MSI GX700 Extreme Edition Review - Crowdedbrain

MSI GX700 Extreme Edition Review Hot

Hardware Laptops

Written by admin

Friday, 03 August 2007

Page 2 of 2

The score was let down by the Graphics mark, which leads us onto the biggest disappointment, the 8600MGT 512 may be a DX10 card but its performance was way below the standard set by the GO 7950GTX, but we must point out that you pay £300 more for a laptop with this card, what it does give you is the same performance as you would get from a 8500GT desktop style card, in that you can play games, but will have to tone down the graphics some what.

We did over a week of artificial and natural benchmarking, which you can see from the images - at the end of the review - that the scores are some what lower than the 7950GTX.

Running at the highest res on the laptops native (1680 x 1050) was virtually impossible, as the card struggles even at the lower 1280 x 900 widescreen resolution, unless like we said before the graphics detail is turned low.

AA and AF settings should be experimented with at lower resolutions because the NVIDIA scaling function will at least scale the display to fit your screen and you can then get some respectable frame rates when you have play tested a few games, but the laptop is not a games machine that you can simply walk into and play on the highest settings.

For Benchmarking we used 3D Mark 06, HardwareOC Prey test and Company of Heroes Performance tests, which we also ran a DX10 test on the card and we have to say the DX10 textures on COH nearly crippled the device on higher resolutions, so again throttling back on the settings will be needed.

To give you an idea of what the card can achieve, we have displayed a few screen shots at the base of the review to show you the settings that we felt the games could run at quite comfortably and to be honest they are not that bad, we were more than happy with the games running at lower settings as they were just as enjoyable as ever.

General Vista performance was improved slightly due to the new Intel Santa Rosa platform, thanks primarily to its new features such as the 1MB of Intel Turbo Memory, Intel PM965 Express Chipset and of course having 2GB DDR2 memory helps. The Santa Rosa platform has a lot of new features, so if you are interested in knowing more, then please click on the following Wiki link.

The laptops boot up times were good thanks to the above and the vista experience seemed a lot more enjoyable as its performance felt better. Though its battery life was still bad, running anything in hi-performance mode i.e DVD's or games would give you just over an hours of use, but again this laptop will be used primarily for games.

As for value it does come out pretty good for the spec you get, but its warranty could be slightly better, as the second year is RTB.

Editor review : Final thoughts

93 of 94 people found the following review helpful


Overall rating		7.8
Design/Build Quality		8.0
Screen Quality		8.0
Sound Quality		8.0
Performance		7.0
Noise Level		8.0
Value For Money		8.0

The MSI GX700 Extreme Edition Laptop is only let down by the 8600M GT graphics card. However compared to most laptops you can at least play games and it is DX10. The rest of the Laptop was great, Vista performance, screen, HDMI port, build quality were all top notch.

If only the Laptop had a HD-DVD player then this would have been even better, otherwise the HDMI port looses its appeal.

We have to be honest though and say it is still a great laptop to use and it does give you the best of both worlds, a fairly quite device for Windows use, mixed in with a graphics card that can allow you to play games at lower res and settings.

Note: This score represents our views of the final prototype of the GX700 Extreme Edition, so with newer drivers from NVIDIA the 8600M card could improve on performance.

Was this review helpful to you? yes