Any news on the x460?

I'm wiling to try, jus need to find a caddy... It's supposedly different than other caddys

 

The warranty sticker is from MSi, and the MSi forum moderator says that you won't void your warranty just removing the sticker and doing standard upgrades, FWIW.

Agree that Windows bloats up pretty quick with each new service and TSR that gets added, as well as any added Anti-Virus and Firewall routines. But considering that a standard Windows 7 boot takes 8-10 times that long, and that a standard Windows 7 boot will also eventually have the typical additional delays from loading various crap, but that your crap will load in 1/8th to 1/10th the time, it's still a beautiful thing to imagine! Enjoy! And savour our jealousy!

 

Just a quick note that the stickers on my X460DX came off pretty easily, probably because they haven't been on all that long to begin with.

I just used a piece of flexible plastic ( a little thinner than a credit card: it was actually a plastic retail loyalty-program keychain fob). I took care not to ever bend the plastic 'back on itself' (if that makes sense) - so that the angle of the sticker peel from the metal wrist rest never exceeded 90 degrees, and warmed each sticker up beforehand for about 30 seconds with just a sustained thumb-press (I didn't use a hair dryer or anything really hot), and took my time. I began with the plastic edge pushing on a corner until I had enough loose to grip between my finger and the card edge, and took about 1 to 1.5 minutes per sticker.

It looks a lot nicer now. I thought briefly about doing the same to my i7 work laptop, and transferring the i7 sticker onto the X460DX to make people jealous, but then thought that would just be silly, and I like the clean look anyway.

 

I did the same, but without heating it up. Albeit it was a harder to do, there was some residue, but clean as a baby's bottom now. Looks a lot better too!

 

I remembered that a guy doing an eval of the X460DX (which had a great deal of measurements similar to those used by Notebookcheck.net) was gathering a lot of info a few weeks back, and so I kept checking back to Notebookcheck.net to see if they would ever post an X460DX review, but I never saw it listed.

Then I recalled that the guy doing it was posting his comments in Polish, so thought I would check out Notebookcheck.pl instead, and lo & behold, there was the review - likely there for several days now.

I got my *.ICM colour profile, finally (his display panel was by CPT also).

Just reading the rest now, but thought I would share the review with everyone here first.

Review, in Polish:
Notebookcheck.pl: Recenzja MSI X460DX

Review, translated to English by Google:
Google Translate

Enjoy!

 

I was able to get all the residue off, too, but then I noticed the stickers were covering up a groove in the aluminum palmrest. It's like the machining process left a deeper channel across one part of the plate than the others.

I've emailed Newegg to see if they would do an advance replacement for me. I don't want to lose the mail in rebate, if possible.

I've also been looking for a 14" LCD panel that might fit the notebook - but can't find any 1080P versions. Anyone know if they exist?

Also, has anyone found a caddy? I don't care if it doesn't match the notebook.

 

There's 1600x900 ones that are supposedly 40-pin, but I have no idea if they are compatible. Schenker notebooks have a 14", but I don't know its specs (but I think they were AUO 14 inchers), other than that the colour, contrast and brightness are excellent, if that's any help.

Supposedly a pencil eraser is good for getting the residual gum off. Hope that groove isn't an eye-catcher. Glad it worked so easily for you.

Do you have the URL for the NewEgg rebate? I could only find rebates for the X370 and older i5's and older i3 notebooks. Thanks!

 

I got all the residue off. The groove is more of a skin-catcher than an eye catcher. It's scratchy on my right hand in particular.

Here's the link to the rebate
Newegg Rebate Center
http://images10.newegg.com/uploadfilesfornewegg/rebate/SH/MSI34-152-276Sep8Sep1411jy59.pdf
If you ever need a rebate from Newegg, go to the homepage, and check the rebate center.

 

Thanks - I saw that before on the US site, but it's never been on the Canadian site, and the US form says 'US only'... I guess it can't hurt to try. They're selling a 'US Only' version of the X460DX (the 006US).

 

Sorry. Hope you can find it.

 

Did the ICC profile of his improve the screen quality? Tell us more

 

Anything higher then 1366x768 is likely never going to happen with this laptop unfortunately. Anything higher then that rez requires a dual channel LVDS cable. The best we could hope for is maybe a better 1366x768.

I'm sad that the notebookcheck review didn't test the contrast ratio. I found a datasheet that says the panels contrast ratio should be 500:1 which would be pretty decent for a laptop. I was trying out a latitude e6420 with the 1600x900 screen and was really turned off by the poor blacks. Watching a dark scene in a movie was unbearable.

 

It didn't really help with the contrast, but it helped a bit with the colours. Yellow-ey Greens are a speck challenging to differentiate still, and near pure whites still get a speck blown our at the very top end, but colours are generally better than the best I could do previously (without the profile).

Gotta send (taking off).

 

Just a continuation from my last post (flight attendant made me disconnect).

Before I applied the new ICC (actually *.icm) profile, I reset all colour adjustments back to defaults, so none of my efforts buggered up the new profile.

Note that I still had to do the 'Windows' completely subjective colour calibration process just to adjust the gamma down a bit (as I did before). Also, a word of warning to anyone that's never done this (applying device colour profiles) before: for monitors, always expect things to generally look 'browner and darker' (although it will be warmer, and certain shades will be darker, the whole image won't be darker, just parts of it: that's just the reaction most people have). The reason is that to make the screens look their brightest and punchiest, the contrast and colour balance get tweaked to ridiculous & barely usable, because it looks more impressive on a retail chain floor and sells more product.

Colour was excellent afterwards though, especially skin tones and slight 'off neutral' casts (colours that are supposed to be a little different from dark greys or off-whites or neutral greys). Generally, the colours are completely usable now, whereas before (after my own efforts) they were tolerable, IMHO. Prior to my own calibration efforts (in other words, out-of-the-box), it looked a bit on the crappy side. Now we have the real thing.

I still have a problem (as I did on my own before) getting anything extremely close to white to not effectively 'show up as white' (in other words, I want to see a difference, but this doesn't show a difference). Maybe that is a limitation of the brightness or contrast limitations of this, although I personally don't find the contrast to be too bad, but this is the first time I've ever had a 'glare' display. All my prior LCDs and CRTs had non-glare coatings, but my experience at least includes about 5 or 6 LCD panels (about half of them being higher-end) and 6 or 7 CRTs (ViewSonic and Mitsubishi and one NEC, all top-end), plus all the Thinkpads and Dell laptops I've used at work: I do imaging for my day job.

And as mentioned (and now confirmed by the notebookcheck.net gamut coverage chart), there are a few colours that aren't as well supported for this display, and one that keeps showing up for me are yellow-ey greens.

But as far as practical colours you will see, this display is fine. Few laptop displays actually can show and differentiate a really broad range of subtle colours and tones, but this one is fine - just realize that you are not seeing everything. Most stand-alone consumer displays behave similarly anyway.

The only way to see it all is to get a 'Wide-Gamut' (or Adobe RGB) panel, and I doubt that would work using the connector cable (someone posted somewhere that most laptop LCD panels actually only show something like 14 of the 24-bits of an image?). the next best thing is to find a display that comes extremely close to covering the whole sRGB range, which is a fair bit smaller than ARGB (Adobe). Anyway, with a wide-gamut display, it really should be calibrated regularly, so to avoid that routine nuisance, I'm fine with running the closest I can get to sRGB, and if not that, then a display optimized to make the most of its limitations (which is what applying the *icm profile will do for you). Eventually it will drift from that calibration, but you're still usually better off with it than without it.

So I'll keep checking whenever I have time for a better compatible 40-pin display, but for now, I'm happy enough with this. I can do a good enough job with photos and videos and design work, and hopefully that feedback will suffice for any other concerned readers of this thread, and put their minds at ease too. Apologies for the long post!

 

In my opinion trying out different notebooks w/ diff screens, 1-4 being horrible, 5-6 being decent, 7-8 being good and 9-10 being IPS/95% gamut of Sager or the screen of Sony Vaio Z1.

I had the Thinkpad x120e and T420 and those 2 had terribad screen where the colors looks so dull and washout where I rate them about 3 or 4 out of 10.

X460DX screen is not perfect but it's not too bad and I rate it 6/10.

 

I agree with benchmade. I just got my x460dx a few days ago. As much as I wish the screen on it was a lot better, comparing it to a lot of other laptops it's not bad at all. Actually i'm a little sad that so many people are not even looking at this because of the screen. Not sure what they think they are going to get elsewhere for the price. The contrast and viewing angle could be better, but i'm so happy the colors aren't dull and washed out like so many other laptops on the market. With some slight tweaking, the colors are actually pretty good. I haven't tried the ICC profile, or used my spyder to calibrate it yet, but that should only improve my experience. The 6 our of 10 is right where i'd place it as well.

Also thank you Wumpus for the long posts regarding the icc profile, and this thread should probably be converted into the x460dx owners lounge...

 

Just updated an information about a caddy. Check it out

 

link please?
NVMD: http://forum.notebookreview.com/msi/612199-hdd-caddy-msi-x460dx.html#post7925321

Still would like to know which one you bought.

 

Hey guys, got my replacement x460dx and it the display has no dead pixels. In addition to that, the bezel to the right of the screen isn't loose like the last one which caused it to scratch itself against the palmrest, causing ugly cosmetic damage to the bezel.

Beating Crysis 2 on it at Gamer settings and it hit 82 degrees celcius at worst. Temperatures seem good.

 

ForumNewb: Sounds like you got a winner this time!

So glad to hear.

Gonna probably pull the trigger on DCS-A10C tonight, which also has some really nasty requirements. Hope my box fares as well as yours on another demanding title. Enjoy! If anyone's interested, I can post framerates and settings, although it might take a few days just figuring out how to taxi!

 

Awesome ForumNewb!..Glad to hear that as well. And i'd definitely at least like to hear how playable DCS-A10C is. Honestly, didn't expect the 540m to perform as well as it has when i pulled the trigger on the x460dx. But I haven't found anything I couldn't play.

 

I ordered an X340 awhile back with $100 MSI rebate offer and received the rebate with no problems. A VISA Gift Card, if I recall, with something like $90 because I opted for the $10 "rush" processing so I would get it right away.

 

I have left one in for a few days now, and it doesn't seem too sensitive to being 'popped out' accidentally. Thanks MrRebeLs for the info: I agree that it is just 2-3 mm sticking out.

I'm trying ReadyBoost on this box, because we had a sale recently on Kingston Class 10 SD Cards (16GB) for under $20. I dedicated 8GB for ReadyBoost.

Unfortunately, mine failed the ReadyBoost test (yet blew away all the memory card benchmarking utils for reads & writes from 50K through 15MB), so I had to hack Windows registry to accept my card and use it anyway.

Working great since. Only difference noticed is that dialogs open snappier.

 

Anybody have a trouble with mic and the webcam? I reinstalled windows 7 ultimate and I could not video chat on skype and it does not recognize the mic and webcam. I could not download the drivers on the website because it says mic is already included in driver?.. Please let me known if somebody has a same problem or has a solution

 

I also reinstalled Win7, and added *all* the drivers and almost all the apps/utils, and the webcam worked flawlessly (I use it exclusively for logins, although I had to take 64 face photos under different lighting conditions to get it that reliable!).

Haven't tried the mic, but a notification pops up succesfully telling me everytime I plug something in or unplug something into the headphones jack, so my hunch is that the audio driver is working. I will check the mic functionality out tonight.

Got mine from MSiMobile.com. Make sure you select (and keep checking) whether you are downloading 64-bit or 32-bit, because my session kept resetting to 32-bit after each download. Perhaps you downloaded the 32-bit Realtek and Camera drivers.

MSI Global ? Notebook - X460DX

Near the top of the list (where it says 'Select OS') you can filter the list to match only your OS...

 

Try Wumpus' suggestion on the realtek driver. I also reinstalled Win7 and didn't have any issues getting the mic to work.

For the camera, use the keyboard shortcut to enable the webcam (Func + ?? dont have it in front of me). It might be turned off or disabled by default because it was on mine too.

When I did that for the first time, windows 7 went through the "new hardware found" and automatically installed the drivers.

 

My video works now!, that was very simple.. haha
but my mic still doesn't work.. i guess i need to drive more drivers

 

My mic started working with the install of the Realtek drivers.

 

I have heard of the mic problems if you don't have the drivers installed. I personally have always installed the drivers straight off, so I never even tried the mic or anything without them.

 

Verified tonight that my mic is working fine (recording sounds), as well as playing back and detecting jack changes (which I already knew). You need to first enable it under 'Recording Devices' (displayed when right-clicking the speaker icon in the task bar), then adjusting the volume/sensitivity slider (and mute switch) under the 'Open Volume Mixer' dialog (found the same way).

This sound card implementation has a really powerful Mic boost feature (more than most, IMHO) that should work fantastically for Skype calls. Unfortunately, it does also pickup feedback easily too (that's when I really knew my mic was working: I nearly blew my ears out when I enabled the Mic after cranking the Mic boost!). You can enable and adjust the Mic Boost independently of the Mic sensitivity.

You also will need the Realtek driver, which is a combined 32/64-bit OS driver. Don't forget to adjust the overall volume levels (Fn + Right Arrow and Fn + left Arrow, and Fn + End for toggle).

 

Glad you got it working!