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With their X-Slim series, MSI bring some pretty sleek notebooks in an altogether hot and exciting the design, reminiscent of the MacBook Air. Not only that; they’re also expected to perform quite well since they’re based on Intel’s ULV processors, made for the user who desires a long battery life on a constrained budget. It almost sounds too good to be true.   

We hope to induce hyperthermia while testing this hot new netbook/subnote/notebook in the summer heat.

The product was kindly lent to us by MSI.

Specifications

Category:
Student, Business

Processor:
Intel ULV Celeron 723 (1.2GHz)

Chipset:
IntelÂź GS45 + ICH9M-SFF

RAM:
2GB DDR2

Storage:
2.5'' 320 GB HDD SATA

Display:
13" TFT-LCD Display

Sound card & speakers:
2 speakers

GPU:
UMA GMA 4500MHD

Battery:
4-celled lithium-ion battery (Li-Ion)

Inputs/outputs:
1x D-Sub
2x USB 2.0 Port
1x Mic-in Port
1x Headphone Output
1x HDMI Port
1x LAN Port  
1x Webcam 1.3M
1x 2-in-1 card reader

Connectivity:
Built-in Gigabit Ethernet LAN and Modem Module
Built-in 802.11b/g/n WLAN Card

Dimensions:
330(W) X 224(D) X 6.0~19.8(H)mm
~1.3KG (including 4-celled battery)

Support:
Support is available via MSI

Warranty:
2 years limited warranty

Operating system:
Genuine Windows VistaÂź Home Premium

Price:
The reviewed model costs about ÂŁ675 including VAT.

Package contents

You can say a lot about the boxes computers are shipped in, but they are the first thing that meet the eye once you’ve bought a product. The box for the MSI X340 looks rather good and makes certain promises about the computer itself. When you open it up you’ll find everything packed neatly in a black case – it all seems well though-out, and the presentation just screams that MSI is giving us a designer product.



There are a bunch of manuals inside the case. MSI generally do very well in this area; you never feel like you’re left to the mercy of the talents you may or may not have when you buy an MSI product. There’s also a polishing cloth for your new companion – these are always good to have and you’ll almost definitely end up getting more if you like a clean notebook.




The wire is nice and long with  a small station where you combine two parts of the wire. This won’t annoy you though.



Included:
- AC adapter
- Manuals
- Cloth
- Warranty etc.

Physical aspects

First impression



I was pleasantly surprised to note that this laptop can easily live up to the expectations the case and its contents created. When I first got my hands on the X340 there was no doubt in my mind; this is a great piece of craftsmanship, both in terms of design and quality. Fortunately these two often go hand in hand. This model has a great feel to it, a smooth and slightly dull one that goes really well with the almost unibody design. It’s made of only a few different parts put together, and thus seems more like a single unit. The chassis itself is cast in almost one piece which gives it a great look. However it is quite glossy, so you’re gonna see a lot of fingerprints especially on the inside
that’s just the price of the sleek look.




The MSI logo is at the rear and shines with the light from the display in the best Apple-esque manner. It still looks fantastic though. You’ll also find the logo below the display in a silvery material – quite discreet so as not to be annoying. Sadly MSI was unable to resist the temptation to plaster the insides with stickers, but there are only a few of those.




One of the first things I noticed was that it doesn’t have any extra buttons at the top, next to the power button; they’re all incorporated in the keyboard as another function for different buttons.
The diodes shine with a white light that contrasts beautifully with the black theme that otherwise prevails on this computer.

When you expose this laptop to strong sunlight, you’ll notice a type of crystals embedded in the material of the chassis, a funny little detail. The netbook itself is cast in some sort of hardened plastic. If you compare it with the MacBook Air (which is really the laptop the X340 is out to beat), Apple has chosen to employ hardened aluminium which makes the chassis quite hard, a testament to quality. MSI have used a type of hardened plastic instead, which probably enabled them to shed a bit of weight. However this also means you can feel the chassis yielding if you press really hard on it, which means you don’t get quite the same feeling of quality and that’s really a shame.

Plastic also has the advantage of being easier to shape and form, and I’m not convinced they would have been able to achieve the same curves with aluminium, so perhaps they deliberately opted for this solution. Still, they would have gotten a whole lot of free “quality feel” by using a different material. On the other hand, most other notebooks have a plastic chassis so it doesn’t really stand out so much.



The ports have metal frames which give them a sense of quality and stability. It’s a very clever solution instead of just using plastic, and it also adds to the overall impression. Even the webcam has been given a small silver frame.




The X340 generally has a lot of rounded edges and indentations here and there, giving it a very streamlined and modern design which is pleasant to look at. If you want to improve on this further you can opt for the white model, which may also sport some better hardware (depending on country).

The lid:



The lid is incredibly thin and I assume this is what gave rise to the name X-Slim. Besides being so thin and streamlined, it’s cast in some fantastic materials. It has smooth rather than sharp edges and the display takes up most of the inside. Just above the display you’ll find the webcam and microphone.



The hinges are pretty discreet on this model, which is generally true for the entire computer except for those details MSI deliberately chose to show off, which is pretty darn cool. The hinges are quite sturdy and do not seem as if they’ll wear out over time; they’re solid and will keep up the display at all angles which is perfect for your plane or train ride.



The front:



The front almost vanishes from this angle; only one thing to say – Slim. There’s nothing but a fan at the front.

The rear:



The front and rear are almost indistinguishable, although here you can see the hinges but not much more. The battery is at the bottom.

The bottom:




The bottom doesn’t hold much of interest, although this is where you insert/remove the battery; it’s only a 4-celled kind so it doesn’t take up much space. However it meshes perfectly with the design, which may explain why they did not include a bigger one.

The right side:



The left side:



Overview:



Two things to note here.
The first is D-Sub, which as far as I have gathered is a VGA port so you can connect to an external monitor. However you can connect it to other things as well, so it’s really much more than just a VGA port.

In addition to that we have my personal favorite that only increases my love for this model: an HDMI port. Thank you, MSI! HDMI is extremely useful if you have, for example, a newer TV with HDMI inputs. That allows you to transfer both video AND audio to your TV from your computer. Useful? Very much so, especially if you have movies or the like on your laptop. The quality is also tiptop with this port. What separates this from, say, a DVI port is that sound is transferred as well, which is one less wire to worry about.

Diodes:





The diodes are found at the front of the computer, and on the power button. They shine with a white light as mentioned earlier, which gives a really cool effect. Plus they’re quite discreet and I’m a big fan of that; in my opinion, diodes have no need to draw too much attention.

Keyboard and touchpad:




The keyboard is of great size, though the Enter key may be slightly smaller than what you’re used to, but that issue fades with time and use. At least I had no problems typing away on the web or in a word processing application.
The keys are something special though; they don’t yield too easily but are not too hard to depress either, and the sound they give off is soft and not annoying. It truly is a great product with a lot of attention to detail.



The touchpad is nice and big and feels good to the touch. It reacts as it should and adequately sensitive for when you want to double-click without using the button below. There is one large button rather than two separate ones. This sometimes works well on notebooks, and sometimes not. Luckily it worked out exceptionally well on this particular model...no complaints here. It’s really great when it works as intended.

Display:



The display is beautiful. It has just the right size and is perfect for widescreen which most new movies are made in, making it a pretty optimal choice for watching movies as well as surfing the web.





It has the mandatory microphone and a webcam so you can enjoy those video conferences on the internet. While it’s long been accepted that webcam and microphone are things you just have to include, they’re always nice to have. It runs a resolution of 1366x768 pixels. This is greater than most other netbooks and allows it to go through our PCMark benchmark. As mentioned already, it’s great for surfing the web.

The colours are vivid and easily visible both in daylight and at night. As can be seen in some of the pictures it does suffer quite a bit from glare. Whether that annoys you is a matter of taste...you just have to make sure you look good if you use it in the sun, because you’ll be looking at yourself most of the time. The colours also wash out a bit in direct sunlight. It may not happen often, but just note that using this notebook in sunlight is suboptimal.

As a new part of our reviews we now test displays for pixel errors and faults in the backlighting, using a program called MonitorTest. It works by, for example, blackening the entire display which will expose pixel errors, i.e. areas that do not change colour. This will also allow you to see if the backlight is uneven.

None of these problems are present here. It a bit hard to show you any proof since it would only be a black picture, but even in a dark room I couldn’t spot a single error.

Sound and speakers

The audial aspect is better than expected and certainly good enough for Skype and other things on the internet. Still, don’t ever expect too much from the speakers in this particular segment...

Noise, heat and power consumption

Since the battery is only 4-celled I expect little from it. However since MSI put a power saving processor in the X340, it might just provide a decent battery life. Time will tell.

They also added some preinstalled power settings which supposedly optimize battery life depending on what you’re doing – watching movies, standby, working, etc. How great an effect you get from this is hard to quantify, but it always sounds good when you think about it.
I have no complaints when it comes to noise; it handles this aspect elegantly, even at full performance.

This should indicate that it gets rather hot but it never gets more than lukewarm, so you can easily sit with it in your lap if you so choose.

Benchmark

All benchmark tests are run at highest performance settings on the laptop. Otherwise no settings have been tampered with.

Windows Vista Experience Index:



The Index is just above average and that is satisfying enough.

I have decided to compare the X340 to a previously reviewed model from Acer – their Aspire One D150. Alright, it may be unwise to compare with a netbook, but considering that the X340 is powered by an Intel ULV processor, performance shouldn’t vary too much on the two models. The X340 is still a good couple of hundred quid dearer though, so it’ll be interesting to see if you get your money’s worth.

The Acer Aspire One D150 model had the following specifications:

Processor:
IntelÂź Atom N280 1.6GHz

Chipset:
IntelÂź GM45 Express-chipset

RAM:
1x1GB DDR2

Storage:
160GB 5400rpm HDD

Display:
10.1" LED CrystalBrite

Sound card & speakers:
High-definition audio support
2x built-in stereo speakers
MS-Sound compatible
Integrated digital microphone

GPU:
GMA 959 - Shared

Battery:
6 celled Li-Ion (6 hours battery life)

Inputs/outputs:
1x 5-in-1 card reader
1x CrystalEye Webcam
3x USB 2.0 ports
1x External display (VGA) port
1x Headphone/speaker/line-out jack
1x Microphone-in jack
1x Ethernet (RJ-45) port
1x DC-in jack for AC adapter

Wireless connectivity:
Bluetooth 2.0
802.11b/g Wi-Fi

Dimensions:
260 (W) x 185 (D) x 33.4 (H) mm
1.33 kg incl. battery

Operating system:
WindowsÂź XP Home

Price:
About ÂŁ250 incl. VAT

Boot times and out of standby:





Boot and out of standby times are measured from when the power button is pressed and the Windows desktop appears.

The Acer starts up a tad faster, but the MSI gets out of standby the quickest. In my opinion both start up in a decent amount of time.

Battery life:



Idles times are measured at the lowest power profile on the tested models while Classic times are tested at the highest performance profile. Both are tested with BatteryEater 2005 to find the maximum battery life at the given settings.

Here the X340 really falls short. It only has a 4-celled battery and just cannot keep up. This is probably the biggest – and the only – downside I’ve found on this model yet.

The processor:

SuperPi:



Super Pi calculates the number Pi with 1 million decimals. The result is a time in seconds, meaning that the lower the number, the better. This can be used for direct comparison with other laptops that have run the same test.

Here you can see that the processor in the X340 computes the number twice as fast as the one in the Acer. That’s quite a large difference.

SiSoft Sandra CPU Arithmetic:





SiSoft Sandra’s Whetstone and Drystone benchmark tests the processor’s ability to do pure number crunching, which occurs during gaming or different forms of picture editing. The measure is in Mflops (Millions Floating Point Operations Per Second) – the higher, the better.

The SuperPi result is echoed in this test. The processor in the X340 performs much better and crunches those numbers much faster. It’s a vast improvement that you’re almost sure to notice.

SiSoft Sandra CPU Multimedia:





The multimedia test in SiSoft Sandra is calculated on a 2D figure. The output (it/s) is Mandelbrot iterations per second, i.e. the bigger the better.

This result is a bit ambiguous as they come out even. In any case neither can claim multimedia as their strongest suit, but the results are decent nevertheless.


RAM - SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth:





Sisoft Sandra’s Memory Bandwidth benchmark is used to measure the speed of the RAM – the higher the value, the better.

Here you can see the RAM performing a good deal better in the X340. You do get twice as much as well, so you’ll definitely notice a difference when loading up programs and such. This also allows the X340 to run Vista rather than XP.

Hard drive performance - SiSoft Sandra Hard Drive Read:



Sisoft Sandra’s hard drive test module is used to measure the performance of the hard drive. Sisoft Sandra runs a number of tests on the surface of the hard drive and calculates the average reading speed.

Both hard drives read fast enough, no complaints. The X340 is slightly better, but you probably won’t notice it outside of benchmarks.

GPU performance - 3Dmark:





The 3Dmark tests show the performance in DirectX 9, and paint a picture of the performance in newer games and applications. 3DMark 2005 and 2006 are based on DirectX 9 and show the performance under contemporary games and 3D applications. No tests have been run in DirectX 10.1 (which both cards support).

Graphical performance is definitely not the forte of this particular segment, but the results still show you get more for your money in the X340. MSI have spent a little more in this area, which in my opinion gives a better all-round product. You’re sure to notice the difference in certain areas.

Overall performance:



The PCMark 05 results can be compared directly with other laptops that have run the same PCMark version. The program produces a score from a test that includes the performance of the processor, RAM, hard drive, GPU, etc.

The Acer netbook does not have a large enough resolution to run this benchmark. The X340 does though, which is why I opted to include the graph. That says enough about the resolution of the display, a huge plus.

Conclusion
MSI gives us a fine notebook equipped with the right components. That in itself is reflected in a higher price, of course, but in addition to the nice hardware you also get what is in my opinion the hottest notebook in this particular segment to date.

This is definitely a high-end product with a focus on design; no concessions have been made on the quality of materials and you can clearly see MSI paid attention to the details. Not only is it modern, it’s downright sexy. Even better, it weighs next to nothing and is so slim that it makes you feel like carrying it around with only one hand, no problem.

It’s an incredibly light product which is so compact when you close the lid that you cannot help but be surprised. When you open it up again you’re met by a fantastic display, a large keyboard and a great touchpad. It doesn’t get much better than that.

The display is definitely one of the strongest features as it allows you to view everything in an acceptable resolution. Some might dislike the glare and yes, it is something you have to be aware of when you buy it, but that personally doesn’t scare me off.

When you get a silent laptop that doesn’t get too hot, in a great design and with good hardware, why doesn’t everyone buy it?
We saw its weakness in the battery test. It only has a 4-celled battery, so you really can’t expect much from it. That means it won’t last for the entire duration of a longer flight or train ride without some sort of power supply or extra battery. If you don’t like your laptop to run on AC, then this model probably isn’t for you.

There is no doubt that what you get for your money is good hardware, beautiful design and a great product overall. What you don’t get is independence from AC.
This is where you have to consider whether or not this is what you’re looking for...it certainly will be for some. I will say that I was smitten with the X340 and would very much like one. Still, ask yourself how important battery life is before you get one.

When you look at how it handles benchmarks and the like, I think the price is quite fair compared to what you get and what kind of product it is. I’m definitely impressed by the X340 and am looking forward to future MSI products if they keep this up.
Pros:
- Design
- Display (resolution and widescreen)
- Materials
- Weight
- Connectivity
- Heat
- Noise or lack thereof

Cons:
- Battery life. This can be improved by an 8-celled battery upgrade though.

Battery: 3 / 5Graphics: 4 / 5Construction: 5 / 5Mobility: 5 / 5Software: 5 / 5Overall: 4,5 / 5