Design

The GT660 is just huge and for a 16-inch notebook, it’s just heavy (7.7lbs) and is like a beast of a laptop. It may not be as cool-looking as an Alienware M17x but it’s got some design inspiration from the latter with all that chiseled corners. Even the lid cover reminded me of the Mazda 3′s hood.

Open up the lid and you’d be greeted with an extended keyboard that includes an alpha-numeric keypad on the right side. It’s a nice addition but if you’re a regular laptop-user, the orientation is confusing that you always tend to hit the wrong keys when typing. One needs some time to get used to the extra keys and learn to familiarize where the Enter button is.

The chiclet-type keys are appropriately sized with special color labels on the gaming keys (asdw) and the arrow keys.

And while it’s glossy black on the outside, it’s rough and textured in the inside — the palm rest has this honeycomb finish and the trackpad feels like sand-paper and is somewhat flushed to the left. The left and right click buttons are not separated but shaped accordingly to differentiate the two.

Display & Audio

The 16-inch display is bright and crisp with a maximum resolution of 1366×768 pixels (I was actually expecting it could be higher, somewhere in the 1600×1200 range, because of the large real estate). The glossy display is also prone to glare in the outdoors and against bright light sources.

Above the keyboard are light indicators with the power button in the center. On both sides are two huge stereo speakers powered by Dynaudio. The speakers are impressive, offering good sound volume to appreciate movie playback even at a distance. The audio quality is somewhere between good to great with a strong, deep bass and probably is the best laptop speakers I’ve tried so far.

Performance

The MSI GT660 is powered by Intel’s Core i7 720QM with 4 cores and 8 threads that runs at a base clock speed of 1.6GHz for each core but can boost up to 3.2GHz. This chip is among the most powerful processors to be fitted in a laptop. With 3 or 4 cores active, it can go to 2.26GHz; with 2 cores active, it can boost speeds to 3.06GHz and with only 1 core active, it tops at 3.2GHz.

Couple that with an nVidia GeForce GTX 285M with 1GB GDDR3 VRAM, 6GB of DDR3 memory and you get a beast of a gaming machine. The GT660 is also the very first notebook I’ve seen that sports two (2) hard disk drives — it has two 500GB HDD for a total of 1 terabyte (would be interesting if it can do Raid 0/1 here).

Windows Experience Index gives it a base score of 5.9 due to the HDD but the CPU got a sub-score of 7.0 and the graphics got a 6.9 sub-score.

Battery Life

As expected, battery life suffers from all the power requirements. Even with a high-capacity 9-cell (7800mAh) Li-Ion battery, the notebook only lasts just over 2 hours on a single full charge (as indicated by BatteryBar in the screenshot above).

As a desktop replacement and gaming rig, I reckon you’d always be plugging this notebook to a power outlet so battery life isn’t a big issue for a laptop in this category although I can appreciate MSI’s effort to put in a 9-cell battery here.

To make it more interesting, MSI retrofitted several red lights around the notebook to make it look meaner (front and side as well as the edges of the lid) but forgot to include a backlit keyboard.

Conclusion

The MSI GT660 has a premium price tag but the specs of this gaming rig is very impressive to somewhat justify that. It’s not your regular multimedia notebook and this kind of combination is hard to come by.

Local Price: Php109,990

Specs:

• Processor: Intel Core i7 Core i7 720QM (Quad Core @ 1.6GHz)
• OS: Genuine Windows 7 Home Basic (64-bit)
• Display: 16″ WXGA (1366 x 768, Glare Type)
• Graphics:NVidia GeForce GTX 285M 1GB DDR3
• HDD: 2 x 500GB HDD (1TB total)
• RAM: 6GB DDR3 Dual-Channel
• Optical Drive: Super-Multi DVD+RW
• Ports: USB 2.0 x 3, VGA, HDMI, eSATA, SD Card Reader
• Wireless Connection: WiFi (802.11 b/g/n), Bluetooth 2.1
• Battery: 7800mah 6-cell Li-Ion
• Weight: 7.7 lbs.

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The laptop came in with this huge packaging. Even the battery pack too — at 7800mAh (8-cell?); and the charger looks like a heavy piece of brick.

The lid is shaped/designed to look like the hood of a car (Mazda 3 look-alike) with the logo of the MSI glowing/lighted when the laptop is powered on.

The MSI GT660 has the following specs:
16″ display screen @ 1366×768 pixels
Intel Core i7 720QM @ 1.60GHZ (4 cores, 8 threads)
NVidia GeForce GTX 285M 1GB DDR3
6GB DDR3 RAM (3 x 2GB Dual Channel)
2 x 500GB Seagate SATA (1TB total)
DVD+RW
WiFi 802.11 b/g/n
2 x USB 2.0 ports
2 x USB 3.0 ports
1 x HDMI port
1 x eSATA port

The keyboard’s got chiclet-type keys with extra numeric keypad on the right side, a large textured (honeycomb) wristpad and two huge audio speakers powered by DynaAudio.

For perspective, I’ve placed the GT660 beside my 11.6″ ULV notebook here and you can see the difference between the screen real estate of the two units.

The suggested retail price of the MSI GT660 is Php109,995.

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What makes people choose MSI is the affordability of its products without sacrificing too much on quality. Let’s see if that is still the case with the CR420.

Design

MSI used their Cross-Hatch Color Film Pattern technology to coat the CR420 making it scratch-resistant. I don’t know how many patterns MSI has but the one used here are simple horizontal lines which I find cheap-looking. Not stylish at all for my taste.

There’s nothing special about the chiclet-style keyboard but it’s not one of the best I’ve used on a laptop. I find the Backspace and Enter key a bit small. It doesn’t feel natural to type with it on the first go but eventually you’ll get the hang of it.

What I find discomforting is the backslash key between the Left-Alt and Spacebar. I’m not sure why the designers made a clone of this key and placed it in this position but it’s making it tricky to do Alt-Tabs on the keyboard.

The size of the touchpad is quite alright. It features a single rocker for the left and right-click buttons but it doesn’t affect the functionality at all. As I mentioned, the design on the palm rest does not make it fashionable nor stylish but that’s just me.

Display & Audio

The 14” display is of glare type so be warned when using this outside. There aren’t a lot of suitable viewing angles for the display here so it’s hard to share your videos or photos with a group of people. The display is bright though that even at below 50% it’s still very usable.

The speaker is located on top of the keyboard but I do find it soft even at full-volume and in a quiet room. I tried trailers, TV shows and movies but it couldn’t give the powerful, clear audio that I want. I would say audio is just average.

Performance

Our CR420 came with a 32-bit Windows 7 Ultimate (typically it’s Windows 7 Home Premium). Here’s the Windows Experience Index which is above average for your normal laptops thanks to the Intel Core i3 processor.

Watching 1080p trailers went without a hitch here despite having only the integrated graphics. Casual gaming with Facebook is handled really well by the Core i3 but I doubt if that will also be the case for 3D games although they would be playable.

What’s good about the Core i3 is that despite having only 2 cores, it supports HyperThreading, allowing it to handle 4 processing threads at once. To check how it actually performs, I did a video encoding test.

I used Cyberlink’s MediaShow Espresso to convert a 2-minute 1080p movie trailer from Apple into iPhone format (640×360) and the resulting 27MB file was created in just 1:20 minutes. A 43-minute TV show (349MB) was converted in just 18 minutes resulting to a 654MB file.

I also like the fact that it doesn’t get hot nor too warm even when using it for hours straight doing normal tasks.

Battery Life

If there’s really a letdown on the CR420, it’s the 4400mah 6-cell Li-Ion battery pack it comes with (although you can upgrade it to a 9-cell). How many hours do you think a single charge would last? 5 hours?

Here’s what BatteryBar has to say about it:

I did my primitive battery test on the CR420. At 100% charge, I used it with WiFi always on and connected and Brightness at 50%. I surfed the net, played some Facebook games, download and watch some trailers, normal things you do with a laptop. In just 2.5 hours, the battery was depleted. That’s quite low for my standards even for a Core i3 laptop.

Conclusion

The MSI CR420 is as ordinary as it gets for a Core i3 laptop. It would have been better if they stick with the standard keyboard layout and sizes (think Sony).

It’s quite powerful for your everyday use but with such power comes a tradeoff in battery life and the low capacity rating on the included battery doesn’t help its cause. Better get the the 9-cell battery option if you’re going to be away from a power source most of the time.

Overall, the MSI CR420 performs really well for a typical 14” casual laptop given its affordable Php32k price tag. The Core i3 adequate for most of your needs but if you are likely to do a lot of gaming with it, I would suggest going with the CX420 instead.

Local Price: Php31,999

Specs:

• Processor: Intel® Core i3-330M Dual Core Processor (2.13 GHz)
• OS: Genuine Windows® 7 Ultimate (32-bit)
• Display: 14″ wide (WXGA: 1366 x 768, Glare Type)
• Graphics: Mobile Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator HD
• HDD: 500 GB (Serial ATA)
• RAM: 4GB DDR3
• Optical Drive: Super-Multi DVD+RW
• Ports: USB 2.0 x 3, VGA, HDMI, 4-in-1 Card Reader, ExpressCard
• Wireless Connection: WiFi (802.11 b/g/n), Bluetooth 2.1
• Battery: 4400mah 6-cell Li-Ion
• Weight: 4.4 lbs.

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The MSI Wind U210 is a pretty large netbook, weighing in at 1.45kg (3.19lbs) with the 6-cell battery while the 9-cell version that I bought is heavier at 1.6kg (3.52lbs). And though most of the other 12-inch netbooks have a diagonal screen size of just 11.6 inches, the U210 is larger at 12.1″.

In many respects, this model is like a cheap, full-fledged notebook without a built-in optical drive. I remember buying a similarly-spec’ed 12″ Compaq-Presario laptop 2 years ago worth Php55k.

The design is similar to the first generation Wind netbooks — glossy lid cover, glossy display screen and about an inch thick, not counting the protruding 9-cell battery at the bottom. It’s got a wide and textured trackpad with separate left and right click-pads which are pretty easy to use. There are 3 USB ports, a multi-card reader, LAN port, VGA port and and HDMI port to output HD videos to external monitors.

Standard specs of this unit is also above average with 2GB DDR2 RAM, 250GB HDD, WiFi draft-N, HDMI and option for 9-cell battery. Unfortunately, Bluetooth is missing (although the F9 function key has a Bluetooth icon printed in it) — prolly to save on production cost.

Most interesting part is the AMD Athlon Neo X2 processor that powers this unit. It’s a dual core CPU running at 1.6GHz.

On Windows 7 Ultimate, it scores high on Windows Experience Index with 3.0 as the lowest sub-score assigned on the graphics card (ATI Radeon Xpress 1270). The CPU alone got a sub-score of 4.1, the highest we’ve when compared to the Intel atom N270, N280 and Z530. Video performance is also good and capable of playing HD videos as well as streaming YouTube HD.

However, that extra juice that the dual-core CPU is pumping also becomes a problem when it comes to battery life. For a 9-cell battery, I was expecting between 6 to 8 hours of battery life on a single full charge. Even after several optimization and tweaks, I could not even get it to last more than 5 hours. On average, you’d get 4.5 hours with the 9-cell battery. I wonder how would the standard 6-cell battery perform? My guess is 3 to 3.5 hours.

So far, the MSI Wind12 U210 is one of the most responsive and powerful unit in the netbook category I’ve ever reviewed. The only drawback is that it’s also power-hungry so battery life is below average. Surprisingly, the unit does not feel hot even on prolonged use — probably due to the ventilation offered by the protruding battery at the bottom (PC Wizard records CPU temp between 53 to 57 degrees though which is high IMO).

Shops are selling this for a promo price of Php23k without an operating system so you’ll need to shell out a couple more thousand bucks for an OS license or you can get the version with Windows Vista for Php28k. Standard battery is 6-cell and the 9-cell model I got was during the promo period. If you have an old XP license or Windows 7 RC at home, maybe the Php23k price is a good deal.

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