Micro-Star International made its first big push into the U.S. market with its Wind U100 netbook. Now it's targeting the entry-level gaming laptop market with the GT627. But while the hardware specs look good on paper and provide a good deal of power, a couple of design and build issues severely limit the system's appeal.
Priced to move at $1150, the GT627 is housed in an understated black aluminum case. A bit of red trim around the edges adds color, but a chrome grille above the keyboard is the only overt sign that this is a gaming laptop. In fact, the GT627 could easily pass for a stylish business notebook.
Inside is a run-of-mill Intel Core2 Duo 2.26-GHz P8400 CPU that you can overclock on the fly using the laptop's Turbo mode, along with 4GB of RAM, a 320GB hard drive, and nVidia GeForce 9800M GS graphics with a whopping 1GB of onboard RAM.
In our WorldBench 6 tests, the GT627 earned a solid score of 101. Though we couldn't run our tests at 1680 by 1050 resolution, the laptop managed a frame rate of 62 frames per second in Enemy Territory Quake Wars and 58 fps in Unreal Tournament III at 1024 by 768 resolution in Turbo mode.
Unfortunately, this all-purpose-size laptop exhibited a desktop-replacement-caliber battery life: 2 hours, 29 minutes on a single charge. On average, all-purpose portables have about hour more battery life than the GT627.
For context, let's match MSI's rig against one of Gateway's strong, stylish, reasonably priced gaming laptops. The Gateway P-7811FX delivers a WorldBench 6 score of 96 with very similar specs. But whereas the P-7811FX has a native resolution of 1920 by 1200, our MSI test system fell far short of those numbers, at 1280 by 800.
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