Verdict: A gaming laptop in name only.
If you've ever spoken to someone who works in marketing and they're good at their job, the chances are that after five minutes of knowing you, they know how many pets you have, how likely you are to read 'The Guardian' and how large your mortgage repayments are on your inner-city, late Victorian, end-terrace apartment. Armed with this knowledge, the marketing chap or chapess will then pitch you a product or service that ideally suits your lifestyle, and you'll find yourself very happy with your new purchase that does indeed improve your life in some way. Marketing is all about 'aiming' a product at its intended audience, and can therefore be a force for informing you of products or services that you genuinely want.
However, it's also the reason why MSI's latest GX700Extreme laptop, with its glossy paint job and red tribal tattoos, has the word 'Extreme' in its name. Unlike professional types, who like their laptops to be three shades of grey, gamers want their laptops to look menacing, fast and sharp. Or at least that's the theory. In truth, gamers are normal human beings who just want their equipment to be well designed and represent good value for money. With this in mind, apart from the clichéd styling, the GX700Extreme is a promising package. It offers a 17in 1,920 x 1,200 screen, Core 2 Duo CPU, 250GB hard disk and 2GB of RAM, all for £510 less than the similarly specified Rock Xtreme 770. It's also thinner and lighter than the Rock, and has a less gargantuan power brick than many gaming laptops.
The CPU is the dependable T7500 seen in the Rock, and the 2GB of RAM suggests that the MSI will be more than competent in our Media Benchmark tests. However, the 250GB hard drive didn't fill us with confidence - it offers plenty of storage space for a laptop drive but, with a 5,400rpm spin rate, it doesn't bode well for game load times or performance in our hard disk-thrashing GIMP test.
However, it's gaming and not 2D performance that's the priority, and while we wouldn't be happy about it, we'd be prepared to put up with slow level loading as long as the game looked good and played well. Much like the Asus G2S from the recent gaming laptops Labs test, the MSI has its own rucksack and mouse in colours to match the orange and red of the flame tattoos. The mouse is an MSI-branded A4 Tech X-750F laser model and boasts a high sensitivity of 2,500dpi. It's similar in style to the customised Logitech MX 518 used with the Asus, although the build quality isn't as good, with its flimsy, glossy plastic construction. The rucksack's a good inclusion though; there's plenty of padding both for your back and inside for peripherals, and the shoulder straps spread the weight of the laptop evenly across your back. It's nice to see other manufacturers considering the entire portable gaming package, even if the aesthetic styling of the rucksack is more 'back to school' than refined.
To eliminate any doubt that this is a gaming laptop, MSI has highlighted the WASD keys, just as Asus does with its gaming-specific laptops. This is handy, since no gamer has a clue where these keys would be located otherwise. Oh, hang on, yes, we do.
The quality of the keyboard isn't great either. It suffers from a cramped layout, which impairs split-second reactions when hitting remapped shortcuts - you risk being labelled a n00b, despite any l33t skills you've carefully honed over the years. MSI's decision to move the Ctrl key from its usual little finger-friendly home is more of a problem than it may at first seem, as games don't understand what a Function key is. Swapping the two is a bad move for gaming. The area under the small Return key and around the thin scroll keys is unforgivably cramped as well, another crucial area for gaming, especially racing games, unless you remap your controls. This sort of thing is frustrating when laptops such as the Rock manage to provide a full-sized, easy-to-use keyboard on a laptop of the same size.
While Rock sticks with the current trend among laptop makers in using a glossy coated panel in order to boost the contrast, vibrancy of colours and overall clarity of the screen, MSI uses the more traditional matt screen with the GX700Extreme. This may be less prone to distracting reflections, but it doesn't offer as attractive an image. In fact, the MSI screen was rather poor for a modern laptop, with the colours appearing washed out and the general graininess of the screen making text difficult to read. You may be able to watch 1080p HD movie trailers, given the large 1,920 x 1,200 resolution, but they won't look as good as they should.
Performance
Since the advent of Intel's Mobile Core 2 Duo CPUs, application performance on laptops has been able to rival that of hulking great desktop systems. Compromises have to be made with each component to deliver power-frugal, small PCs, however, so the scores in our benchmarks were understandable and fairly good for laptop of this price. However, the Rock Xtreme 770 showed an extra notch of performance over the MSI laptop; this is clearly the result of the faster 7,200rpm hard in the Rock, compared with the 5,400rpm disk of the MSI.
However, while application performance forged ahead, mobile gaming performance stalled. The fastest mobile GPU currently available is the GeForce Go 7950, which Rock uses in this laptop. MSI opts for a GPU from Nvidia's new 8-series GeForce Go family and, in the typical confuse-people-as-much-as-possible style of the IT industry, this proves to be slower. The GeForce Go 8600M GT is the same GPU[?] as that used by MSI in the £955 MS-1719 in the gaming laptop Labs test. While MSI may have previously thought otherwise, it should have known by now that it would perform badly.
Company of Heroes proved to be a tough test even at 1,024 x 768. The minimum frame rate with graphical details set to maximum was a woeful 10fps. To achieve a playable frame rate, you'll have to drop the levels of eye-candy.
Even playing an older game didn't offer much hope; the laptop was unable to play F.E.A.R at 1,280 x 1,024 with 2 x AA and 2 x AF. It was only when we dropped down to 1,024 x 768, and turned off anti-aliasing that the minimum frame rate rose above the all-important 25fps point needed to achieve smooth gameplay. It's obvious that with only 32 stream processors clocked at 950MHz, the 8600M GT simply doesn't offer enough performance to be considered for a gaming-specific laptop.
Conclusion
We're sure that it's possible to put together a laptop for £1,100 pounds that offers a fun gaming experience. The chief failing of the GX700Extreme is that it doesn't achieve the right balance in terms of component choice; it compromises on the quality on the graphics card in order to squeeze a fast CPU and large, high-res screen into the budget, and this doesn't make for a good gaming laptop. The most crucial component of the laptop, the graphics card, is the GX700Extreme's weakest link - unfortunately, it takes more than a glossy paint job to make a good gaming laptop.
