MSI FX600 Laptop Review (with nVidia Optimus Technology)

1. Introduction2. The MSI FX600 Laptop (Bundle)3. The MSI FX600 Laptop (External)4. The MSI FX600 Laptop (Internal & Software)5. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra6. Synthetic: PC Mark Vantage7. Synthetic: HDTach & CrystalMark8. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.5 64 bit9. Real World: BluRay Playback with Cyberlink Power DVD 10 Ultra10. Real World: Flash HD Playback Performance11. Real World: Media Encoding with Cyberlink Espresso12. Real World: File Copying with Kingston HyperX Max 3.013. Gaming: Left4Dead 2 (Direct X 9)14. Gaming: Resident Evil 5 (Direct X 9/10)15. Technical: Thermal Dynamics16. Technical: Battery Life17. Technical: Acoustics Performance18. Closing Thoughts19. View All Pages

This year has been very healthy for the mobile sector with sales of tablets and mobile phones continuing to grow. Laptop sales are also thriving and many people are now able to pick up a well built machine with killer performance without breaking the bank balance.

With this in mind, we are looking at the MSI FX600 laptop, a Windows 7 powered, Intel Core i3 machine with a combination of IntelHD and nVidia graphics with 4GB of DDR3 memory. Best of all, this is currently available as a special offer through Argos for only £499 inc vat. Has Christmas came early? Today we will find out.

MSI FX600 System specifications

CPU and Memory:
Intel Core i3 330M.
2.13GHz processor speed.
4GB DDR3 RAM memory.
500GB SATA hard drive.

Display features:
15.6in display.
Resolution 1366 x 768 pixels.

DVD optical drives:
Dual layer.

Graphics:
nVIDIA GeForce GT 325M graphics card with 1GB memory.

Interfaces and connectivity:
Multi-Media Card (MMC) compatible.
3 USB ports.
1 HDMI port.
Bluetooth.
B/g/n wireless/WiFi enabled.

Multi-media features:
1.3MP built-in webcam.
Built-in mic.

Operating system and software:
Microsoft Windows 7 Premium.

Weight:
2.4 kg

The MSI FX600 arrives in a subdued, white box with a picture of the machine on the front.

Our reviewers sample is not indicative of the final product packaging. After checking with MSI, they confirmed that the retail package will contain a recovery DVD, warranty card and online survey instruction literature, including a Windows 7 guide book. We thankfully received the power supply and battery.

The BTY-S14 Lithium battery, is rated at 4400 mAh, 49 Wh. It is a slimline design and slots nicely into the back of the machine without protruding.

The power supply is made by Delta Electronics and is a 100-240v switching design with a 19V output rating. It is a relatively small unit.

The MSI FX600 is shipped with a protective sheet between the keyboard and the screen.

The machine is an attractive, simple design which we like. The keyboard is raised and feels good although due to my large hands I always have issues with a single depth return key.

The MSI panel is an LED design with a high gloss finish which is surprisingly good, considering the price budget of the machine. Gaming proved trouble free with very little motion bluring or artifacting. I did notice a slight bluring with a few fast motion based first person shooters however when I asked a colleague to view the screen he said it looked fine to him. Those with sensitive eyes may therefore notice some rapid movement blur.

High definition movies were maintained to a high standard, although to enjoy 1080p movies in their full glory you would need to run via HDMI out to a television. 720p content is rendered in a realistic manner with high levels of sharpness although there was evident black level shift and bleeding.

The palm rest area is slightly textured, almost like a crocodile skin effect. and this carries over to the tracking pad. There is a small button above the tracking pad which can be toggled to disable it completely. A nice feature to protect against accidental movement.

Underneath the tracking pad button is a list of icons which light when active, showing battery status, caps and num lock status, and other functionality such as bluetooth mode and hard drive activity.

Connectivity is reasonably strong with a card slot, 3 USB ports, 1 HDMI port, Bluetooth and B/g/n wireless/WiFi. The front fascia has the same textured surface which makes it very easy to grip from a variety of angles. The silver accented strip heightens the appearance.

Initially we couldn't get the wireless to work on our review sample, but there is a row of buttons under the screen and one of these toggles wireless on/off. A handy feature for an airplane. Volume controls and power buttons are also in this row.

The MSI FX600 has an onboard certified THX sound system which delivers a reasonably high level of sound – dual speakers are seen behind black grills on either end of the machine below the screen area. Two more speakers are placed near the wrist rests. I wouldn't want to mislead anyone by saying it was producing groundbreaking levels of audio reproduction, but for a 15 inch laptop it is one of the better systems we have heard. Mid tones are surprisingly strong which means watching movies and listening to dialogue content is a pleasure.

The underside of the machine is almost perfectly flat, with several vented areas to allow heat to escape. The battery slides into the back.

A single panel is held in place by 7 or 8 screws and once this is removed we can see the FX600, up close and personal. Several large heatpipes run across the width of the machine to keep the components cool.

The hard drive, is a 500GB Toshiba product which while offering plenty of storage is only a 5,400 rpm unit.

There are two 2GB DDR3 ram modules installed which is a perfect partner for the 64 bit Windows operating system.

At the top left is the wireless card – an Intel Link 1000 product offering a wide array of support.

On the far right (from the back) is a fan housing which is connected to a dual heatpipe system. This is next to a vented area to allow for hot air to escape directly out the rear and side. Both processor and graphics are cooled by this. We will look later into the cooling performance.

The layout is a proven design which should work well long term. We know a lot of people never remove the rear covering of their laptop, but we always tend to blow out the fan system on these computers with a quality air duster a couple of times a year, at least.

The MSI FX600 has both Intel HD and Vidia GT 325M dedicated graphics onboard with 1GB of GDDR3.

When you first start the machine, MSI have the software suite specially configured to offer prompts to the user. If you don't wish any of the software installed you can tell the machine to use a barebones configuration. I enabled installation of all software, which you can see in the image above. I like the fact they are allowing the user to choose, and I hope more manufacturers switch to this way of thinking.

A strong windows rating, let down by the hard drive, which we expected as it is a low performance 2.5 inch Toshiba 5,400 rpm drive.

Today we will be comparing against an Intel Atom powered ASRock Ion3d system which we reviewed last month. This is a good way to be able to measure potential upgrade benefits if you are finding your current Atom powered laptop too slow.

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.

Sandra is a (girl) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)
• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)
• Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)
• Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)
• Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

• SMP – Multi-Processor
• MC – Multi-Core
• SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading
• MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions
• GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics
• NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access
• AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86
• IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

The benefits of the Core i3 platform against the Intel Atom system are immediately easy to see and a good indication of potential real world performance improvements.

PCMark Vantage is a PC benchmark suite designed for Windows Vista offering one-click simplicity for casual users and detailed, professional grade testing for industry, press and enthusiasts.

A PCMark score is a measure of your computer’s performance across a variety of common tasks such as viewing and editing photos, video, music and other media, gaming, communications, productivity and security.

From desktops and laptops to workstations and gaming rigs, by comparing your PCMark Vantage score with other similar systems you can find the hardware and software bottlenecks that stop you getting more from your PC.

PCMark Vantage performance shows a well rounded system with only one real weakness, the 5,400 rpm hard drive. We will look at this more on the next page with drive specific testing.

A very important part of overall system responsiveness is down to hard drive performance so we used two of our favourite benchmark utilities Crystalmark X64 Edition and HD Tach to rate the Toshiba 2.5 inch 5,400 rpm SATA drive.

Performance is pretty much in line with what we have seen from PcMark Vantage on the previous page. Difficult for a 5,400rpm 2.5 inch drive to deliver much more than this.

CINEBENCH is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer’s performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON’s award-winning animation software CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Spider-Man, Star Wars, The Chronicles of Narnia and many more.

CINEBENCH is the perfect tool to compare CPU and graphics performance across various systems and platforms (Windows and Mac OS X). And best of all: It’s completely free.

The Core i3 processor is no rendering power house but performance is considerably higher than anything you will experience from the ATOM platform.

While this particular review sample has no BluRay drive, MSI do offer a more expensive unit with one installed. We have an ASUS USB 2.0 Bluray drive so we decided to include this page as a measurement of what you might expect if you decide to pay extra for the Bluray equipped version of the product.

Our good friends at Cyberlink kindly supplied the software for our Bluray and conversion tests.

Cyberlink PowerDVD 10 is one of the finest solutions for the Blu-Ray experience on Windows and we found this software to work perfectly with this chipset. We tested with the Bluray Disc of Avatar, one of our favourite sci-fi films in recent years.

Average load is 14 percent, which allows the processor time to carry out other tasks if desired.

We then recorded the CPU demand over a specific set of time to get a ‘real world' rolling scale of activity. The Core i3 processor is easily capable of delivering a fantastic HD media experience.

Many people using this system will be enjoying Flash related content so we feel it is important to test with some of the more demanding material available freely online.

The Core i3 processor maintains CPU usage between 5 percent and 29 percent, averaging 21 percent. No problems with the YouTube experience.

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats.

Now you can easily playback and display your favorite movies, songs and photos not just on your on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology.

New and Improved Features

• Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously.
• Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention.
• Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices.
• Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment.
• Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A.
• Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier.

For our testing today we are converting a 1.1GB 720p MKV file to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device. This is a common procedure for many people and will give a good indication of system power.

We are now going to test the USB 3.0 and 2.0 speed, so we used the fastest drive we have, the Kingston HyperX Max 3.0 128GB, which is an Toshiba based SSD product within a USB 3.0 capable enclosure.

Today for testing we first copied a 3.9GB MKV file to and from the Kingston HyperX USB 3.0 drive.

USB 2.0 performance is as good as we have seen on a laptop system.

Next we created a 3GB folder of mixed sized files, this is to reproduce a real world scenario – many users have folders of word documents, picture files and even database documents.

A pretty solid set of results, not quite as fast as we have seen before on other desktop based systems, but well in line with mid range laptop performance.

Left 4 Dead 2 is a cooperative first-person shooter game. It is the sequel to Valve Corporation’s award-winning Left 4 Dead. The game launched on November 17, 2009, for Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 in the United States; it launched November 20 in Europe. It builds upon the cooperatively-focused gameplay of the original and uses Valve’s proprietary Source engine, the same game engine used in Left 4 Dead. The game made its world premiere at E3 2009 with a trailer during the Microsoft press event.

In a similar fashion to the original, Left 4 Dead 2 is set during the aftermath of an apocalyptic pandemic, and focuses on four survivors fighting against hordes of the infected. The survivors must fight their way through levels, interspersed with safe houses that act as checkpoints, with the goal of reaching a rescue vehicle at the campaign’s finale.

We tested at 720p with 8AA enabled and all other settings on maximum.

Left4Dead was a very smooth experience at these settings with only a few drops under 30fps when the zombie head count multiplied.

Resident Evil 5, known in Japan as Biohazard 5, is a survival horror third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom. The game is the seventh installment in the Resident Evil survival horror series, and was released on March 5, 2009 in Japan and on March 13, 2009 in North America and Europe for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. A Windows version of the game was released on September 15, 2009 in North America, September 17 in Japan and September 18 in Europe. Resident Evil 5 revolves around Chris Redfield and Sheva Alomar as they investigate a terrorist threat in Kijuju, a fictional town in Africa.

Within its first three weeks of release, the game sold over 2 million units worldwide and became the best-selling game of the franchise in the United Kingdom. As of December, 2009, Resident Evil 5 has sold 5.3 million copies worldwide since launch, becoming the best selling Resident Evil game ever made.

We tested at 720p in DX10 mode with settings on full.

Performance from the dedicated nVidia solution showed very capable results. We also forced the game to run with onboard Intel HD graphics, in DX9 mode at 720p.

A video below of the built in benchmark in action from the IntelHD graphics … its actually usable if you dont mind disabling anti aliasing and running DX9 mode.

The Intel onboard solution can be used when battery life is low or you aren't running such an intensive game. I was surprised of the reasonable levels of power considering its the ‘back up' option in this machine.

The tests were performed in a controlled air conditioned room with temperatures maintained at a constant 24c – a comfortable environment for the majority of people reading this.

Idle temperatures were measured after sitting at the desktop for 30 minutes. Load measurements were acquired by running Furmark and Cinebench together.

We also attached 5 diodes to the rear of the machine to measure the load temperatures of various parts of the chassis. These were measured after 1 hour of gaming.

The top right section of the chassis gets the hottest, and by a considerable margin. There is a lot of air flow in this region as heat is transfered out the side of the machine. It isn't the most comfortable machine to use when gaming as it can get quite warm but under general office duties these temperatures are significantly lower.

Battery life of a 15inch laptop is very important, especially if you are a business man and frequently checking email and working in Microsoft Office.

To test the battery today we put the machine through two sets of real world situations. One as a gamer on the move, who wants to play games on a train journey or bus with two thirds screen brightness. Secondly as a business man, using the machine for productivity with wireless enabled and balanced power settings with a mid way brightness setting.

We managed to get over 4 hours out of the machine when used in the less demanding environment which impressed us. As a gaming machine it delivered just under 2 hours, which again is actually rather good. MSI's choice of battery certains gets some kudos from us.

Recently we have changed our method of measuring noise levels. Ambient noise in the room is around 20-25dBa. We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the chassis and 4 foot from the ground with our Extech digital sound level meter to mirror a real world situation.

KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refridgerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum

The MSI FX600 generates a low level of noise under general use conditions. When it is pushed hard gaming or rendering it can become clearly audible, generating around 39 dBa of noise under extended heat conditions. If you game a lot then this wouldn't be the quietest of systems to purchase, but many gamers don't care about fan noise anyway.

The MSI FX600 is a very attractive machine which looks much more expensive than it actually is. Build quality is superb and we noticed no flex in the middle of the keyboard, which is a common problem even with more expensive machines.

The keyboard is very usable, however we wished MSI had included a dual height return key as I found myself often hitting the wrong key. Not a major issue and I would probably adapt over time, although as I get older I get more stuck in my ways.

The screen quality is very good for such a modestly priced machine, and being an LED panel means that battery life should be extended …  verified later in our testing. The screen does have significant black definition bleed at the bottom of the panel, although it is really only noticeable with a pure black image or when measured with a diagnostic gun. A few people I used as guinea pigs didn't even mention the shift, so clearly I am a little anal retentive.

The nVidia GT325M graphics solution is very capable, and when paired with the Intel HD solution offers a multitude of settings to cover all demands. Intel HD can handle most tasks, but when you need the extra horsepower the nVidia Optimus Technology kicks in to deliver the goods.

The biggest weakness of this machine, and the only downside I could really mention is the poor hard drive performance, which is directly tied into the use of a Toshiba 2.5 inch 5,400 rpm hard drive. It would often grind away, delaying load times and becoming a constant source of irritation. I tested this machine with a low cost Solid State Drive and it totally transformed the experience, it was almost as if the processor had been upgraded to a Core i7 Extreme Edition. It sounds dramatic, but a continual issue with laptop systems is the poor choice of manufacturer hard drive. Understandably every system purchased by a punter is targeting a specific price point, but if I ended up with this system, im afraid the hard drive would need to be replaced.

Argos are selling it on offer, for a short while – £100 off at £499 inc vat.

KitGuru says: A very attractive laptop which is well built and delivers a high level of performance. The hard drive however was a poor choice and lowers overall system responsiveness.

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