MSI GT640X - Gaming Laptop Review

Page 9 - Tests - Temperatures, battery and general impressions

Temperatures and cooling

After a hour under full load we measured the following temperatures on the body of the MSI GT640X:

All measurements were made at 25°C room temperature with highly precise IR thermometer. As you can see they are very acceptable and even the metal wrist rest does not heat enough to be unpleasant. The cooling is apparently performing well, even though it is a tad noisy at full load (and a vibrates too).

Power consumption and battery life

As for power consumption the this is what we measured with the laptop off, in stand-by mode, in Idle mode and under full load:

The peak is at 111W under full load. It would be interesting to see how does the supplied battery 52WAh fares. And as expected we checked this out – under not too great of load (continuous video play at lower brightness mode for the display) the battery lasted for an hour and twenty three minutes. Yes, precisely 1:23h – very little indeed. Definitely not enough to allow you to do serious work on it without external power, let alone play intensive 3D games.

Design, build, comfortability

As you have already noticed to great extend the body of MSI GT640X is from aluminum. With rather stylish design and only high grade materials used the class of the product is clearly noted. With the lid closed the laptop is well protected, alas while open that is not so – we already mentioned how easy the cover bends and how the picture of the display gets distorted.

GT640X with weight of mere 2.7kg is very comfy to drag around, considering its compact size too. This combined with its swell performance makes it undoubtedly a largely successful product.

Interesting factor about comfortability while working is the start up time, which is more or less affected by the system performance. For full loading of Windows 7 , MSI GT640X needs only 53 seconds

As for access to internal components, as we saw from the pictures, it is indeed easy - remove two covers and you get to any part.

Display

MSI had yet again chosen to use glossy displays in their high-end products, on that is supposedly of higher quality and with better picture. We personally object to that statement. In very rare cases the glossy display is useful, most of the time it reflects ambient light and has very unpleasant effect, not to mention that is rendered useless under bright daylight. Unfortunately most high-end laptops that have entertainment purpose in their core come with such displays nowadays.

On all other accounts the display is just fine – 1680х1050 resolution, wide viewing angle and the good 16:10 format. The brightness is not too great bur the contrast is. Picture is extremely good, because the display has good black saturation, vivid colours and high contrast. Another interesting thing about the display is that its hinges allow it to be open to almost 180 degrees, a site rarely seen indeed. The hinges themselves are very sturdy and stable and can hold the display in any given position with little effort.

Keyboard, touch pad, sensor buttons

We already said what we wanted about the keyboard. It is crowded, many of the important buttons are either too small or on the wrong place and therefore there will be need of serious adjustment in order to be able to work/play normally with it on GT640X. As strange as it is this is the greatest disappointment in this product.

The touch pad is big, slightly underlying the aluminum panel and very comfortable. Its buttons are on the same level as the panel, thus making t even better. It is very unlikely to touch it while typing, which does happens a lot in most other laptops. It is sufficiently precise and the buttons are very soft. The only setback is that it tends to gather dust bellow the buttons.

There is also the sensor button pane we mentioned before. Combined with light indication they perform extremely well – being highly responsive and comfortable to use.

Software

MSI had picked very slim pack, including only the most necessary, not dragging us down with useless applications. The disk provides the required drivers, and some software for controlling the additional functionality of the machine.

The additional functions being „Eco” and „Cinema Pro” modes. Eco in general is a system for power management control, which offers few preset modes, determining display brightness, time until system shut down and processor performance. The five available modes are: text processing, gaming, movie viewing, presentations and Turbo Battery.

Cinema Pro mode on the other hand allows allows turning on few more functions that make watching movies even better. It includes system providing a more detailed picture, though we could not manage to see a significant difference ourselves. There is also a SRS Premium Sound system for more detailed sound and stronger bass. GT640X has integrated high-performance sub woofer, which is supposed to aid the above mentioned mode. But really, how much of that is true we're about to see...

Sound

Yes, the other great disappointment in MSI GT640X is the sound. The two speakers behind the metal mesh next to the sensor buttons, aren't particularly strong, and if we put them to the max tend to have quite reverberant and metallic sound. The integrated "high performance sub woofer” does not change a thing. Yes, the sound is a bit better from that of cheap and small laptops, but is indeed nothing special, and not good enough for watching movies or playing games either. The best part though is that there are enough jacks to get out 7.1 channel audio along with proper controller

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