MSI GX660R Laptop Review

Introduction

Laptops have have had a very hard life as a product.

In the early days they were very slow when compared to desktops and hideously expensive. Gradually as time has moved on they’ve split into two very distinct types.

There are the “free with a large fries and coke” ones that are fine for net surfing and that’s about it. Or, if you were willing to sell a kidney or two you could get a gaming laptop that has a battery life of about 3 minutes and would house a family of five.

For the former the modern smart phones are about the same price, but naturally much more useful and considerably smaller. Even a budget gaming rig will annihilate the latter for a nth of the money, and if you spend “gaming laptop” money on a desktop system you would probably end up with a solid gold case.

Enter MSI with their GX660 Laptop. Today in R guise. Available for right on the £1000 mark it promises a hell of a lot, being a good looking thing with a great spec-list and yet for about half the price of what a normal gaming-capable laptop would be.

So does that body write cheques that it can’t cash, or will you soon be writing cheques that MSI can cash?

Technical Specifications

Popping across to the MSI site we can see the GX660R comes with a hefty set of specifications. Our review model has a Core i5-460M CPU running at 2.5 GHz. Coupled to the Mobile HD5870 it’s certainly tasty on paper.

 

Basic specifications would actually be enough to be able to stop right here. For the money, that’s a good system. Of course things aren’t that simple thankfully, so let’s grab a look at the MSI close up.