MSI Gaming Laptop : MSI GX630 Specs & Reviews
Summary: MSI has really nailed an very tricky market, that of the inexpensive gaming laptop, with their GX630 gaming laptop. It provides respectable gaming performance without draining your savings account of all its precious credits.
DESIGN / FEATURES
The GX 630 features a shiny aluminum, graphite-colored exterior with hot red accents and metallic threading. Its slick design is visually pleasing and, thankfully, does not include any exterior case lighting effects (gaming laptop case lighting is just cliche at this point). On the GX630’s keyboard, you will see small colored squares on the WASD keys in order to make them stand out. I see this as a bit of a gimmick and would have rather seen minor backlighting on those keys instead. In well-lit environments, it does work. However, in dark environments it doesn’t really help you. The GX630 features an internal 7.1 channel sound card which allows for some very decent sound when connected to the right speaker setup. When not using external speakers, the on board speakers are incredibly crisp and do the job of immersing you in game audio nicely.
The MSI GX630 features a 2.1 GHz AMD Turion X2 Ultra Dual-Core Mobile Processor. Remember, this was designed as a budget-gaming laptop, so do not expect the most cutting edge hardware behind the scenes. The currently installed CPU is a perfect fit for the GX630’s objectives and with the 4GB of DDR2 RAM, provides a stable computing base to pair the internal Nvidia 9600M GT GPU with. Speaking of the graphics card, it comes with its own dedicated 512MB of DDR3 memory, so it won’t share the system RAM like many budget laptop’s graphics cards do.
The 15.4” LCD screen runs in a native resolution of 1280×800 pixels. I would have expected to see a 1440×900 native resolution as the screen is a bit bigger than what is recommended for 1280×800. Nevertheless, the screen is a bright, crisp display of obviously good quality with a fast refresh and visually pleasing contrast ratio.
ECO MODE
While in ECO mode, the laptop gears itself to be as battery-friendly as possible. In actuality, there are five different ECO sub-modes: office mode, gaming mode, movie mode, presentation mode, and turbo-battery mode. Each of these sub-modes tweaks the power usage of the laptop slightly, and is said to give a battery life increase of up to 20%. In our usage, we did note additional battery life when using the ECO mode, especially in Windows desktop operations. During ‘normal’ usage, we could get about three hours out of it. When set to ECO mode, this went up in some cases by an hour depending on what we were doing and how CPU-intensive it was. The problem with the ECO mode for us, is that we were mainly focused on gaming with the GX630, not necessarily how long we could do word processing on it. We are gamers, battery life be-damned! We want gaming performance, which brings us to…
TURBO MODE
The GX630’s ‘Turbo’ mode puts the laptop into a state of auto-overclocking, the turbo engine calculating the best increase of performance based on the temperatures of the internal hardware. Now, you have to be in AC mode to use the feature but when coupled with a laptop cooler it is truly the best way to game with the GX630. It is worth noting that when using the laptop for gaming purposes, its underside would get very hot, so we would recommend to use the GX 630 with a laptop cooler of some kind. When using a premium laptop cooler, we saw a jump in speed of the CPU by 0.25GHz when using the Turbo mode.
MSI GX630 Gaming Notebook Benchmark
The first benchmarks were taken in new first-person shooter, Crysis: Warhead. Being much more stable than the original Crysis, it takes advantage of the latest graphics hardware for a very visually pleasing experience. On the ‘Mainstream’ graphics settings, the GX630 scored an average of 18 frames per second while yielding 15 frames per second when set to ‘Gamer’.
In Fallout 3, we set the graphics sliders to medium-high and received an average of 42 frames per second over our runs around the opening outdoor areas of the D.C. Wasteland. Honestly, Fallout 3 was so playable that what was meant to be an hour review of the game’s performance turned into us actually playing it through to completion!
Finally, we took the GX630 for a spin with Ubisoft’s Far Cry 2. Setting the game to ‘Medium’, we were surprised to see an average of 19 frames per second over our many hours of play.
We should note that all of these benchmarks were taken with the laptop plugged into an AC power source and the Turbo mode enabled. With the 6-cell battery provided in the GX630, serious gaming should only be attempted while plugged into an AC source, otherwise you are lucky to get an hour and a half out of the rig. Hopefully, MSI will allow an upgrade to a 9-cell battery at some point which should help with this slightly.
MSI GX630 Gaming Notebook Specs :-
CPU: AMD Turion X2 Ultra Dual-Core Mobile Processor @ 2.1GHz
Memory: 2 x 2GB DDR2
Hard Drive: 250GB 5400 RPM SATA
Graphics: NVIDIAs GeForce 9600M GT with 512MB dedicated memory
OS: Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit
Display: 15.4-inch 1280×800 pixels
Others: Wireless 802.11 b/g/n , Blu-ray Rom/DVDSuper-Multi Writer, 3 USB ports and e-Sata, Firewire, HDMI and Card Reader port , Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR, Modem & Gigabit Ethernet, Webcam 2.0M, PCI Express Card.
CONCLUSION
With its lofty goals, MSI could have easily failed in their efforts. Thankfully, their diligence and patience has really paid off in an excellent sub-$1k dollar gaming laptop which will give you more than your money’s worth. No matter if you are a gaming journalist needing to edit some video, review a game, or write an article or perhaps a student who needs an inexpensive laptop to do homework on and play World of Warcraft, the MSI GX630 is up to the challenge.
Source : GamingShogun
