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We first heard about MSI's GE600 gaming notebook at CES earlier this year, and at long last, MSI has begun shipping the 16-inch laptop to the North American market.
Not much has changed since our sneak peek several months ago, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The GE600 sports a respectable spec sheet consisting of an Intel Core i5 420M processor (2.26GHz), 4GB of DDR3 memory, 320GB hard drive, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5730 videocard with DX11 support, a DVD burner, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, 4-in-1 memory card reader, 1.3MP webcam, 6-cell battery, and Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit.
MSI's new notebook also features a scratch resistant chassis, illuminated touch sensitive hotkeys, a raised chiclet keyboard, wide touchpad, and a glossy exterior we imagine will act as a fingerprint magnet.
The GE600 is available now for about $900 street.
Image Credit: MSI
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strykyr
April 29, 2010 at 4:57pm
I just paid $1k for an Asus G72 at Best Buy just under 3 weeks ago. It plays Crysis @ 1600x900 all High settings with no issues. According to CPU-Z it will OC to almost 3.0ghz using the Asus Turbo Gear software that came wiith it. For under $30 I can get a bluetooth module to drop in under the keyboard, $250 will get me a Blue-Ray drive for it. $15 will get me a second bracket to drop in a second 500gb HDD. I think that my biggest gripes are the battery life and the mic jack. Supposedly I'm supposed to get 1.5 hours but just a few minutes ago at 80% I had 1 hour and 32 minutes battery left in power saving mode. I had to take a road trip to Dallas from New Jersey a couple weeks ago and wanted to have my police scanner routed into this laptop with mp3s playing at the same time, then run from the headphone jack on the lappy to the input of the car stereo but I couldn't get it to work because of what I would assume to be an AC hum but with other AC hum issues I was able to get rid of the hum by removing the AC power. Not this time. Using the built in mic with Skype and Live messenger would get me compaints about an AC hum type noise that slowly built up that I couldn't hear. That noise wasn't there when I used the little USB sound card that came with my Gamercon 777s. I thought about trying to get it replaced because of the mic issue but I have run into crappy mic connections or whatever in every laptop I've ever used.
I do love this laptop tho. It really showed me what a good video card can do compared to my 7900gs SLI setup. I have a q6700 with 2 gigs of memory on that system. This is the C2D close enuff equivilant(sp?) with 6 gigs and a GTX260 with 1 gig dedicated. I bought Dawn of War II while I was there. On a friends Dell Laptop with a C2D cpu, 2 gigs of memory and a discreete 256mb 7900gs, I couldn't squeeze more than a 12fps out of it. On their Dell tower with a pentium 4, 1 gig of memory and a geforce 210(not sure if it was a gt or gtx or whatever)we got a 32fps. My g72 got 68fps with everything maxxed out. The load screen on my SLI tower took forever, but once I was in game I was getting 27 fps on all high settings.
Now I'm looking at about $400 for two BFG gtx260s and 8 gigs of memory for my tower.
I was using the DOW2 benchmarking proggy for my above numbers. My SLI tower and this lapppy are using Win7 x64. The 2 Dell machines were using XP home OEM by Dell.
LGA1156
April 29, 2010 at 6:21am
Week 1366 X 768 Resolution.... My asus g73Jh will mop the floor with this POS
SpeakerGeek
June 20, 2010 at 4:17pm
Your asus is also far from portable, while this thing weighs in at 6 pounds and boasts a potential battery life of more than 3 hours, maybe more than 4 with the 9 cell battery, your Asus can barely last an hour and 15 minutes, and weighs more than 8 pounds. Yeah, it outperforms this laptop, but if you need something portable, the Asus just doesn't cut it. This makes the GE600 much more versatile than the g73, and the g51. It's also more powerful than the n61 with a better battery life. As much as I like Asus, they don't even offer a laptop that comes close to this one, in its class (portable, yet powerful). As a matter of fact, at this point in time, it's hard to find a laptop, at all, that offers both the battery life and performance, with a decent screen size. As far as the resolution goes, at this screen size, 1366x768 is more appropriate. Also, at that resolution, the performance of the radeon 5730 is closer to the performance of a 5870 at 1920x1080 than you would think (though the 5870 still dominates). I wish it had a i5 520m or 540m, and better wireless, though.
Paul_Lilly
April 29, 2010 at 6:51am
It damn well better, considering it cost nearly twice as much.
-Paul Lilly
