Verdict: MSI brings overclocking to laptops.
Above the keyboard of MSI's GX600 is a large circular button bearing the word 'TURBO' in ominous red writing. Obviously, we found this quite exciting; as 1980s American TV shows have taught us, turbo buttons (usually in conjunction with some sort of rocket propulsion) can imbue an otherwise ordinary car or motorbike with enough speed to jump ravines.
The GX600 is the first laptop we've seen to offer CPU overclocking abilities as standard, taking the 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7250 to 2.4GHz as soon as you hit the turbo button. Ravine jumping is sadly absent.
Cooling an overclocked Core 2 Duo can be tricky in a cramped laptop chassis when you only have tiny fans and heatsinks at your disposal. We therefore imagined that an overclockable laptop would have the portability of a breeze block and the dimensions of a special edition of Metal Gear Solid. However, the GX600, with its modest 15.4in screen and fairly thin body, is surprisingly dainty. At 2.7kg (plus a 0.5kg power brick), it's no MacBook Air, but it's much more portable than the wider, heavier and chunkier Rock Xtreme 770 T9300-8800.
The styling of the GX600 certainly grabs your attention. Arcane fiery symbols surround a red and silver steam-punk logo on the laptop's glossy black lid and the trackpad. Blue lights blink on the front edge when WiFi and hard disks are active, while the silver and red speaker vents look like something from a Buck Rogers comic.
The novelty factor soon wears off though. The black glossy paintwork may look sleek and shiny at first, but it gets covered with greasy smears and fingerprints quickly. The use of four different shades of red, the plasticky materials and the unfocused design (from tribal tattoos to steam-punk vents) make the GX600's styling look piecemeal and cheap.
With the laptop turned on, the 15.4in display is equally disappointing. The screen has a native resolution of 1,680 x 1,050, but it's dull and overly grainy, and the small text of Vista Home Premium is difficult to read. Even at full brightness, you have to move closer to the screen to read the type. Viewing is further impaired by poor viewing angles, as the screen visibly dims as soon as you move your head.
The panel is also pretty sluggish for a modern TFT display; fast on-screen movement in films or games resulted in obvious blurring and ghosting, a problem caused by slow pixel response times. The screen isn't up to scratch by modern standards, so the HDMI output (with DVI converter) could come in handy.
The GX600 has Nvidia's so-called mid-range 512MB GeForce 8600M GT GPU. Previous testing with this GPU has shown it to be incapable of playing modern games at high resolutions, so it's a good job the GX600's screen isn't any bigger.
Since laptops are a complete package, the degree of comfort and ease with which they can be used is as important as raw speed. This is another area in which the GS600 disappoints. The glossy plastic means that you suffer the same kind of sticky-skin problems that you get from a leather sofa, which isn't ideal for prolonged gaming. The layout of the keyboard is fiddly too - the Ctrl and Fn keys are reversed, so quickly hitting 'Crouch' in a typical first-person shooter is difficult. When typing, the single-line Enter key is also frustrating. This makes the inclusion of a full-sized numberpad annoying. We'd rather lose this non-gaming luxury in favour of a bigger main keyboard.
A Western Digital Scorpio hard disk completes a list of fairly uninspiring components. With 160GB, there's room for a good handful of games, but the 5,400rpm spindle speed means that levels load slowly.
Performance
Refreshingly, the GX600's application performance goes some way to redeeming its odd looks, and even the poor screen and keyboard. We managed to quell our curiosity about the turbo button long enough to get the standard-speed benchmarks out of the way. We weren't surprised when the laptop limped to an overall score of 650.
Pressing the turbo button surroundsit in a ring of red light, and the laptop's fans spring to life. CPU-Z confirmed that the CPU had indeed been instantly overclocked from 2GHz to 2.4GHz. In turbo mode, we saw big score increases in every test. The Handbrake video encoding test nearly broke into the 900s, while the GIMP test just passed the 800 barrier. The multitasking test proved to be a little too tough for the GX600, however, delivering a disappointing score of 602. The overall score of the GX600 when overclocked is only 100 points shy of the score of the £1,900 Rock Xtreme 770-T9300-8800 on p34. The turbo button does what it says, allowing you to instantly move in and out of overclocked mode.
We were curious to find out if the GX600 could overclock any further. Amazingly, the laptop's BIOS has an overclocking section, allowing you to increase the board's FSB from 200MHz to 260MHz. To our further surprise, the GX600 was perfectly stable with the CPU clocked at 2.6GHz, and the laptop powered through our tests. It scored close to 1,000 in the Handbrake test - almost the same speed as a desktop PC with a 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E6750. The resulting overall score of 841 is only 23 points behind the £1,900 Rock Xtreme 770.
To find out if the 2.6GHz overclock had pushed the GX600 to the ragged edge, we fired up Orthos. The laptop remained perfectly stable, with a CPU temperature of 79ûC, a safe 21ûC off the CPU's thermal shutdown temperature. However, by now the fans were screaming as they pumped out hot air from inside the GX600.
It's a shame that the turbo button stops working once you manually overclock the laptop. Plus, increasing the FSB speed by as little as 1MHz locks the fans at full speed, which creates quite a din.
If 2D performance is the GX600's strongest feature then game performance is perhaps one of its weakest. Supreme Commander is hardly the most demanding of games but, with the CPU running at its stock speed, our 1,280 x 1,024 test returned a stuttery minimum frame rate of 4fps, which increased to 6fps once the CPU was overclocked. Call of Duty 4, based on Infinity Ward's reasonably forgiving proprietary game engine, also limped along. Even at 1,024 x 768 without any AA or AF, the GX600 failed to provide a playable frame rate. With the CPU running at stock speeds, the GX600 lasted a pathetic 39 minutes in our gaming battery test, which is well below average.
Conclusion
A portable gaming laptop with a 15.4in, high-resolution widescreen display and overclockable CPU for less than a grand sounds awesome. However, a gaming laptop needs quality in other areas too. The keyboard needs to be responsive, comfortable to use during lengthy gaming sessions, and well laid out. The screen needs fast-switching pixels to prevent nasty blurring when gaming. The graphics card must also be powerful enough to play games with high detail settings.
While the GX600 has some features that make it worth considering for a small, portable games system - namely, the ability to overclock the CPU on demand and the 15.4in, GPU-friendly screen - it fails in other departments. While we like the lunacy of being able to overclock the processor ourselves, there's little else about the MSI GX600 to love.
