Gadgetory

all right guys so I'm here in my room in the Palms Hotel in Las Vegas I'm just looking out the window right now so you can't really see much from the window here but I guess what do you really expect to see there's an Eiffel Tower you're sort of over there I guess that's not too bad there's the Rio all right so I'm gonna sort of head back over here where I'm going to be doing a surprise unboxing so this is an MSI notebook this is part of their GX 660 R series and I'm gonna tell you guys all about the spec of this particular model coming up live from CES 2011 now I'm not really live in Las Vegas all right so it's only fitting I break the seals on this bad boy with the killer neck killer neck killer NIC heatsink that I got at the MSI overclocking event today so we're gonna go ahead and break this open I did not bring my unboxing knife with me because I did remember about how I had it confiscated last time I tried to take it on an airplane so yes lesson learned and I will not be repeating that mistake so as a GX okay with GX has the first two letters of the part number here it's fairly obvious already that this is a gaming series notebook so I can tell you guys right now that it uses a core i7 processor it supports up to two internal two and a half inch hard drives up to 12 gigs max of ddr3 memory and it also has a powerful Radeon HD 5870 graphics card so let's see how much of that in MSI is going to cover on the outside of the box for us it looks like most of the features on here are things that I covered already you can see the exclusive three times ddr3 a sodium slots for maximum 12 gigs of ram with the way that prices are coming down on ddr3 that may be a very possible thing that you can upgrade this particular model with we've also got mxi exclusive TDE plus that is turbo drive engine plus technology for increasing the speed of your CPU and GPU about that as well over here all right we've also got yeah that I mentioned before so it comes by default with dual SATA hard drives in raid zero but what I would really recommend for a notebook like this and I'm probably going to outfit this one with this particular setup would be changing one of the drives to a an SSD and then using the other drive as a storage hard drive we've got an HD webcam supporting 720p with 30fps as well as support for USB 3.0 now seven fight Dynaudio that's kind of an interesting interesting thing to call out on a notebook because honestly I've been complaining about notebook audio for years and it's good to see that there's not only MSI but there's actually a couple companies that are really working towards addressing what has been just a glaring omission in the notebook market and that is a notebook that is really designed to deliver good quality sound whether you're running it off the speakers or off of some headphones so here's the overall spec of this particular notebook and stop setting particularly now sorry about that guys and this is in French so while I could do it in actually sure why not okay so the color is black black grey and black the screen is a 15.6 inch 1920 by 1080 P they're calling it the layer type although that's not very flattering I think what they mean to say is glossy or vibrant we have an Intel Core i7 740 QM processor with dual 320 gig hard drives in raid 0 those are 7200 rpm drives this is a performance model so it's all about performance we've got 6 gigs of ddr3 running in triple-channel and we have a blu-ray combo drive so that's pretty cool Wireless has we've got Bluetooth and wireless n we have Windows 7 home premium 64-bit and the battery is a 9 cell battery which for a gaming model I guess it better be if you're hoping to have any kind of reasonable battery life and it looks like looks like French people don't get to know that the VGA is an ATI Radeon HD 5870 one gig DDR 5 i I really don't think that was on the French side check that out yes it's not there so why don't we go ahead and get our our killer seal breaker here and let's get this thing opened up here we go if I can figure out how to open the box which I have done on a number of occasions with various products as you guys may or may not already be aware let's see what we got inside here so as usual reduce accessories first that looks like the notebook is there and maybe these are little MSI ends actually that's probably just for packaging stuff so we have our accessory box just gonna move this so that we can get the best possible light I know the lighting is not ideal here but I wouldn't be me if I didn't unbox things anywhere and everywhere so the first thing we find is a power cord next we find an AC adapter so that's where that power plate is going to plug into it is pretty large but if you expect that on a gaming model because there is a lot of power that needs to be delivered I'll tell you guys what this thing's rated for in just a minute here so this guy is rated for 19 bolt out put and up to six point three two amps so that would be well over the maximum of what I would expect this notebook to draw it's actually not that heavy for such a large power brick here I'll give you guys my my iPhone for comparison if I can find it I apologize for the state of my room here I just kind of threw my things down on the everywhere when I walked in so here's my iPhone for comparison okay so it's a little bit longer than an iPhone it's about the same width and in terms of thickness there you can compare that as well so hopefully that helps all right we've got some discs here we've got drivers manual and utilities we have a blu-ray and DVD solution okay so we have playback in Britain suite for multimedia systems pretty cool we have a Windows 7 home premium thing I'm just going to make sure my serial number is around there because last thing I need is no serial number for this particular notebook that I did it again f3 hotkey recovery function so let's find out what this is the purpose is to restore the system back to the factory default settings with f3 hotkey always backup important data before using the f3 hotkey recovery that's a very good idea so there you go so they've apparently made it quite easy to restore the system to factory defaults which is great if you're like mining a system like this for your mom and you don't want to go over there every time she has some kind of a problem ok maybe your mum's a gamer my mom isn't but you never know it's still a good feature to have in their notebook line regardless of which notebook model we're talking about so here we have a Quick Start Guide which covers the basics as well as some common operating features so here let's show you guys what kind of features we have with the function keys so we can enable or disable a touchpad we can change our output we can turn on or off the Eco engine which I'm assuming is going to preserve some power we can enable or disable our webcam wireless LAN Bluetooth 3G I don't think that's going to function in Canada not 100% sure about that we can adjust brightness volume as well as our mute so that's how we can change things about the system with the function keys while we are operating it with a little warranty summary here so it looks like it is a 24 month 2 year warranty in the United States and Canada here is AC e complaints booklet which I've never seen before and I'm not even remotely interested in so next we have our 9 cell battery and we're almost there guys we're almost there here's our 9 cell battery it's rated for 7800 milliamp hours and finally we are ready to take the notebook out of the package so I actually just arrived in Las Vegas this morning I had an MSI event today I went to an OCC event today as well also had a steel serious thing to do and then tomorrow is another very full schedule I'm gonna try and get as many videos uploaded while I'm down here as possible but it's sometimes a bit of a challenge and I might have to wait till I'm back in Vancouver really give you guys the full update MSI has come such a long way in terms of their shell design this is just really slick looking you've got kind of a neat scaled finish going on up here hopefully you guys can see that okay and then the the top of the notebook is no I wish I wasn't getting sort of weird reflections off it there we go so the top of the notebook has kind of an angular shape to it kind of like a stealth fighter and it is a glossy black finish and then we've got a little chrome accent here that I love chrome accents there you guys know a little something about means another one there I love that okay so let's go ahead and sort of turn it on its side let's see what we're gonna find here so we're gonna find a vent pull up two USB 3.0 ports that's outstanding actually we have an SSD slot as well as a USB 2.0 I hope I didn't say 2.0 I meant 3.0 they are color-coded blue and they have a little SuperSpeed logo above them and then finally we have an Express yeah whatever that is it's a PCIe or whatever expansion slot that you probably won't use but you'll be kicking yourself if you don't have one and you do need something for it here on the back we're gonna find pretty much the usual fare a Kensington lock covered ventilation hole so that's kind of that's kind of peculiar I wonder if they're using the shell for another model as well that does require ventilation over here interesting to say the least here we have our power in as well as our land we do have support for VGA as well as HDMI video out and we also have an eSATA port on the back finally moving around to the other side Hey look at that looks like we've got dedicated jacks for 5.1 audio out as well as a microphone that's pretty cool so they really are taking audio seriously on this model we've got another USB 2.0 port I love having one on the other side just in case you want to run a mouse off this port or if it's not convenient to have it up against the other side so that's a really nice thing to see and then here we have our blu-ray combo drive which is nicely angled with the shape of the overall notebook alright let's have a quick look at the bottom although I'm not gonna let you guys see that just yet so that my product key can remain not all over YouTube and I'm just going to install the battery really quick here and I'll rather I'll show you guys how to install the battery so you just put that in there lower it in and that's it you've installed the battery so I'll show you guys the bottom of the notebook here you can see that we have easy access to upgrade the RAM as well as the optical drive as well as the hard drive so just by pulling off this whole plate you can get access to pretty much the entire internals of the notebook for user upgrades and you can bet that I will be doing some user upgrades on this guy we've got what appears to be a speaker I guess that's a subwoofer actually so please correct me if I'm wrong but that looks like a subwoofer on the bottom of this notebook that's a pretty cool feature all right so let's have a look at the inside here okay so it's covered in plastic so we won't have any problems like getting damaged and shipping here's our HD webcam up here at the top I'm going to go ahead and remove this and you guys can come along for the ride because I don't have a can then it sort of conveniently and shots for me when I need it and all that good stuff so I'm pulling all of the protective film off oh my goodness I'm undressing it oh yeah let's see what this says got a question or problem contact MSI customer service good thinking okay so here you can see that the screen is quite glossy you can clearly seeing me in the reflection off the screen oh there's your microphone for the webcam so it's right up there once again we've got a sort of some chrome accents up here chrome accents down here love that overall a glossy black finish and then there's also some matte black accents in here as well so I'm going to go ahead and remove this as well hopefully I can get a fingernail under that and I can lift that up there we go so there are our our stereo speakers and here's their sound by Dynaudio again I'm just gonna try and get an angle here where you guys can see it more easily and you don't have so much reflection off of my lamp but I also don't completely block my light as well so here why don't we do that that's not a bad angle okay so let's get in here so we've got our two point one speaker set up so that looks like two speakers up here one subwoofer down in the bottom we've got our power switch here as well as a nice chrome and the side logo we've got some buttons up here which looked to be touch sensitive buttons are either got or these are just indicators so I'm gonna have to find that out for you guys and I'm gonna be giving you guys my full impressions on this notebook once I have a chance down here and CES I don't know how realistic that is but once I do get back I'm gonna tell you everything that I have to say about this notebook overall build of it seems so far quite sturdy although it's really hard to tell until I've really typed a lot on the keyboard and really played around with the shell opened it up in terms of keyboard layout it looks pretty strong so far this is not a bilingual layout I hate bilingual layouts to be perfectly honest with you guys I've got a properly positioned shift key I have a short shift key here but I don't mind that because it would be very rare that I would actually reach over here to hit the shift key it's much closer here so I really like this design choice that they've made here to put the arrow keys there to condense the keyboard to give me a number pad because I do actually work on my notebook even though it is a GX gaming notebook yeah I'm still gonna do some work so it's great to have a number pad if I have to do any data entry the enter and backspace keys are also the appropriate size and look at this I've got conveniently highlighted WASD keys so yeah yeah there's a lot Gaming focus in there for sure we have one Windows key here and then we do not on the other side but that doesn't really bother me very much and I think that's pretty much all I need to say about the keyboard the touchpad uses kind of a textured finish so you shouldn't get too much grease built up I don't really like very very smooth touch pads and I'm glad to see that everyone seems to be pretty much moving away from that same thing here we've got a bit of a glossy shiny chrome finished outer portion here but the actual buttons themselves are using like a brushed finish so that they're not going to be too bad in terms of finger magnetism and you've also got a little bit of a grip on it so you can really feel where your finger goes without it sliding off or anything like that we've got some stickers here something about ATI mobility Radeon HD 5870 graphics Windows 7 core i7 Energy Star and DTS surround sensation PC look at that I wonder if what are these hmm interesting okay well we've got another little summary of the technology that's present in this notebook although I've covered that already and I think that pretty much concludes my unboxing I'm gonna take a moment and actually fire it up here with you guys there we go we've got an MSI boot screen we've got appears to be Western Digital 320 gig drives in raid 0 you can see they are configured in the raid BIOS that's such a cool feature being able to have raid in a notebook I mean you could even throw two SSDs in here throw those in raid zero and get just crazy speed for a notebook I'm also going to play around in the near future I'll do another video for you guys I want to play around with the overclocking feature for the CPU because I will be using this notebook for some video rendering and I want to find out how much of a performance improvement I can get by overclocking the CPU so there we go were fired up and I'm gonna spend some time now to do some setup thank you for checking out my unboxing of the msi GX 660 R 0 6 0 us this is a core i7 and mobility Radeon HD 5870 gaming notebook