MSI EX620 review

MSI is clearly trying to inject more of an element of pizzazz with its submission this month - a point made clear by the briefest of inspections.

Its gloss-black lid is accentuated with grey waves and the keyboard surround smoothly fades from black to grey at its front edge. MSI gets an A+ for effort, but the overall effect is a bit of a mishmash.

It's more successful elsewhere, and nowhere is this clearer than its screen. This is one of the new breed of 16:9 displays, and boasts a resolution of 1,366 x 768 pixels. It provides good image quality, with colours that are reasonably accurate and images that pop off the screen.

It's a good thing too. Although the screen can't display HD material in its true splendour, the image quality makes an impressive partner to the Blu-ray reader in the drive bay.

The EX620's specification includes a sensible roster of components. The 2GHz Intel T5800 processor buddies up with 4GB of memory and a dedicated graphics chipset courtesy of ATI's Mobility Radeon HD 3470.

Our benchmarks didn't throw up any great surprises, finishing with a workaday score of 0.98, but gaming performance was good. In our simplest Crysis test, the MSI achieved an average of 24fps - a solid enough result, if a touch behind the Nvidia graphics in the MacBook.

Once you get to grips with the EX620, things take a turn for the worse. MSI has traditionally squeezed numeric keypads alongside the keyboards of its larger laptops, and this is no exception. It's a dreadful decision, though, with the extra keys cramping the layout and there's also an irritating half-height Enter key.

It wouldn't be so bad if typing wasn't such an unpleasant experience. The keys give little in the way of feedback and the flexy, springy base upon which they rest only compounds matters.

A dubious sense of style and poor ergonomics wouldn't be the greatest pairing in the world, but the worst battery life here hammers the final nail home. For the money, a very reasonable £600 exc VAT, the MSI does cram in a fair old amount, but it simply isn't up to scratch.

Author: Sasha Muller