CyberPower's X6-9300 and MSI's GT680R: Fighting for Your Mobile Gaming Dollar

MSI GT680R: Doing the Time Warp

We originally had the MSI GT680R in for review in February. Then the whole Cougar Point chipset fiasco came, and we never completed a full review. We did post a quick look at the performance the Sandy Bridge i7-2630QM offered, with the recommendation that anyone looking for a new gaming notebook would be well advised to wait. Here we are two and a half months later and we have the GT680R back in for the finished review, so on the one hand we have a flashback to a couple months ago. On the other hand, looking at the design of the GT680R feels like a throwback to several years ago. The MSI GT680R is also available as a barebones laptop (e.g. the CyberPower Xplorer X6-9400 and X6-9500 use the MS-16F2 chassis, though the palm rest is black instead of silver/gray), but the standard GT680R specs are in the following table.

Nearly all of the specs are the same as the Clevo P151HM, other than the additional hard drive and RAID 0 set; what’s interesting is the specifics of the implementation. The GT680R is a bulkier chassis, coming in around .75” wider, .5” deeper, and .5” thicker. It also weighs .6 lbs more, although a good chunk of that goes to the second HDD. You lose out on Firewire support and the fingerprint scanner, and MSI puts a VGA port on the back instead of DVI or DisplayPort. As with the P151HM, quite a few ports are on the back of the chassis, so if you don’t like that arrangement you’ll want to go elsewhere. One other piece of information to point out is the difference in LCD panels; both are AU Optronics B156HW01 panels, but Clevo uses the v1 panel and MSI uses the v5 panel. Oh, what a difference that single digit makes! You lose matte, lose the high contrast ratio, and reduce viewing angles, so the v5 panel is definitely inferior.

There are a couple more interesting points to bring up. First, MSI added an extra 1-year warranty on the GT680R, thanks to the Intel Cougar Point chipset snafu. That means the GT680R now has a 3-year warranty, which is a nice change of pace. The other item to mention is overclocking. MSI includes an overclocking tool with the catchy name of Turbo Drive Engine. Back in the Core 2 days, overclocking the CPU was a common feature on higher end notebooks, but with Clarksfield and Arrandale it became less useful. Thanks to Intel’s Turbo Boost, overclocking often resulted in slightly lower performance as the increased bus speeds would result in lower turbo modes kicking in.

With Sandy Bridge, overclocking by changing the bus speed is basically dead, and particularly on the mobile parts the Turbo Boost range is very impressive. The i7-2630QM runs at a base speed of 2.0GHz but can hit 2.9GHz on a single core when needed—or all four cores can run at up to 2.6GHz. If you need more than that, an i7-2720QM will bump pricing up about $165 (depending on the vendor) and give you a 2.2GHz base and up to 3.3GHz Turbo, but that’s a relatively small gain for the price hike. With CPU overclocking thus addressed, MSI’s Turbo Drive Engine turns to the GPU and will nudge the GTX 460M core/shader clocks from 675/1350MHz to 709/1417MHz. Yes, that’s a relatively small 5% overclock, but it comes free with the notebook and it does give it a slight edge in gaming performance compared to other GTX 460M notebooks. (Note that GPU memory speeds remain the same, so a 5% performance increase is the most you’ll see from the overclock.)

Okay, calling the GT680R a throwback to several years ago might be a bit severe, but the glossy plastic notebook designs have got to end. I actually think they gained prominence among designers because they liked the 3D renders the artists could put together; in actual practice, I can’t come up with any good reason to prefer glossy plastic exteriors, especially glossy black plastic. Fingerprints show up the instant you touch such surfaces, though at least MSI takes one step in the right direction by using glossy gray plastic (with a honeycomb texture on some of it) for the palm rests. While we’re on the subject of the palm rests, let’s also talk about the stickers that adorn so many laptops. MSI has small Energy Star, NVIDIA, Intel Core i7, Windows 7, and THX stickers on the palm rest, along with a larger sticker listing some of the features of the GT680R. While it’s possible to remove all of those stickers with a bit of work, they only make sense for retail show floors where potential buyers can find out what they’re getting. If you buy a laptop in a box, there’s simply no reason for the stickers—they’re advertisements for something you already bought.

Another item that will either please or detract is the extra lighting on the chassis. The chassis is reminiscent of the older Dell XPS designs, with lights on the front grille and on the left and right edges of the LCD bezel and palm rest. Unlike Dell’s older XPS (and the Alienware laptops), the lights cannot be customized, so you’re stuck with the orange glow. The orange lighting motif extends to the indicator lights as well—orange is the new white apparently. Thankfully, you can disable the lights (via a touch-sensitive key in the top-right) if you dislike them. I’ve never been a fan of bling, even on the Alienware laptops, and it’s almost insulting to put the effort into superfluous chassis lighting when keyboard backlighting would be the best place to start. As a company with strong Asian market ties, perhaps MSI is simply catering to that market—I wouldn’t know if this sort of chassis is considered better or worse than the competition overseas. What I do know is that personally this feels like a misguided design that could have been fixed with a few focus groups and mockups to solicit feedback.

The keyboard is of the typical chiclet variety, which you’ll either like or loathe. Typing action is okay if not great, and at least there’s minimal flex. Actually, the keyboard feel is very similar to the Clevo—that’s not necessarily a good thing, although it could be worse—only with a different layout. The good news is that MSI gets the 10-key layout correct, so you can actually touch-type on the thing. The cursor keys do partially overlap the zero key, but it’s still about 1.5x regular key size. What’s missing is direct access to the Home and End keys; PgUp and PgDn are in the top-right and the same keys give you Home/End via an Fn-key combination. Alternately, you can turn off num lock and use the 10-key shortcuts, but that’s still not ideal. Amazingly, we do get direct access to the scroll lock and pause/break keys—keys which few people ever use, and certainly not with the frequency they would use home/end. And as a final complaint against the keyboard, like so many Clevo notebooks, there’s also no keyboard backlighting; that’s a shame on a gaming notebook that would conceivably be used at dark LAN parties.

The problem with input devices doesn’t end at the keyboard, unfortunately. The touchpad has a moderate-sized surface, which works well enough, but what I can’t fathom is why any modern notebook would ship without support for any form of gestures. Heck, it doesn’t even have the old vertical/horizontal scrolling on the edges of the touchpad. Instead, the right and bottom corners can be configured to scroll when you tap/hold them. It’s as bad as it sounds—and if that doesn’t sound bad, it should. The hardware for the touchpad apparently comes from Sentelic, a company I don’t recall hearing of before, and if the chassis design seems several years old the touchpad feels positively ancient. Couple that with rocker-style buttons and really there aren’t any good qualities to the touchpad other than that you can move the mouse cursor around and click on things.

Rounding out the hardware elements of the GT680R, we have the audio subsystem. With stickers for Dynaudio speakers and THX, you’d expect something that sounds better than the average laptop. For a change, the audio actually lives up to the quality claims made on the stickers. In blind listening, it was a tie vote between the GT680R sound and a Dell XPS 15—the XPS 15 tended to have a bit more bass, and while you can tweak the audio settings via the Waves Maxx control panel, there’s still plenty of subjectivity involved. The Dell laptop also gets a bit louder if you’re looking to fill a room, but the difference is only a matter of a couple decibels. If quality audio is something you care about, the GT680R won’t disappoint—or at least, it will disappoint less than most other notebooks I’ve tested.

As with the X6-9300, MSI’s GT680R certainly delivers in the performance department. Medium to high detail gaming at the LCD’s native resolution is possible with most recent titles, and there’s a large gap between the GTX 460M and most of NVIDIA’s GT 500M lineup. Pricing is comparable to the Clevo P151HM—in fact, you can buy the MSI as a whitebook offering in the form of the Xplorer X6-9400 at CyberPower. Doing a head-to-head comparison on pricing, while the MSI branded model will set you back around $1450 as configured, you can get the X6-9400 with the same components for just $1342. That actually makes the MSI notebook potentially cheaper than the P151HM, and even better CyberPower will let you customize the components. Our recommendation would be to go with a Kingston 128GB SSD for the OS and applications, and pair that up with a spacious 750GB 7200RPM HDD for data. With that setup, your final price from CyberPower still comes in at a very reasonable $1520, or you can further tweak the configuration as you see fit (e.g. higher performance SSDs like Intel’s 510 are available). There’s still no Optimus support, so battery life isn’t great, and I’m not all that keen on the aesthetics or design. Even so, the MSI GT680R (MS-16F2 whitebook) gives you plenty to work with for a good price. We just wish MSI would swap out the LCD for the panel in the Clevo (along with ditching all the glossy plastic).