Occasional Gamer.

With the launch of the GX and GT series, MSI continues to increase its control of the gaming sector. The company has a wide product range so that every enthusiastic gamer, who enjoys playing on the laptop, can find a laptop which fulfills his/her needs. Whether the buyer chooses to get a big, high performance gaming laptop, or a smaller, far more handy, but still good performance notebook, like the MSI GX 400, he/she will almost always find the perfect laptop in MSI's diverse product range.

The colourful W-A-S-D keys were the trademarks of all the previously tested MSI gaming notebooks, as these keys are usually the ones which direct the player's character in games, especially in FPS(First-person shooter). Unfortunately, these keys are not to be found in the GX 400, but, on the other hand, the keyboard does have a business-like appeal with the black keys and the white, and sometimes dark blue, letters printed on the keys.

Now to the more important factor: the layout. What was MSI thinking when they conceived this keyboard?
Generally, a 14 inch case offers enough space to accomodate a big, user-friendly keyboard. MSI, however, manages a work of art by including a row of more or less unimportant keys on the left side of the keyboard. This ensures that the space available for the rest of the keys is effectively reduced to a small area, in which the rest of the keys are crammed tightly. An ugly situation indeed.

The small F-keys are placed in a line at the top of the keyboard along with delete, paste and escape. They are raised to half the height of the rest of the keys so as to optically differentiate them from the other keys. This is still okay, however the next two features of the keyboard require more time to get used to. The >< keys are positioned right next to the space bar, which, itself, is placed further to the right of the keyboard. The use of the space bar as the key for jumping in games is thus made harder as it is no longer easily reachable with the thumb, if the user is using the other fingers for the WASD keys.

However, the flaws do not end here. The positioning of the FN-key on the outside left of the keyboard is usually seen on business keyboards, but in a gaming notebook this is a mistake. Usually you would get to the console in a game by pressing ^, however in the GX 400 there is a special button assigned for it instead, which one has to get used to first and till then mistakes are sure to be made.

Last but not least, the arrow keys are also rather small in size. They are much harder to use due to their small size. After a few rounds in Racedriver GRID, cramps in the middle three fingers of the right hand became evident....

Thankfully, the touchpad is rarely needed for gaming. As the surface of the touchpad is similar to that of the material surrounding it, it did not surprise us that the feel of sliding on it was only modest. However, for mobile use this touchpad has everything that one would require.

The display colours can be seen as good or bad depending on the user. However, the maximum possible contrast is only 158:1 which is rather low. Wireless trips with the GX 400 outdoors are not recommended due to the mirroring surface of the display, and because the, at best, modest, brightness can not cope with the brightness outdoors.

The typical weaknesses of the display are evident, such as the stability of the viewing angle. The colours change rapidly when the viewing angle changes vertically, however if the viewing angle changes horizontally the picture is much more stable in its colours. However, the glare panel makes sure that distracting reflections are present along both axes at flat angles.

We recently tested the LG P310, a slim 13 inch notebook equipped with the Geforce 9600M GT Grafik from Nvidia. The same graphics chip is also installed in the MSI GX 400, but there its performance is only half as impressive as in the LG laptop. Still the GX 400 is one of the smallest notebooks of MSI's laptop palette, and it meets the current mulitmedia standard, with its Intel Dual Core CPU and the GeForce 9600M GT graphics chip, which dictates that even playing the latest games should be possible.

The CPU in the laptop is the P7350 chip from Intel, which is a processor of the current Penryn generation (45-nanometer), with a FSB of 1066 MHz, a 3 MB L2-Cache and running at 2 GHz. It is worth mentioning, in relation to the above, that the P series has, when compared to Intel's T series, a lower TDP value of 25 W which enables smaller cooling needs of the system.

Like in most MSI gaming laptops, the GX 400 has a "Turbo" button. By pressing the button, the installed CPU can be easily overclocked. This does not directly influence any other hardware in the laptop, and can easily overclock the CPU to 2.314 GHz (data from our test model). This is a plus in performance of around 16%. However, overclocking the CPU will also increase the rate at which the cooler fan is spinning, thus increasing the noise emissions.

Theoretically one could say that currently a dual-core processor with a high frequency can deliver more performance, especially when playing games, than a quad-core clocked at a lower frequency. More information about this principle can be found in our test of mobile quad-core processors. Of course, in the case of the MSI GX 400 a quad-core CPU is out of the question, as these mobile CPUs are found in laptops in a completely different, and much more expensive, price region. No, here in the case of our test model its more interesting to see how effective the "Turbo" button really is.

In the 3D Mark 2006 benchmark the MSI GX 400 achieved, at a resolution of 1280x1024, 5010 points. The score of the CPU itself was around 1813 without overclocking. With the "Turbo" function activated, the total result rose by around 2% to 5128 points. However, the score of the CPU rose by 16%, after overclocking, which increased the score of the CPU to 2103 points. With this score, the overclocked P7350 CPU is at the same level as the P8600 chip from Intel.

Now to the "hopefully" amazing performance of the MSI GX 400 in its supposed discipline: games. We ran a few of the latest games on our test model and noted the results, especially when the "Turbo" mode was switched on.

Crysis

This ego shooter game has been a hurdle for even the best performance laptops that are out on the market currently. So it's no surprise that the GX 400 had a hard time delivering a fluid gameplay. While the resolution was set at 1024x768 and the details were set to low, the notebook could actually give a pretty good result of 58.8 frames per second (fps) in the GPU benchmark. The CPU benchmark, which is integrated in the game, delivered a result of 56.9 fps which is also good. However, as soon as the graphics level was bumped up to medium, the quality of the gameplay rapidly fell.

At this level, the laptop could only deliver 23.0 to 22.3 fps at the same resolution, but with the graphics details set at medium. This performance was not enough to describe the gameplay as fluid. The effect of the overclocking feature was interesting to note:
With low details, the Turbo mode could increase the performance by a slight measurable amount. However, when the details level was raised, this increase in performance rapidly fell to a negligible amount. To conclude, the "Turbo" button could not really increase the performance of the laptop enough to improve the gameplay significantly.

Supreme Commander – Forged Alliance

Things got a bit more interesting when we tested the CPU intensive, strategy game: Supreme Commander – Forged Alliance. We once again used the performance test integrated in the game to get our results. We noticed a similar trend to Crysis here too, as, when the graphics were low, the overclocking function seemed to increase the gameplay by a much greater amount.

The performance test, which ran with a resolution of 1024x768 and medium details, gave an average result of 22.6 fps, which could be boosted in turbo mode to a good 27.2 fps. This was an increase of around 20%.

A further increase of the detail level to high, and 2x anti-aliasing (AA) lowered the fps to 19.5 (without overclocking) and 21.8 (with overclocking).

Call of Duty 4

Any self-respecting, gaming laptop manufacturer is sure to test his creations by running Call of Duty 4 - Modern Warfare on it, as it is an absolute must for gaming laptops to be able to run this game. We tested the successful multiplayer shooter on the notebook by playing part of the first single player mission and noting the performance details.

At a resolution of 1024x768 pixels, middle details level, and deactivated AA, the MSI GX 400 showed a good performance of, on average, 122.38 fps. When the turbo boost was activated, the result rose to 142 fps, which is an increase of about 16%.
After an increase of the graphics details to high and 4x AA, the quality of the gameplay broke down, and the increase in performance from the overclocked CPU became negligible. At these settings, the fps were recorded as 48.94 fps (without overclocking) and 48.92 fps (with overclocking). At this rate, CoD 4 was still somewhat playable, whether with or without turbo.

Racedriver GRID

So as to vary the games a little, we decided to run the racing game, "Racedriver - GRID" next. To divine the fps, we raced for one round as the BMW team from Germany.

The basic trend which we have noticed in the three games above seems to continue here. With low details, the resolution set at 1024x768, and 0xAA, pressing the overclock button increases the performance slightly. However, if the graphics levels are increased, then suddenly the performance boost from overclock feature drops to a negligible amount, and the CPU's influence on the quality of the gameplay dwindles. In this case, the GPU becomes the factor which limits the performance of the laptop in the game. 
With higher graphics settings, the game was still playable but the gameplay was plagued by short spans of time where the game froze. This negatively impacted the feel of the game and, more specifically, the  time it took to complete one round.