Ryzeki's MSI GX660R Review

[ryzeki]

Introduction
Welcome to my review for the MSI GX660R! If you read my past review, you will notice that not too soon ago I was an Asus G51J owner (pretty happy one by the way) and suddenly made the jump for this new MSI. If some of you even remember, I was kind of against changing my laptop because I felt the jump from GTX260m to HD5870m was not that big. Boy was I wrong. And I am very glad about it!

A 15 incher with an ATi Mobility Radeon HD5870? That's the first thing that will pop on most people's heads. If you research for a bit, you will find that this particular GPU is not only powerful, but it is mostly found on 17inchers because of the heat it can produce. Naturally, most people would be skeptical to buy a 15.6 inch notebook with such a high end GPU, specially since MSI also has a model with the radeon 5850 and moderate temps. What I can spoil you right now, before reading further, is the fact that this machine has an absolutely amazing GPU cooling solution.

I got my awesome new laptop from the best resellers out there, GentechPC. Like my previous experiences with them, my process was smooth and fast. Ken Lee (a representative of Gentech, which is also a member of this community and is available for anything you need!) helped me throughout the whole process, and kept me updated regarding my order. Personally, and from experience, Ken and Gentech provide the best experience from resellers I have seen so far in the market. I heavily recommend them!

Coming back to the review! So what made me change my mind and order this laptop? I wanted a full upgrade in performance, and from what MSI spec'd on this machine, I was sure expecting a lot. I am glad to say my expectations were blown away.


-Specs as ordered (Changed driver from blu-ray to regular DVD and added IC thermal compound):
CPU: Intel Core i7 Processor 740QM @ 1.73Ghz – 2.93Ghz (IC thermal compound)
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Chipset: Intel PM55
Memory: 6GB DDR3 @ 1333 Mhz
Screen: 15.6” 1920x1080 (16:9 ratio) WLED backlit AUO15ED screen
Video Card: ATi Mobility Radeon HD5870 1GB GDDR5
Hard Drive: 2x 320GB 7200RPM SATA (Pre-Configured in RAID-0)
Optical Drive: DVD+/-RW
Wireless: Intel WiFi link 1000 BGN 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.0+EDR
Autio: 2.1 Sound system by Dynaudio. Yes, this is WORTH mentioning.
Warranty: 3 years standar factory warranty + first 1 year accidental damage warranty
I/O connection: 2 x USB 3.0, 2 x USB 2.0, eSATA, HDMI, S/PDIF, Line in, Line out, Mic in, VGA, Ethernet, card reader, PC Express card slot.


- What's in the Box:
The machine comes in a well designed box, sturdy build and gaming oriented design/logos around. The contents include the standard manuals and reference guides, along with drivers/software discs, AC adapter and battery. Sadly this machine does not have any extras in the form a mouse etc, but that hardly matters when you stop to consider what you just bought: One of the most powerful 15 inchers!


-Design and Build Quality
Coming from an Asus G51, I immediately recognized the overall size and chassis resemblance of the Asus G50/G51 series and that isn't exactly bad. Aesthetics are very nice, with a black to gray glossy finish that thankfully is not as "dirt magnet" as I thought, probably due to the colors chosen for the palmrest. Pictures do not give justice to the look of this machine as it looks way more "serious" in person (with the LEDs off, of course heh). The Red color around the speakers is actually metallic so it does not stand out tremendously at all, and feels in line with the overall look of the machine. The only weird thing is the LCD cover which I think it looks weird. I don't hate it, but I don't particularly like it that much. At least it is all black and looks less "Look at me!" without fancy designs etc.

The machine is sturdy. the built is entirely of plastic, or so it seems. There isn't much flex, and the whole chassis feels strong. The only place that seems way weaker and has considerable flex is the cover, but it feels around the same as my G51J. I think that a support in the mid section of the cover would have made this a bit better but it is not bad at all, nor something to worry about.


- Screen
I know there is some concern with the screen. Let's get to the facts first. The screen has mediocre viewing angles, both vertical and horizontal, but vertical angles suffer the most. What this means is that when you tilt the screen or move it sideways, you will start to notice color distortion. Additionally, the screen has low contrast compared to other gaming machines.

However, it is very sharp and of quite high resolution. The brightness settings allow for incredibly bright display, or quite low light viewing. Using display settings augmenting color saturation, the contrast/image GREATLY improves to a good display, leaving only the low viewing angles as the bad point.

An important note: Viewing angles won't affect you much, the user, as you will most probably see the screen directly to it's sweet spot 99% of the time. The issue would come when others look at the screen from moderate angles. When watching the screen from a sweet spot, you will probably start to see colors begin to wash on either the bottom or top depending on the angle. When gaming this does not affect because the angle is not that prominent, but when watching a movie or something with heavy emphasis in white/dark constrasts, you will notice dark/blacks becoming grayish. Using the screen at 30% or so brightness (with FN+up/down arrows) in well lit rooms, you will have great colors, ink-like blacks and all, but sadly the viewing angles don't improve that much.

My take? the screen works for what it is, even if mediocre. It looks sharp, it is functional, produces decent colors with saturation enabled, and is perfectly bright when used on very bright places/outside. If screen is VERY important to you, then you WILL be disappointed. If not, you will most likely enjoy it for what it is, specially the resolution. I find it pleasant looking during the day, and only disappointing when playing at night in a dark room, when the brightness does make the blacks and everything more grayish.

Note: the high brightness does make blacks look grayish when watching the screen in a dark/low light room or area. When using in normal daylight, blacks are iindeed blacks, and colors look great.


-Keyboard

Build, distribution, material texture are all well implemented. Typing is easy, keystrokes feel good with just enough feedback to type quickly. I have noticed a tiny bit of missed key strokes sometimes, but I haven't identified the problem yet. This is by far one of the best laptop keyboards I have used, wht the keyboard area has little to no flex. material used and texture allows for a clean looking keyboard all the time.

The downside? it is not backlit. To be honest, I don't care about it anymore. When I first heard of the lack of backlit keyboard, I was adamant about it being a significant downgrade, but the look, feel and overall quality of the keyboard allowed me to forget such missing feature. After using this machine for a while now, I gotta say, I don't even miss it. It may be that the brightness of the screen help iluminate the keyboard just enough, or realizing that I rarely used the feature before but I honestly don't mind the lack of it.

coming from the Asus G51J, this keyboard provides the same distribution and size but with different texture and little flex. Keystrokes have more feedback that the Asus keyboard, and are more akin to the G73 keyboard feel.

The flex the keyboard shows is mostly located from the mid section. I personally don't notice much unless I type and see the keyboard. Which I don't so at first I didn't know there was flex at all.

basically, it is a keyboard that the only thing preventing it from being perfect, it's the lack of backlit.


-Performance and User Experience:
Stock performance is incredible and on par with your expectations. The machine performs well in single and multitasks. Game performance is great thanks to the small bump in CPU and the superb ATi Mobility Radeon HD5870. Additionally, MSI includes its own version of overclocking functionality with the push of a single button. This is specially great for those that are afraid of overclocking, as it provides a small performance boost for no cost.

The best feature though, is the capability of fan control, and the turbofan feature. At the touch of a button, you can summon the maximum speed of you fan to keep things real cool. When gaming, specially with headphones, you won't even hear the fan that much and it ensures you complete cool temps while gaming.

From the looks of it, the Turbo feature overclocks the CPU to 1.812ghz, so it's a decent bump for a simple button. Some games seem to gain 1-2fps, some are unaffected, some actually loose 1-2fps of performance. The reason is still uknown to me. And personally, I rarely use it.

Gaming is possible on 1920x1080 res, at least from all the games I have tried so far.

Windows Experience Index : 5.9 (slowest is HDD)

These numbers don't mean much. Even if the laptop is branded as 5.9, all components are fairly stronger on the 7.1+ scale.

3dmark06 stock CPU/GPU(stock drivers): 12746 at 1280x1024.
Divided as following:
SM2.0 5197
SM3.0 6008
CPU 3377


3dmark06 Turbo on, OC 900/1030(Cat 10.8 drivers): 13927 at 1280x1024.
Divided as following:
SM2.0 5663
SM3.0 6708
CPU 3564


3D mark Vantage Turbo On OC 900/1030 Cat 10.8 drivers:
Score P9865
CPU 12046
GPU 9304

SEE BOTTOM OF REVIEW TO FIND THE MAX OBTAINED SCORES FOR THESE BENCHES!

Some Game results!

Batman Arkham Asylum
Settings:All highest enabled, vsync triple buffering, 1920x1080
Min: 39fps, max: 60, average: 58fps
comments: Benchmark ran smooth, and gameplay seems and feels very smooth. I haven't played much with this rig, but the chapter I played, went completely without problems and ran like a champ completely maxed out, and looked gorgeous.


Killing Floor
Settings:All high, 1920x1080, 2x AF and AA
Min: 30fps, max: 60, average: 50fps
comments: The game is not that demanding at first, but with increasing number of allies and foes, the fps dip a bit (mostly due to the vsync capping fps at 30, 45 and 60). For the most part, it runs completely smooth.


League of Legends
Settings:All high, 1920x1080, vsync
Min: 54fps, max: 60, average: 58fps
comments: This is probably the least taxing game so far. Looks good, and plays smooth. I haven't tried all maxed out in a full game, but the little moment I tried, I noticed no difference from high settings.... except fps dropped a bit at some point but recovered. My advice is to keep things to high, as some fps drops are also caused by the game programming itself (a bit lack of polish I guess).


Demigod
Settings:All high, vsync, 1920x1080, 0x AA, 0x AF, CPU O/C
Min: 28fps, max: 70 average: 48fps
comments: The game runs quite good without vsync. It seems that with vsync you can get your fps halved to 30 and that sucks when playing at 60fps then 30fps drops. Without vsync you get quite an enjoyable experience in all high. this is about 10-12fps higher on average, from my G51J.


Battlefield Bad Company 2
Settings: All high, shadows medium, no AA, 4x AF, 1920x1080, vsync enabled
Min: 25fps, max: 60, average: 50fps
comments: This was a major improvement from my previous laptop. Same settings, my G51J with GTX260m would muster a max fps of 48, with average of 25fps. With the Radeon I practically run 100% faster on average! I am able to enjoy high settings at max res, something I could only dream with my GTX260m! Single player runs a bit slower, between 30-60 due to several smoke effects and crumbling buildings etc. Crumbling buildings hits fps hard for 1 second. On multiplayer, I have enjoyed consistently high fps.

Notes: Game runs well enough on all High in both DX9 and DX10. All high and even HBAO on produce around 30-45 fps which are smooth enough to play. For multiplayer I use All high, medium shadows on DX9 for max performance with great visuals.


Crysis
Settings: All high, medium physics, medium volumetric effects, medium water, 1920x1080, no AA/AF
Min: 23fps, max:60, average: 33fps
comments: This is another dream come true for me. To be able to play crysis on practically high settings, at 1920x1080 and actually be playable. Using this config, I have run past 60% of the game with consistent playable frames, and overall a good experience with great visuals. If it serves for something, my GTX260m could muster an average of about 20 fps with the same settings. Hell, this thing runs Crysis at high settings, like my GTX260 ran it at medium same res haha.

note: Using all high reduces average to 28-30fps, still completely playable, but I rather have a bit extra fps If you OC your card, you can play all high with perfectly playable fps! (except the later levels, which seem to lag every now and then due to bad optimization regardless of your config).


FFXIV Benchmark
LOW (1280x720 res) Score: 3696
High (1920x1080 res) Score: 2078
comments: The game looks gorgeous, and actually ran great. on LOW, it seemed to run at very fluid framerate no matter what happened, while High seemed to be around 30fps perhaps a bit less, but still fluid and consistent. I think it's safe to say that this MSI laptop handles FF14 without issues, and possibly maxed out. In comparison, my GTX260m looked quite choppy on high and, around 30fps on low.


Borderlands
Settings: All high and enabled, 2x AF, 1920x1080
Min: 20fps, max: 62, average: 40fps
comments: This is another game where I saw a major improvement over my previous laptop. However, I have mixed feelings from the performance I got. Using all high enabled it runs consistenly well but it has some random dips to 20 fps with some enemies when very upclose, and also with a couple of effect also up close. when disabling Ambient Occlusion, and Flare outs, the average bumps up to near 60fps, but the dips to 20fps remain every now and then.

It could be the processor, but I don't know.

UPDATE: Got lost planet 2 bench working. I just needed to download an update for DirectX. I will try to upload the pics tomorrow, but I will leave the DX9 here.

Lost Planet 2
Settings: Test A, 1920x1080, no AA, all high, DX9
Min:28fps, Max:56fps, avg: 40fps
Comments: Lost planet 2 looks quite good graphically. I noticed that DX9 still looked great and performed amazingly well. The whole test seemed completely smooth, in part thanks to the motion blur. DX9 allows maxed settings with ease.

Pic for DX9

Sadly, the same cannot be said for DX11. Using DX11 with no DX11 (weird eh?) I got an average of 36fps. With DX11 on low, it was reduced to 28ish, medium to 22, and high to 18 or less fps. Visually, I didn't notice much between low and high at all. Tessalation was there when you enabled wireframe, but without wireframe, you would be hardpressed to find the extra visual power for the huge drop in fps. I think right now Tessalation is just being implemented to be able to say "we have tessalation on!" instead of actually using it in a worthwhile way.

Reducing resolution does help a lot. just for kicks, on 720p res all high medium DX11, the average goes back up to near 35fps.

I accept any request for benchmarks/games but it will take time before I aquire the game etc.



-Battery life
When looking at a gaming notebook, battery life is usually not important, because of the high power components it requires. Coming from several gaming notebooks already, I was used to 1 and a half hour batteries.

I am happy to report that thanks to the 9 cell battery, you can enjoy 2 to 3 hours of battery life from normal usage! Exploiting the super battery efficient settings, you can probably reach 3+ hours easily. My current average is 2 hours and 30 mins with moderate usage (no gaming).

Definitely a good point for the GX660 laptop.


-Heat and noise:
This part is still in progress, but the little I can tell you, and proudly so, is that this machine is cool. How cool? under 78C at load, on auto fan settings. Want super cool temperatures? Kick the Turbo Fan on, and watch your max temps reach around 68-70C depending on your ambient temps and games!

I will add Furmark Xtreme tests, as well as additional screenshots with 3dmark runs and 68C temps.

Every single gaming notebook I have ever owned, has had temperatures on the 90C range. Specially my last G51J laptop, equipped with the GTX260m, reaching up to 97C while normal gaming, underclocked... So yeah, I wasn't expecting such superb temps.

I am testing with different overclock settings and gaming. Right now I have successfully game'd at 800/1030 for hours (from stock 700/1000) but when I tried playing some games at 840/1070, I ended up crashing with a screen full of black/white bars and all frozen. My veredict was that the RAM couldn't take it, as temps were around 73C.

As a note, I only overclock and game using turbo fan on. Without turbo fan, I have seen temps on the 83C range, and I prefer to keep things cool. Keep in mind that these temps are with overclocking on. On stock, I haven't seen anything above the 70s range.


-Sound System

One of the highlights of the MSI GX660(R) is the inclusion of Dynaudio sound system. The system is made of a 2.1 setup (2 speakers, 1 subwoofer) and tweaked software with presets for different types of audio. Why is a laptop sound system important to mention? Because these speakers are, bar none, the best laptop speakers I have ever heard. What makes them special is not only the fact that they are loud enough, nor that they have a subwoofer on, but the crystal-like quality of the sound. You can hear everything in such an authentic way. To be honest, after experiencing my speakers, I rarely use my headphones anymore, I need to get better ones now so that I can feel the same experience these great speakers give.

Any other laptop I have ever owned had decent to mediocre sound. This one went leaps and bounds above to have a superb sound experience for 15.6incher laptopps. Props for MSI and Dynaudio for this!

-Warranty

This is my first MSI notebook and thankfully it seems to come problem free from factory. So far the only crash I have had, I attribute it to the overclock. The stock warranty is 2 years standard parts and labor, and the first year accidental warranty.

I haven't had to use the warranty yet, thankfully, but I hear that the main beef with MSI is that they charge you the shipping costs when you send your machine. This is a bit bothersome, because prices could be up to 60+dlrs to get your machine fixed. I can only hope that MSI grows more as a company with these great products so that the offered warranty can improve as well.

-Conclusion
This is an amazing machine. From the specs to build quality even aesthetics, overall performance make this a superb deal for the price! I greatly recommend this machine to any gamers out there, that want to spend just enough money on a rig capable of high performance gaming on the go. The only bad points of this computer is the screen itself, but that isn't THAT bad in the end. But for the price and specs, it is more than worth it.


Get this if:
-You want to run games very well, at a reasonable price.
-You want value from your purchase (in extra specs/ports etc).
-You want excellent sound quality from your laptop.
-You want a gaming laptop with 2+hours of battery life.

Avoid if:
-You want the best possible performance (there are still higher spec'd machines for more $$$).
-You need great mobility (size is on the limit before being too big).


Thanks for taking the time to read my review! Feel free to comment on anything you want regarding the laptop, and ask any questions you want! I will try to answer ASAP.

UPDATE: Due to a severe lack of free time, I will leave this review in its current form. I know it lacks pictures, but I consider the review to be good enough to help users decide on this fantastic machine. Thanks to everyone that gave me valuable feedback, all my readers and of course all the participants of this thread.

LAST UPDATE: I changed my machine for a new MSI 1762 GT70 sporting a GTX680m as of this update. I decided to update this review to leave my last and best benches I had with my GX660R after upgrading the processor to 920xm and overclocking de GPU. Originally I had plans of upgrading the GPU to an HD7970m but the opportunity to change the full machine came and I took it.

HD5870m Clocks 920/1100 with CAT 12.1, CPU Core i7 920xm @ 3ghz
3dMark11: P2792 (GPU: 2541) || Vantage: P11186 (GPU: 9980) || 3dmark06: 16581 || PCMark 7: 4220

[Forge]

Great, you're guilt-tripping me into getting started on my optimization/cooling guide.

Heh. Ryzeki makes a mention on similarities between the Asus G50/G51 series. They're pretty close in size.


Good read, by the way. On my own machine I notice Killing Floor tends to cry in pain when there's a lot of particles--grenade smoke, flames, etc--but otherwise runs very smooth. Looking forward to the finalized review.

[moral hazard]

I do like those lights on the front, they look a bit like break lights.

[ryzeki]

Great, you're guilt-tripping me into getting started on my optimization/cooling guide.

Heh. Ryzeki makes a mention on similarities between the Asus G50/G51 series. They're pretty close in size.


Good read, by the way. On my own machine I notice Killing Floor tends to cry in pain when there's a lot of particles--grenade smoke, flames, etc--but otherwise runs very smooth. Looking forward to the finalized review.

Thanks man, and yeah, killing floor seems to take some hits every now and then. Try disabling vsync, it may help. I will test with different settings but the ones I currently use (mix of different high/highest) give me mostly smooth performance and very few fps drops (until there are 120 enemies around).

Man, I am soooo sleepy right now. 4AM here and just trying to please the masses

[ryzeki]

I do like those lights on the front, they look a bit like break lights.

Yeah, once I got the machine I thought that the LEDs didn't look that bad. I actually liked the front ones so I am considering leaving those on.

[Ulags]

Ryzeki! man you are my hero.. Great review thanks for sharing with us and for being awake till 4am ;-).. I cant afford to pay 1.6k for a laptop so am thinking of buying the i5, 720p gx660.. Any suggestions?

[badb0y]

Thanks for the review!

[Panchowska]

How big is it? Does it fit in 15.6'' bags?

[PTRob]

Great review!

[future4]

Hey thanks..Can't wait to get mine. Did you see much performance boost with raid o.