MSI GE620 review

Most high-end MSI laptops aimed at gamers are big, bulky and often covered in LEDs and bright colours, but the GE620 breaks the tradition. Despite having a powerful CPU and Nvidia graphics card, the design is far more refined.

Underneath the brushed, metal-effect lid, the only indications of the GE620’s gaming roots are the red W, A, S and D keys, which should be familiar to fans of first-person shooters. The raised, Chiclet-style keys all have relatively short travel, but didn’t have a huge amount of tactile feedback. There’s a dedicated numeric keypad, which makes data entry easier, and several multimedia shortcut keys.

We felt the touchpad was slightly too small but it was smooth and very responsive. Our main concern was the single see-saw button, which had a noticeable dead spot in its centre. Even so, we only noticed it occasionally failing to register clicks, so it’s something you’d quickly get used to.

There’s no Blu-ray player, but the DVD re-writer is useful for watching standard definition films as well as burning home movies and backups. On top of this there are three USB ports, two of which are USB3, a multi-format memory card reader and integrated Bluetooth.

With a second generation Intel Core i7-2630QM processor and 4GB of RAM, performance is fantastic. The processor runs at 2GHz as standard, but can use Turbo Boost to speed up to 2.9GHz when some extra grunt is needed. As it’s a quad-core processor, even multi-threaded programs shouldn’t be a problem. Our multimedia benchmarks loved the extra cores, as the impressive overall score of 78 shows.

Gaming horsepower comes courtesy of a dedicated Nvidia GeForce GT 540m graphics card. With a gigabyte of video memory, it flew through our Dirt 3 test at a smooth 41fps. As long as you’re prepared to disable the performance-sapping anti-aliasing, the GE620 is well-equipped to handle the latest titles. Considering it uses Nvidia’s Optimus graphics switching system, we were disappointed with three and a half hours’ battery life. At 2.4kg, the GE620 isn’t too heavy to take on the move, but you’ll probably need to take the rather bulky power supply if you do.

Image quality on the 15.6in screen was decent; the 1,366×768 resolution is enough for web browsing and 720p video, but you’ll need to connect an external display using the HDMI output to play 1080p content and make the most of the powerful graphics card. Colours were accurate for the most part and contrast was very reasonable, even if viewing angles were only slightly above average. There’s not a huge amount of screen tilt and the glossy finish could make it difficult to use in direct sunlight, but we were still quite impressed overall.

As usual, MSI provides a generous two-year collect-and-return warranty, which is better than the guarantee most laptops come with. Plus, this is a great price considering the amount of power on offer. There are other laptops with better battery life and slightly higher-quality screens, but the GE620’s fantastic performance, great range of features and comprehensive warranty mean few other laptops in this price range can match it.