MSI GT663R

The new gaming laptop has arrived in the market. Its the MSI GT663R. This laptop packs with a lot of firepower and looks stunning to boot. It has a chunky, black design. The keyboard is great, with large, spaced out keys and the ability to toggle the WSAD keys for the left-handers. The separate numpad is a plus. While the touchpad is big and wide, it's quite unresponsive and has a sandpaper-ish quality to it, which kills the experience.

This laptop is powered by a quad-core Intel i7 processor

(Q740M @ 1.73 GHz) and has an 1.5 GB Nvidia 460M GPU. Turbo Boost allows it to go up to 2.93 GHz when required.

The Turbo Drive Engine overclocks the GPU's core rate from 675 MHz to 709 MHz, and the shader rate from 1350 MHz to 1414 MHz. The notebook has 8 GB DDR3 RAM and 2 500 GB Western Digital hard drives in RAID 0 to boost read/write speeds. The 15.6-inch display (1366 x 768) is great.

The device sports 4 USB ports, 2 of which are USB 3.0 plus an eSATA port, an Express Card slot and a 5-in-1 card reader. In addition, there are HDMI and VGA outputs as well as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth v2.1+EDR and Gigabit Ethernet. The integrated webcam can record at  720p at 30 FPS, which is really good.

This laptop posted very impressive results in my tests. It bested the ASUS G53J and G51J in synthetic and real world tests, and in games. It could play Call of Duty: Black Ops at 48 fps, and Mafia 2 at 33 fps, but in Metro 2033, it only managed 8 fps. Games live Battlefield: Bad Company 2, which are CPU intensive, ran at 29 fps at maxed out graphics. The audio is crisp, clear and loud enough, thanks to the 2 built-in Dynaudio speakers.

MSI has done a good job at heat dissipation. At full load, it does get quite hot, but the heat escapes out through the large vents present. The GT663R is quiet as it completes day-to-day tasks, but fire up a game and you will hear the fan whirring as it moves into high gear, which is a little distracting.

At full charge, the battery will last you a good hour and 10 minutes of intensive gaming, and over 3 hours under low load.

At Rs. 1,29,999, it does provide the performance it promises and is a great option for gaming on the go.

SPECIFICATIONS

Rs. 1,29,999

Dimensions (WxHxD): 395x55x267mm

Weight: 3.5kg

Processor: Intel Core i7 Q740M

RAM: 8GB DDR3

Storage: 2x500 GB

Graphics: Nvidia Geforce GTX 460M

Display: 15.6 inch

Networking: Gigabit, Wi-Fi n