MSI is touting its overclockable laptops again in Shanghai this week - it's something we got a glimpse of at this year's Computex, but it's well worth a revisit. The GX600 is a Santa Rosa notebook with a Turbo button that overclocks the CPU from 200MHz to 240MHz front side bus: that's a 20 percent core speed overclock from 2GHz to 2.4GHz.
MSI demonstrated that this equates to a 10fps increase in Half-Life 2 (at 800x600) which is not all that bad, but the Nvidia GeForce 8600M core isn't overclocked as well unfortunately. The notebook has useful and had quite a unique feature set of eSATA and HDMI (with HDCP) output, as well as the same design that we were initially none too sure about.
Those worried about power usage will be glad to know it's still all done within the same power envelope (TDP) as the CPU core voltage is not increased - this is simply free MHz. In addition, you can only use it while plugged in too.
In all honesty, the shiny plastic still feels tacky but the quality of product and finish was far greater than at Computex, however we still feel MSI is missing the mark a little. Maybe that's because of my personal taste for a certain level of subtlety and minimalism, but Apple does sell a lot of Macbooks and the U1F I'm writing this on is very nice.
After getting some play time today with F.E.A.R., I'm still not that overwhelmed. It's a niche feature that gives MSI an edge and while I can see the advantage of a gaming laptop for someone who wants something they can carry around, but not sacrifice features and performance, it's very much an overstatement in design.
Anyway, here's some shots of the insides just in case you were ever interested but too scared to void the warranty on your own. Enjoy!
Discuss in the forums.
From top to bottom that's the Nvidia GeForce 8600M with 512MB of GDDR3, P965 Northbridge and Intel Core 2 Duo (Mobile) CPU
MSI demonstrated that this equates to a 10fps increase in Half-Life 2 (at 800x600) which is not all that bad, but the Nvidia GeForce 8600M core isn't overclocked as well unfortunately. The notebook has useful and had quite a unique feature set of eSATA and HDMI (with HDCP) output, as well as the same design that we were initially none too sure about.
Those worried about power usage will be glad to know it's still all done within the same power envelope (TDP) as the CPU core voltage is not increased - this is simply free MHz. In addition, you can only use it while plugged in too.
In all honesty, the shiny plastic still feels tacky but the quality of product and finish was far greater than at Computex, however we still feel MSI is missing the mark a little. Maybe that's because of my personal taste for a certain level of subtlety and minimalism, but Apple does sell a lot of Macbooks and the U1F I'm writing this on is very nice.
After getting some play time today with F.E.A.R., I'm still not that overwhelmed. It's a niche feature that gives MSI an edge and while I can see the advantage of a gaming laptop for someone who wants something they can carry around, but not sacrifice features and performance, it's very much an overstatement in design.
Anyway, here's some shots of the insides just in case you were ever interested but too scared to void the warranty on your own. Enjoy!
Discuss in the forums.
From top to bottom that's the Nvidia GeForce 8600M with 512MB of GDDR3, P965 Northbridge and Intel Core 2 Duo (Mobile) CPU
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