MSI GX660R Laptop Review

MSI GX660R Laptop Review

Games

For our gaming we used 4x anti-aliasing and maximum settings on every test but Crysis which was the 0xAA Gamer settings we normally use. However if you were to use 0AA and 1920×1080 the frames stay at a minimum of 25 and average around the mid 30’s. Lets remember this is a laptop and not a 5850 in a basic desktop!

It would be easy to leap upon the Metro 2033 or AvP results as being very poor but they are, as we saw on the previous page, consistently about half of what we’d expect from our bench system with twice the cores and all the power available it wishes to suck out the wall. So if you’ve got sensible expectations, and of course you could tweak your IQ rather than run at the high levels we have here, then the GX660R certainly can game with the best of them.

Black Ops on the train with hardcore pumping audio anybody? Thought so.

Temperatures and Battery Life

Anyone who has suffered with a poorly-cooled laptop will know how ludicrously hot they can get. The few models that have focussed on keeping temperatures under control usually do so by giving you a screaming 40mm fan that makes dogs whine and your ears bleed.

MSI have given us a choice. We can have the peace and quiet of the standard cooling, or if we’re in a particularly intense situation there is a extra fan that can be used to keep things cool and the obvious expense of a bit of extra noise pollution.

It’s clear that the fan does its job keeping everything considerably more under thermal control than without.

Energy is, as we all know, converted to heat. Despite the rather substantial specifications of the GX660R the battery life is much better than we anticipated. We had a joke in the office that gaming in the background of the review video would probably mean the laptop died before the video was finished but actually you can play Crysis Warhead solidly for an hour and a half from a full charge, which is hugely impressive.

More normal use should see five or six hours from a full charge. Again you have to remember the amount of oomph under the hood and this is certainly better than a lot of laptops that are considered portable only because the charger doesn’t weigh too much.