MSI shows off shiny laptops

MSI NOTEBOOKS DON'T seem to get enough attention, so I figured we'd help change that.

It has a bunch of lines, from fashion to gaming to professional. Most are built off the same basic chassis with a feature set differentiating them, but there are some exceptions.

The fashion/home user line is called the Crystal Collection, and it has s logo with crystals surrounding it. The touchpad also has more rhinestones than a drunken country singer in the middle of divorce proceedings. If MSI was going for bright, well, it hit the mark.

There are three Crystal notebooks, two AMD and one Intel. The one that caught my eye was the MSS300, a small Turion X2 based box with a 13 inch screen and four speakers. Did I mention the crystals?

The Crystal line has an analogue in the professional line. They are business notebooks with the same rough chassis but lacking the bling-bling. The PR2000 is an Intel based one with a Core Number Numeral CPU and a GM965 chipset. It has a fingerprint scanner as well as a DVB antenna and HDMI outs.

The last set of notebooks is the gaming line, most of which starts with a GX, like the 17 inch GX710. This one has a 1680*1050 screen, 4.1 channel sound, and a Turion X2. The GPU is an unnamed upcoming X2K series part, but it would not be more specific. It also has Intel based variants with Nvidia GPUs.

The impressive bit about this laptop is how slim it is. Normally 17 inch gaming laptops are clunky as hell and subnotebooks are small but slim. I haven't run across a slim and large one yet, this is the first one I have seen.

One other very nice touch is a full numeric keypad, invaluable for gaming. This notebook looks to be done right, but it is very hard to get a read on how durable it will be from a trade show. It is worth a long look though.

Last is the M677, a 15.4 inch variant of the GX710. Not much more to say other than it has a smaller screen but keeps the rest of the 17 inch model's goodness intact. I can't think of any other 15.4 inch notebook with a full numeric keypad.

That brings us to another demo that has nothing at all to do with laptops but was cool anyway, the oven demo. Take a computer without a case and put it in an oven. Set it for 75C and bake for a week. Run Windows to show it works. It did. Cute demo. µ