7. MSI EX620

MSI's advertising for their new 16'' collection is ambitious, claiming that these laptops will 'become the multimedia centre of your home.'  They're banking on the inclusion of an Intel T5800 Core 2 Duo CPU and an ATI HD3470 graphics card to power the 16'', 1366 x 768 resolution screen to help them achieve the goal of creating a "truly mobile home cinema experience".

Handling

The outside of the laptop is made from a mixture of matte and glossy plastics, with the keyboard's outer casing made in the former and the frame around the screen and the area in front of the keyboard in the latter. Compared to the more innovative design of the Lenovo IdeaPad Y650, MSI has adopted a more traditional laptop look.

For the time being, it's the only 16'' laptop we've tested with a numeric keypad, meaning the whole keyboard takes up almost all of the room available, with barely a centimetre to spare on either a side, which is perhaps why it tends to sag a little in the middle.  Another irritation is the Fn key, at the far bottom left, where the Ctrl key usually is, leading to lots of problems with keyboard shorcuts.

The touch pad in front of the keypad is the usual size for a laptop, which means it looks very small compared to the one on the Lenovo IdeaPad Y650.  A fingerprint reader is included in between the left and right-click buttons, while some touch-sensitive hotkeys for controlling multimedia are found along the top. 

When it's working hard, this laptop is very loud.  If you're looking for a quiet computer, look elsewhere, as once the fans kick in on the EX620, you won't get much peace.

As you can see, the webcam produces reasonable results, even if your cheeks end up looking rosier than you might have expected.  The microphone is an entirely different story, though: our test recordings were ruined by interference and a particularly annoying, sharp, feedback. 

Around the outside, there is an RJ45 Ethernet port, a modem, four mini-jacks for audio, three USB ports as well as a combined USB/e-SATA port, an Express Card 54 slot, an input for a television antenna and HDMI and VGA video outputs.  It's almost a perfect selection, but if you wanted to be cruel, you could gripe that there's no FireWire.

When we turned the computer over, we found a sticker covering the flaps warning that opening them up would invalidate the warranty.  That didn't stop us, of course, and we had easy access to the Western Digital hard drive and the pair of 2 GB Transcend RAM modules, among other things.

TV input (right, yellow)	Optical and analog audio ports
Combined USB and e-SATA port	Fingerprint reader

Processing Power
Windows Experience Index: 4.0. CPU: 4.9 - Memory: 4.8 - Graphics: 4.0 - Gaming Graphics: 4.0 - Hard Drive: 5.1.

This MSI EX620, with its T5800 CPU, and the Sony VGN-FW31E, which has a T6400 CPU, both run at exactly 2 GHz.  The difference between the two processors comes down to the fact that MSI's is manufactured at 65 nm while Sony's is at 45 nm.  It might seem like a very small difference, but the two computers showed very different results in some of our tests. 

Sony managed to finish just ahead of MSI, with a score of 77 against the EX620's 73, indexed against a score of 100 for our standard reference model, the Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Xi3650.  However, MSI did particularly badly at two of our tests, audio encoding in Cubase (35% slower) and producing DivX video in TEMPGenc (22% slower).

Given the overall similarity of the other test results, we can't blame these two discrepancies on the technical differences between the two CPUs and lots of other factors come into play.  It's important to remember that CPUs that are more powerful on paper don't always necessarily translate into more impressive results in every case.

When reading Blu-ray video, power consumption is between 56 and 62 W with a CPU load of 70 to 80%, without turning on graphic acceleration.  Both figures are quite high, especially given how loud the fan is.  After turning on the acceleration, the noise levels drop drastically thanks to a much lower CPU load of just 8-10% requiring 41 W of power.

Gaming
The ATI HD3470 graphics card in the EX620 is also found in the Sony Vaio VGN-FW31E, but here it has a lower resolution screen to deal with.   What difference does that make in practice?  With Crysis, none: you still need to keep the quality 'low'  with antialiasing deactivated if you want to play at native resolution.  The same is true of World in Conflict, where the improvement in quality from low to normal mode is noticeable.  You should choose the former if you'd rather more responsive graphics, but if you go for the latter you'll pay for that extra detail with slower performance.

Sound
There are two sets of audio inputs and outputs, one optical and one analog.  Although four sound ports may seem like overkill, it's actually a very useful feature.  You can keep your speakers plugged in using the high-quality optical link (this is a multimedia system, after all), but still swap headphones and external microphones without having to worry about plugging everything in again afterwards.

Portability & Battery Life
5.94 pounds on the scales for just 1 hour 26 minutes of video playback is not very impressive.  The EX620's direct competitors manage to get closer to 2 hours, and if you lose some screen space and move down to a 13'' laptop, you can expect to gain at least sixty minutes, taking you above three hours in some cases.

This laptop has two major problems: the amount of noise its fans make when it's working hard and the inferior screen. Minor defects, perhaps, but for a multimedia hub, they're difficult to ignore. The extra optical audio connections are a promising sign.