clocked at 640MHz. The Geforce 8600M GT, however wasn’t as fast as I expected it to be. With a score of only 4,106, it was bested by at least two other notebooks with the same GPU. Finally, the hard disk contributed 4,532 points which is definitely above average. Overall, MSI Megabook GX600 was impressive thanks to its CPU and memory scores; games like Crysis, Bioshock, Call of Duty 4 and other first person shooters should have no problems running on it (not on maximum eye candy settings though).
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