-->*OFFICIAL: MSI GT627 Owner's Lounge*<--

try this

To resolve this problem, remove the affected filter drivers. To do this, follow these steps:
Click Start
, type regedit in the Start Search box, and then click regedit in the Programs list.

If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type your password, or click Continue.
Locate, and then click the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
Caution There can be many instances of the registry subkey that is mentioned in step 2. You must make sure that you are in the appropriate registry subkey before modifying the UpperFilters and the LowerFilters values. To verify that you are in the appropriate registry subkey, make sure that the Default data value is DVD/CD-ROM and the Class data value is CDROM.
In the right pane, right-click UpperFilters, and then click Delete.
Click Yes to confirm the removal of the UpperFilters registry entry.
In the right pane, right-click LowerFilters, and then click Delete.
Click Yes to confirm the removal of the LowerFilters registry entry.
Exit Registry Editor, and then restart the computer.
Note After you remove the UpperFilters registry entry and the LowerFilters registry entry, you may lose functionality in certain programs such as CD recording programs. In this scenario, you must reinstall any affected programs. If the problem recurs, contact the program vendor to determine whether an update is available for the program.

 

Cooling seems fine. I haven't done too much with it but last night I was running in-game performance tests with Company of Heroes. When you get 3D going, the fans kick on pretty fast... the heat that comes out the right exhaust is quite substantial but that keeps it away from your lap. Granted it's warm, but not uncomfortable.

 

BTW, what's FSX?

I've been running some tests with Company of Heroes (i know it's older but I love it and I missed it during my WoW days). I got a 30 fps INCREASE when I turned off the Directx10 shading. Rediculous.

 

Games are known to run better on the native resolution of a screen...but yeah, still odd.

 

Nobody has mentioned the backpack that comes with this. It's actually not bad for being "free". Could use some more support but overall it's very practical and not too annoying looking.

 

I'm currently going through the NBR vista tips/enhancement thread on here and it looks quite useful. I've never had Vista before so I plan on tweaking it out the best I can until Windows 7 is out.

 

I got the Fear 2 demo last night and ran it at 1280x800 with everything seemingly maxed out and it was shockingly smooth.

I'll be happy to run/test anything, I just need info on how to report the results. I never used any sort of benchmarking software before.

 

You can actually run FEAR 2 at 1680x1050 with everything on max... 1280x800 is just the default resolution from the hardware detection thing. Weird, I know.

Oh yeah, did you get to try bluray on battery last night?

 

Forgot, my bad. Will test tonight. Any particular player or just use what it came with? (it came with something, right?)

 

Rayan said that he would check temps later on before and after doing some gaming/benching.

Anyways.... heresy, but I think that I've decided almost entirely to just gamble on the 725 and ATI X11 drivers... either order it this afternoon or wait until monday morning allowing me the time to think about it over the weekend.

None of the non-MSI options (ASUS/Sager/Clevo) seem to be any better and are really worse from a size/weight and spec perspective for a similar price. (Well at least the Sager/Clevo configs that I've seen close to the price point use older generation and lower clocked CPUs...)

Yeah, the backpack looks OK, but I've already got one that I used for my Apple notebooks and the 1651 fit it nicely, so I'd expect that the 627 would as well, plus it's a more understated primarily black with silverish/greyish highlights... i.e. Would've rather had a mouse tossed in... OTOH if I do end up pulling the trigger on the 725 I'm pretty sure that it won't be fitting into my old notebook backpack as the 1651 was a tightish fit v. my Apple notebooks.

 

No problem. And yes, you will need to install a player as blurays won't play on GT627 out of the box... Found that out the hard way heheh. I didn't bother with the bluray player software disc included with the laptop and installed PowerDVD instead. I don't think the player makes that much of a difference, but if you use the player included with the laptop and works fine on battery, then I should try that too.

Thanks!

 

I didn't run any temp monitoring, but I did play Mirror's Edge on my lap for 3-4 hours. The laptop doesn't get too warm at all and was still very comfortable on the lap. The side vent does spew out warm air but it's not bad. (that might change in the summer, who knows =p) I even touched the side vent grills after the session and it doesn't feel hot at all, just warm to the touch. Overall I would say the cooling is pretty decent, and would be even better by changing the thermal paste to arctic silver based on other people's comments.

 

Okay let's discuss this thermal paste switcharoo. Where is it, how do I get to it, will it void warranty?

 

First of all, yes, it will void warranty since you need to open up the bottom of the laptop to gain access to the heat sinks. You can get arctic silver from most places, even amazon has it. Basically you would need to open up the laptop, remove the heat sinks, clean up the thermal paste that came with it, apply the new paste and put everything back together. I'm pretty sure there are plenty of guides on how to do that...

 

Honestly I haven't checked the temps with special tools or software...

But I can say that it doesn't really get much hotter than a normal laptop.

You could fry an egg on my old Asus G1S while playing games, really... I got really uncomfortable while using it on the lap even for simple tasks like web browsing in bed.

The GT627 is really comfortable to use on the lap even while playing. At first I thought the exhaust vent on the right was a bad idea, but it really doesn't get that hot at all... I've been playing at room temperature (at about 72F)

I really love it!

 

Yeah, I've been using that guide since it came out... Very useful and it does make Vista a lot faster and cool.

Cheers!
RayanMX

 

Well, sorry guys, I went all heretical on you and just placed my order for the GT725-074US from newegg. Just hope that the ATI X11 drivers are better than I'm expecting them to be or some good OSS drivers show up sooner than I expect...

Good luck with the 627s... (I almost chickened out and went gor the GT627-218US, but decided to roll the dice, as they say...)

 

Hey no problem cutterjohn!

I'll be checking your feedback on the GT725 forums...

Good luck and congrats for your new lappy!

RayanMX

 

The 725 is a great choice, I went with the 627 purely for its size and weight. I take my laptop to school everyday and its pretty much a half mile walk so i went with the 15 in.

I also dont know of the issue about the underclocking while unplugged was resolved. I dont mind not gaming while unplugged, but the video quality suffers as most movies i watch skip a lil bit and are off centered with the audio.

 

Great! Pretty please fill us in on X11 drivers when you get up and running. I'm in the same boat as you just not brave enough to get the GT725 yet. Linux support is very important to me.
I had an ATI card years ago and it was a pain to get FGLRX working especially with new kernel update or xserver updates. I hear things are better so I await your review

 

What about bios? Has anyone checked if the latest bios available from MSI is what they have on their 627?

 

Just a slight addenda, I only went for the el cheapo 3d UPS shipping so at best (if they manage to ship today) I won't be getting it until wednesday, otherwise it'll likely be Thursday.

The order's still sitting at the "charged" stage ATM. Anyways, now I need to see what I can hunt up about swapping in 64b Vista Home Premium in place of the 32b, or IOW some time this weekend I'll have to poke around MS' site and see what I can turn up, and email someone if I find nothing, as I'm just not going to tolerate a 32b OS on a machine that ships with 4GB...

(Also that may be another problem here with linux, as I think that I'm going to try installing the 64b version of Ubuntu 8.10, have a sneaky suspicion that this will make the driver situation worse though as earlier reports on P45M chipsets plus 64b linux seemed to all end in endless reboot cycles... even if it works and ATI's X11 support is flakey under 32b I'll bet that it'll be almost non-existent for 64b.. time to go back hunting up all this info this weekend I guess. I'll post about the 64b + P45M chipset here, as it'll apply to the 627 as well.)

 

I don't think you'll have any extra trouble out of fglrx in 64bit vs 32bit. Ati uses the same package for both. I don't remember having any trouble with that when I had an ati card.
Haven't heard of any problems with P45M. Assuming you are using an updated kernel I don't foresee any problems with the chip set.

Don't let the anticipation get the best of you =)

 

Sorry guys again, anyone having trouble changing settings in the bios? I get all the fields to say read only. Any special password?
Thanks for any help!

 

It shipped.

And in the meantime I was washing some dishes (manually), and since I'm lazy I let them most air dry so while waiting I was poking around for ATI X11 driver info and found a fairly large sub-forum @ phoronix.

The short of it is that ATI X11 drivers still seem to be pretty well half-baked. They're still reporting video playback problems, along with some other things like lack of X.org 1.6 support and linux kernel 2.6.29 support both of which will be required for Ubuntu 9.04. You'd think that by now ATI would've foudn someone who could actually write drivers, as I coming to agree with whomever it was that said ATI GPU are great hw, but only held back from their full potential by the lousy drivers.

Oh well, I'll haveit next week to see for myself, and if things ARE bad, I can at least for maybe 9.3 Catalyst will fix some things or there will be actually useful OSS versions of ATI drivers soon, i.e. that support more than 2D accel.

 

Sorry, saw your other post but somehow forgot to answer LOL

Well, that's really strange... So you didn't put a password there right?

I can modify pretty much anything in there (however I only changed the CPU Overclock to be at 20%) but I could change other stuff If I wish.

I don't know if upgrading the BIOS or at least flashing the same one would override the password. Worth investigating.

RayanMX

 

I do like that ATI has regularly scheduled driver releases. I'd bet they'll have X.org 1.6 support in time for Jaunty. It would drive me crazy that they don't already have support as I like to run Ubuntu starting with the first few alpha releases.

 

One thing that I forgot about mentioning until just now, is that when I had my 1651(GX620-038US clone practically), READEDID was failing under linux. i.e. I could ONLY select the native LCD panel size, 1680x1050 from the nVidia control panel.

Using the CLI readedid tools would also read all the VESA modes to 1028x1024 then crap out with an error message about suspect EDID implementation. There's a bug ticket in launchpad about this, and people with ATI cards also reported this problem, so it wasn't just restricted to nVidia hw.

Anyways the upshot was that any fullscreen wine wouldn't work as it almost always wanted to change screen res which it couldn't and so crapped out, OTOH my NATIVE linux games e.g. X2 and Devil Whiskey ran fine.

I stopped tracking this bug once it turned out that I was being refunded for my 1651, but suspect that I'll be adding to the bug entries again witht he GT725. (Actually I stopped really doing too much with the 1651 once it turned out that the keyboard/trackpad would lock out every so often and was more interested in seeing if MSI could release a BIOS/fw patch to fix it, which they apparently did right after I got refunded... oh well good in some ways, but bad in that I'm only just now getting a notebook that I meant to have last October.)

[EDIT2]
Here's the bug link
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg-server/+bug/194760
[/EDIT2]

Delivery is set for wednesday, March 4th. (It's at times like these that I wish that newegg still had USPS as a shipper, as I'd've likely been able to get it Monday since USPS doesn't take their delivery time range to be set in stone unlike FedEx and UPS which go out of their way to take the ENTIRE length of time even though they actually continue moving the package(s) just like the USPS although they tend to be slower moving them. I bet that by monday night the ed thing will be sitting and rotting in a warehouse about 100m south of me until early Wednesday morning... The usual pattern of UPS deliveries for me...)

[EDIT]
Also after some quick looking around at 32 -> 64bit arch upgrade for Vista, it's seeming to be unlikely at this point w/o spending more money. According to some articles that I read, since M$ has absolutely nothing to do with OEM copies, you are stuck going to the vendor(MSI here) to see about getting a 64b install disk + key, which I don't think that MSI supports. Only other options appear to be to buy a new retail copy(which M$ supports switching 32->64b apparently and is the one with the virtually free install disk mail-in or IOW you pay postage for the disk, c. $10) or OEM copy. Also from what I've read XP & Vista OEM copies aren't as safe to buy as they used to be as many apparently tie installation to particular vendor IDs and hardware configs and won't install on anything else, although I did have luck with an XP Pro copy, and had used an OEM win2k before that.

Still looking at this, as I found a thread here in the Thinkpad/Lenovo forum that I'm browsing ATM.
[/EDIT]

[EDIT3]
The 32/64b Vista install thread is
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=144783
[/EDIT3]

 

Fiexd the issue with the bios. Reflashed it with 1.0P and follwed the procedure MSI recommends and after the boot all was open! Very strange, first time a get a nb/pc that has that. Anyway now going for OSX install...

 

As far as I know the Intel 5100/5300 don't work in OS X. Let us know if you get the 9800m to work with full QE/CI

 

where do you saw it in UK ?

 

i thin k he saw mine lol

many shop are selling it go to google put gt725 in google shopping and u will see

 

I finally tested the bluray playback with battery. I used the Dark Knight. I can easily see what's up with this. The jitterying is annoying... but i will say it's not a dealbreaker when wanting to watch a movie on pure battery. That's me though.. this can easily kill the mood for other people. It's a shame it happens though,... yhou'd think it's fixable with a patch/firmware.

I tested it using the ECO Movie mode... assuming any other mode would be the same if not worse. Anyway, it's not THAT bad.. i wouldn't return this over that or anything... but it can be annoying.

I used the intervideo windvd8 that came with the computer as software.

Any other tests anyone wants me to do?

 

I'm not getting any indication on my battery light. I'm on battery right now and I have 39 minutes left apparently and my battery light isn't even on. Is that right?

 

Hmmm... On mine with PowerDVD it's actually pretty unwatchable, audio was fine but the video was like 1 frame / 3 seconds or something horrid. Jitterying annoying would be an understatement lol. Granted it's not a deal breaker for me, but it would be nice to have the ability to watch blurays on battery.

Could you try changing the minimum processor utilization from power management of "High Performance" on battery to 100% and see? That should improve quite a bit. Also, turning off the nvidia powermizer in the registry helped too. Maybe it will be more playable with windvd8 than powerdvd.

Thanks for trying!

 

Well, it should glow green when charging, dim when fully charged or using battery, glow amber when it's low (probably 5% or whatever level you set it to)... If it's not glowing when you have it plugged in and charging, the LED might be bad.

 

Everyone here is saying that Bluray playback is jittery. Has anyone tried playing a standard dvd movie or am I just getting the wrong impression?

And I know for a fact that in xp if you set your power scheme to "maximum power" when on battery, it speeds up the computer a lot. I would think vista has the option too right? I've used vista aplenty but never on a laptop.

 

so right now my battery is fully charged, it's plugged in, and the battery light is off, is that correct?

 

That is correct. It's like an indication for you to know that the battery is fully charged.

Also, DVD playback on battery looks fine. The problem is that bluray requires too much resources for the battery to handle...

 

Does the 9800m GS decode the blu-ray movie? If so, you may just need to force the video card to stock clocks when on battery using either Powermizer or a utility like Rivatuner. If I remember correctly, the CPU does do some of the decoding work, but it is mostly the video card (for modern cards, anyway). Then again, this may depend on the application you are using, and whether or not is is using the hardware acceleration. Media Player Classic (note that this is not a Microsoft product) allows a lot of changes with hardware acceleration and may be up to the job.

 

It takes both CPU and video card to help decode blurays. I already tried to turn off powermizer from the registry and set the minimum CPU utilization to 100% while on battery. That does bring quite a noticeable improvement on bluray playback, but it's still jittery and pretty much unwatchable. I have to say it's a vast improvement from normal battery mode though, which was like a slide show. And if hardware acceleration is turned off, it's just going to show a black screen.

 

@mark121

i noticed your running xp pro sp3 32bit. is there a massive performance gain running xp sp3 over vista hp 32bit?

 

oh and also anyone who owns this laptop. how do the hinges feel? strong and sturdy? because i had a dell and the hinge gave away and broke after about 4 years

 

Hinges are nice and strong. I'm not sure what to be looking for but it feels solid on mine.

I'm going to play around with some more blu-ray issues. It seems my playback on battery is better than anyone elses.. it's not un-watchable. I'm using WinDVD 8 (that came with the computer). I looked around in it last night and found some settings that may or may not help improve playback.

 

i'm going to be getting a gt627 next week and i was worried about the kb flex. also on other forums around the world people are worried about the flex. i got a question. will leaving the plastic film on the tape cause some problems? It might melt for the heat etc?

 

There isn't a significant difference in performance. Personally, I like Vista though.

 

@--SpikE--,

The hinges on mine also feel sturdy.

Also, the keyboard flex it's really easy to fix ( see my post here), I left the tape sticker on top so I can easily remove the keyboard if needed.

Oh by the way, for those interested on how this lappy performs with GTA IV I got this results when I used the GTAIV Benchmarking feature.

Statistics
Average FPS: 33.12
Duration: 36.98 sec
CPU Usage: 91%
System memory usage: 84%
Video memory usage: 87%

Graphics Settings
Video Mode: 1680 x 1050 (60 Hz)
Texture Quality: High
Render Quality: Highest
View Distance: 32
Detail Distance: 58

Hardware
Microsoft® Windows Vista" Home Premium
Service Pack 1
Video Adapter: NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GS
Video Driver version: 179.48
Audio Adapter: Speakers (Realtek High Definition Audio)
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU P8600 @ 2.40GHz

I used to think that by using lower resolution I'd get better framerates, but as you can see below, that's not really the case:

Statistics
Average FPS: 32.65
Duration: 37.25 sec
CPU Usage: 88%
System memory usage: 76%
Video memory usage: 84%

Graphics Settings
Video Mode: 1280 x 800 (60 Hz)
Texture Quality: High
Render Quality: Highest
View Distance: 32
Detail Distance: 58

Hardware
Microsoft® Windows Vista" Home Premium
Service Pack 1
Video Adapter: NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GS
Video Driver version: 179.48
Audio Adapter: Speakers (Realtek High Definition Audio)
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU P8600 @ 2.40GHz


As you can see, this laptop it's pretty capable if you ask me!!!

 

I was noticing the same thing with some of the earlier GT725 benchs in that lowering res did not SIGNIFICANTLY affect FPS... go figure...

Some of the games tested weren't all that GPU/CPU heavy either, so maybes it's something about how the video drivers/GPUs innately address the LCD panel?

 

I read somewhere on the forums that having more VRam didn't actually help much, but now I wonder if the 1Gb DDR3 VRam on the card more than compensate the higher resolution thus preventing drastic frame rate drop?

I remember that on my old Asus G1S which had only 256 Mb DDR3 VRam, if I decided to go to 1680x1050, many games dropped frame rates drastically.

Cheers!
Rayanmx

 

I received my GT627 this past Friday (02/27) and I absolutely love it! The keyboard flex was REALLY annoying to me. However, thanks to the instructions by Zangetsu57 and the pictures by RayanMX I applied the tape fix Saturday night and it made a WORLD of difference.

I love this lappy, especially since the last one I owned was a crappy Alienware Area-51 circa 2003/04 (had a removable ATI or nVidia video cards).

Granted, I basically only play WoW (occasional FPS but nothing current & Photoshop/Illustrator...) but I was able to play it at 1680x1050 with nearly everything cranked max ('cept shadows/ground clutter and one other thing) and get consistant 56-60 FPS in Northrend areas.

I love this thing, quality build, powerful and still highly portable. Also, the included backpack is quite nice; very underrated IMHO. Obviously, if you already have a nice bag this will probably seem average but it is nice enough that I don't feel the need to go out and buy one for the time being (aside from possibly getting a messenger style).

EDIT:
I forgot to mention, someone else here mentioned how sharp the screen is, I'll second that. It has a beautiful display.

-Aaron