MSI GX640-098US Review

Now that's the one I want! Thanks for sharing!

 

Yes the 6 cell will be perfectly flush with the rear of the chassis.

 

hey, nice review and thanks alot!

looks like i am good to go with the GX640.

 

Nope!
Clevo makes a 15" with a 5870.
It's slightly bigger and thicker but that's from the dual fan setup.
+ you can add a i7-920XM which brings perfomance to another level of insanity.

 

Is there a bay for a second harddrive? The SSD is tempting, but 160GB just doesn't cut it for me.

 

If I have the money for, does the SAGER NP8690 with hd5870+i7 720qm would be a better choise over the GX640?

Also, where is the best place to buy for a canadian, xoticpc, gentechpc, ncix or pccanada?

Thank you

 

Is it going to be sitting on your desk all the time or do you need some battery life? I've heard the 8690 is atrocious on battery life.

 

Yes battery life is horrible but performance is incredible.
It's more of a desktop replacement + it's pretty expensive so I'd be scared to take it out of my house anyway.
For a gaming laptop it offers the best performance and best cooling of ANY 15" laptop sold so far.

 

I think if it's just going sit on the deak, why not get a 17"? The 17" Clevo is a beast too, they get a hour to maybe an hour and 15 minutes maximum of battery (or so I've heard). 42Wh battery... Clevo really commits to the performance > portability thing.

If you're interested in a Sager you could go for aetsolutions which is in quebec.

EDIT: No second hard drive bay but you could use a optical drive hard drive caddy if you really want

 

Hey, no problem for the review guys. Thanks everyone for the +rep

 

Can you tell us what Windows 7 says the battery life is with the screen at minimum and max battery life settings? Thanks in advance!

 

Will try when I get home

 

min, do you know if the 640 comes with a hidden partition that can be used for a system restore to the factory default?

 

Yes, it does.

On max battery setting and screen turned to lowest, it says 2:40 for me on full charge. Although this may well change depending on what you have running in the background, and whether or not Win7 is busy trying to do things like system optimization (especially if the system is relatively new).

 

Can we get clock speeds on the 5850? Any chance of overclocking? The only difference I could find between the 5850 with GDDR5 and the 5870 is just a clock speed boost. If we can close the distance, the 640 seems perfect for me.

 

Yeah, the only difference is clock speeds. You'll probably be able to get HD 5870 clocks with the GX640, but I don't think you'll get 800MHz like some are getting in the ASUS G73JH, not reliably, and not without high temperatures.

 

Does it come with restore/Windows 7 discs as well? Thanks.

 

Sorry sir, there's no way in hell I'm overclocking this card. I am an engineering student going through school with no student loan and working in internships to pay off tuition, and the little bit I saved I put into things like laptops, so I can't risk frying this one.

Oh, and to the other poster, you are prompted to burn your own recovery DVDs.

 

Did you test some games on it?

 

There is MSI's 3 year warranty if you fry it

 

Ya, uh, no thanks.

 

Mind doing a furmark stress test to see how's the GPU temp? Interested to know how the cooling on the GX640 compare.

 

it's already been done, 92c on furmark

 

Hey Min thanks again for the review. Looks like you also purchased from NCIX. Can you confirm that it comes with the 3 year warranty? Cause NCIX doesn't list it.

If it does, what are the terms for the 3 years, is it shipping both ways and parts & labour?

 

you can just look up the warranty (by model) on the msi site. All the warranties no matter who you buy from will be three years. It's a manufacturer warranty, not a reseller one.

 

its a 3 year warranty and 1 year accendital no matter who u purchase from, as long as its new and regestered within 30 days

 

Min, how are you getting Windows 7 to show you the time remaining for battery life? Did you install something like BatteryBar or did you mean the default Windows thing? (mine only shows the % life remaining, not the time, but then again, this is on my Sager so maybe it's been disabled in the bios or something)

 

Mm... after I unplugged it I had to wait a minute or two before it calculated. I think there's a time delay.

 

Would you be willing to underclock by 1MHz on core and memory for some benchmarks? A lot of data I've seen suggests that there's something up with the performance when at stock clocks.

 

I think so too. I will try that tonight.

 

Thanks min, I was wondering the same thing as what cheese asked - I think that test would answer a lot of questions.

 

Something up with performance?

How so?

 

Two things - at stock clocks the GX640 gets a Vantage GPU score (performance preset) of only ~5k, and it was showing the PCIe as only 1x.

Unfortunately, the benchmarks done by Ken (from Gentech PC) were in the "late APRIL" thread, which seems to be gone now. In those, Ken did a very slight overclock which jumped the GPU score to ~7k. These benchmarks by Joseph from XoticPC show a similar result - overclocking from 625/1000 to 725/1100 jumped the GPU score from ~5k to ~8k. The latter is a little above HD 5870 clocks, which is in keeping with GPU scores of ~7.5k for stock clocks on the ASUS G73JH. Unfortunately, Vantage scores are the only useful comparison point I've seen between stock and overclocked GX640s; 3DMark06 is pretty meaningless nowadays. However, unless there's something weird about Vantage, a jump of ~60% in GPU score from a 16%/10% overclock suggests the GX640 is doing something weird when at stock clocks.

Joseph agreed with me: "I too am also confused how the scores jump up so much when you overclock the cpu. 5500 to 7635 is just too large of a jump for such a modest stable overclock. I will mess with the clocks a bit more to see what is causing such a great difference."
Note: he's taking about the total Vantage score here; I think the GPU score is more appropriate when we're looking at just a GPU overclock.

 

I've also seen people having issues with installing new catalyst drivers on it.. is there something up with the drivers in general?

 

Hmm... what should I try that with? AMD Clock tool allows me to change shader but not memory.

 

Will rivatuner work with the 5xxx series? It'll do memory and core clocking.

 

Tried that. Not compatible, doesn't recognize the 5xxx series.

 

That's strange; AMD clock tool ought to do the job. In any case, hopefully changing only the core clock should do the job.

 

Yeah core clocking up/down 1mhz should at least make it do the 1x/16x PCI thing... but I wonder if it is the core, the memory or the driver that is responsible for the weirdness.

Also kind of disappointing that the amd tool can't do mem clocks, you can take memory clocks much further than core and they have a much higher effect. What did justin use to overclock?

 

I'm pretty sure memory clocks have very little effect compared to core clocks for GDDR5 5xxx series cards, actually. I'm also quite sure that AMD clock tool is what everyone has used for the 5850 and 5870, and they've been able to set both core and memory clocks.

 

Can you test if it does more than 2 channels over HDMI? The only way to get 5.1+ on the gt62x is to use a spdif cable...

 

I am able to select up to 7.1 with HDMI output, but I don't have a 7.1 system to test it with.

Oh, found this on notebookcheck:

A special feature of the HD 5000 series is its ability to transmit HD audio formats (like Dolby True HD or DTS HD Master Audio) with up to 8 channels and 192 KHz / 24 Bit over HDMI 1.3a.

 

I tried the raising / lowering 1mhz deal with the 10.5 Catalyst, it didn't seem to have made a difference. Crysis at all very high, 1600x900, and 2x AA ran beautifully

 

You should be able to get 7.1 out of the 4 analogues and toslink converter too, but dont quote me on that i know its big brother can, and it seems the 640 is nothing short of awesome hehe.

 

I know and I did until the 3.5mm to toslink adapter I was using snapped in half. I'd rather use the much sturdier hdmi cable...

 

hey MIN does your heatsink area on the right side have 3 red slits or 2 also is there anything poking through, Also on this lappy is the the mobo on the bottom or near the keyboard. How do I add the pics so I can show it

 

here are the pics.

 

Where did FRAPS put your fps? 1600x900 + Very High is a very tall order.

 

Wait, 1600x900 instead of 1680x1050? Why the non-native resolution?

 

whoops .. double posted