MSI GX740

Product MSI GX740
Website www.msi.com/GX740
System Specifications Intel Core i5 Processor, Windows 7 Home Premium, Intel HM55 Chipset, 4GB, 17-inch display, ATI Radeon HD5870, 500GB HDD, Blu-ray, XD,SD card reader, Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, VGA, HDMI, USB 2.0, eSATA, mic, audio jack, li-ion battery
Price £999.99

MSI'S GX740 appeared at CES in Las Vegas this year as its 17-inch gaming notebook. The device has an Intel Core i5 CPU and MSI boasted that it has formidable gaming abilities for the serious player, all in a stylish case that is instantly recognisable as an MSI device.

The GX740 chassis is a sturdy enough design, which is more than can be said about the screen but more on that later. Its red and black colouring will be familiar to MSI gaming rig followers and its dimensions are 395mm wide x 278mm long x 33mm thick. Its weight of 3.2kg shouldn't be considered too much for a device of this nature.

MSI has made some curious design choices on the GX740 chassis. The DVD eject button is right in the middle of the drive door, in the same area used for pushing the drive caddy back into the GX740. This led to the farcical experience of pushing the drive in, only for the DVD to be ejected.

The other notable oddity concerns the 'function' key on the keyboard, in that it's not where it's expected to be. Most keyboards have the function key inside of the 'control' key, whereas on the GX740 it's on the far outside. Often we cut and pasted some text only to discover nothing had been copied to the clipboard, as we had pressed the wrong key combination. Many have found this to be an issue as well, with the MSI support forums having questions about how to remap this key.

Powering the MSI GX740 is a dual core Intel Core i5 430M 2.26GHz processor, which is a good enough CPU for this gaming notebook. The device coped well with everything we threw at it, from basic tasks to game play and HD video encoding. However, in the US the GX740 doesn't ship with an Intel Core i5 CPU, but with a quad core Intel Core i7-720QM instead. That processor isn't even an option in the UK and the Intel Core i5 chip isn't an option in the US.

To compete with the larger gaming rigs the Intel Core i7 CPU is a must and we're puzzled as to why this is standard in the US model but not in the UK. Asus has opted for an Intel Core i7 CPU in its G73 gaming notebook in the UK, which is a better fit we believe than a dual core CPU.

The only plan we can surmise from this is that MSI's recently launched GT660 Intel Core i7 gaming notebook won't be shipping in America, where the Intel Core i7 based GX740 will be the replacement flagship model instead. If this is the case, MSI might not be selling the Intel Core i7 variant of the GX740 in the UK and will push the GT660 for those in the UK who want a monster gaming rig. That notebook comes with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 285M discrete graphics card, instead of an AMD GPU, as a point of interest.

The GX740 comes with a large and bright 17-inch WSVGA+ TFT LCD screen, capable of 1680x1050 resolution. It's a decent screen, although we would have liked to have seen 1920x1080 resolution just as we have seen on Asus gaming notebooks lately.

While playing games the screen looks and performs flawlessly, and seeing as that is what this notebook is being bought for it works very well by that criteria. However, using the screen on day-to-day tasks such as emailing, web surfing or even writing in Word doesn't provide the same good experience as it does in gaming. With a pure white background the screen shows its flaws, by displaying an almost matte quality. It's a cheap and unclear screen, as seen on the Nokia booklet or the early netbooks. It is very off-putting to use and not a great experience, but if you're just into gaming that fault won't be too noticeable.

The screen isn't the most sturdy we have ever used, since opening and closing the display leads to grave concerns. The screen on the GX740 is thinner than many 17-inch screens we have seen in notebooks, and combined with the larger size it results in a thin, large and less than sturdy display. On closing the screen down to the chassis, by using just one corner of the screen, the 17-inch display bends and by quite some margin, too. Opening the screen back up again, before it's been fully pushed down shows even more of a bend in the screen. Multiply that use with many times in a day or week, by the same frequency over the period of a year and something has to give.

The MSI GX740 ships with the ATI Radeon HD5870 Broadway XT GPU with 1GB of DDR5 VRAM, which sits at the very top of AMD's mobile GPU offerings at the moment. This offers up a formidable graphical experience in the gaming notebook and rightly so, where games such as Crysis could be played on high-end settings for a notebook. We were able to comfortably run Crysis at 1680x1050 on 'high' graphics settings with no lag running at around 40fps, although the 'medium' settings hit around 50fps.

The GX740's fan is very audible and loud while playing games that really work the GPU. We have seen other gaming notebooks from companies such as Asus that ship decent headphones, which helps to get around the noise output, especially late at night. MSI hasn't shipped such niceties here, though quite often we found we were competing with the fan's noise by increasing the volume.

MSI's most recent gaming notebook comes with discrete graphics in the form of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 285M, shared with the bog standard Intel graphics, on the MSI GT660. This isn't the case with the GX740. It's an all or nothing offering with the ATI Radeon HD5870. A discrete graphics option really should have been on offer here as well, which would have increased the notebook's usefulness and also battery life as a direct result.

There are some aspects of the GX740 that hammers home it's a gaming rig, first and foremost. There's a subwoofer on the base of the chassis, which produces decent sound when used properly. If you were in any doubt that the MSI GX740 isn't a gaming device they've highlighted it fully, by adding a template to the keys w, a, s and d with up, left, down and right.

The review unit MSI shipped to The INQUIRER came with the 9-cell battery, which protrudes from the notebook. However, in our battery tests the 9-cell option is the only way to go as we believe the 6-cell unit wouldn't really produce much 'away time' from the power socket and charger.

Running with the most power hungry options enabled, the MSI GX740 lasted for just one hour and 12 minutes. On the most power conservative settings, enabling the MSI Eco battery saving mode and with WiFi, Bluetooth and webcam all disabled, this MSI gaming notebook lasted for one hour and 33 minutes. All of which means someone using the GX740 won't be spending a great deal of time away from a direct power source. Using the 6-cell battery would have resulted in much shorter battery life and we doubt the notebook would have lasted even an hour.

In Short
The MSI GX740 is a decent enough gaming notebook with a very good GPU and a good CPU that work well together in gameplay. What is stopping the GX740 from qualifying as a great gaming notebook is that its resolution could be higher to achieve the full HD status of its competitors. This is along with the choice of CPU, where a quad core Intel Core i7 would have been preferable over the dual core Intel Core i5 processor. Seeing as how the American version ships with that very Intel Core i7 CPU we know it's achievable. Also the US cost of that model is lower than that of the UK version.

The Good
Decent GPU, good game playing laptop.

The Bad
Needs a higher resolution screen, odd layout of DVD eject button, unusual placement of the function key.

The Ugly
Could do with a better CPU.

Bartender's Score
6/10