The two newest additions to MSI's GX gaming series have landed in Europe. GX640 and GX740 sport HD displays of 15 and 17.4 inches, respectively, and are based on Intel's Core i5 platform with DirectX 11 compatible graphics from ATi.
MSI are marketing the two as the lightest and slimmest on the market at 2.7 and 3.2kg (for gaming notebooks, we presume) - we are not sure about that, but we have seen much worse. As noted above they feature Intel's Core i5 Arrandale platform; which processor exactly is unspecified, so there are probably going to be a few to choose from.
They all feature the Turbo Boost technology, which is basically dynamic overclocking, with the upper limit determined by the number of active cores, temperature and current & estimated power consumption. This ensures you always get the most out of the processor, regardless of whether you are running single- or multi-threaded applications.
Besides the size, the two differ slightly when it comes to graphics. GX640 comes with an ATi Mobility Radeon HD5850 GPU (1GB of GDDR5 RAM) while GX740 has the more powerful (roughly 10-20% according to benchmarks) ATi Mobility Radeon HD5870 card (1GB of GDDR5 RAM). Both are DirectX 11 compatible.
Otherwise the specifications are fairly similar with DDR3 1066/1333MHz RAM, 320/500/640GB hard drive, DVD Super Multi or Blu-ray optical drive, 6/9 cell battery and the Windows 7 Home Premium OS. Connectivity includes 802.11 b/g/draft-N WiFi, optional Bluetooth v2.0 + EDR and Ethernet LAN. They also have five speakers (one subwoofer) each and a 2M webcam.Â
The two should be available in March, starting at £999. Stay tuned for a review.
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in Hardware & Accessories by nyk001, 08-05-10 12:46