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 uh I guess what do you really expect to see there's an Eiffel Tower
sort of over there I guess that's not too bad there's the real all right so
I'm going to 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 660r series and I'm
going to tell you guys all about the spec of this particular model coming up
live from CES 2011 no 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 Nick heat snc that I got at the MSI
overclocking event today so we're going to 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 air airplane so uh yes lesson
learned and I will not be repeating that mistake so as a GX okay with GX as 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 2 and 1/2 in 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 M 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 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
with we've also got mxi exclusive TDE
plus that is turbo drive engine plus technology for uh increasing the speed
of your CPU and GPU we've got a sticker 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 30 FPS as well as support for USB
3.0 now sound VI Dine Audio 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 a a layering Omission in
the notebook market and that is uh 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 I'm going to stop saying particular now
sorry about that guys and this is in French so while I could do it and
actually sure why not okay so uh the color is uh black black gray and black
the screen is a 15.6 in 1920 x 1080p
they're calling it glare 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
zero 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 uh 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 58701 gig
ddr5 I I I really don't think that was on the French side so go ahead and 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 we be accessories first so it looks like the
notebook is there and got little maybe these are little msim m's
actually that's probably just for packaging strength so we have our
accessory box I'm just going to 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 cord is going to plug into it is pretty large but you
do expect that on a gaming model because there is a lot of power 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 uh 19 volt
output and up to 6.32 amps so that would be uh 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 uh 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 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 a driver's manual and
utilities we have a Blu-ray and DVD solution okay so we have playback and
buring Suite for multimedia systems pretty cool we have a Windows 7 Home pre
thingy I'm just going to make sure my serial number isn't anywhere on there
cuz last thing I need is uh no serial number for this particular notebook
there 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 back up 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 buying 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 I mean maybe your mom's a gamer
my mom isn't but you never know it's still a good feature to have in their
notebook line uh regardless of which notebook model we're talking about so
here we have a quick 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 uh
enable or disable the 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 Len
Bluetooth uh 3G I don't think that's going to function in
Canada um not 100% sure about that we can
adjust brightness uh 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
we've got a little warranty summary here so it looks like it is a 24mon 2-year
warranty in the United States and Canada and here is a c compliance booklet which
I've never seen before and I'm not even remotely interested in so next we have
our nine cell battery and we're almost there guys we're almost there here's our
nine cell battery it's uh rated for 7800
milliamp hours and finally we are ready
to take the notebook out of the
package so I have actually just arrived in Las Vegas this morning I had an MSI
event today I went to uh an ocz event
today as well um also had a steel series
thing to do and then tomorrow is another
very full schedule I'm going to try and get as many videos uploaded while I'm
down here as possible but uh it's
sometimes a bit of a challenge and I might have to wait till I'm back in
Vancouver before I can 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 uh the top of the notebook is oh 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 biter 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 me there's another one there I love that okay so let's go ahead
and sort of turn it on its side and let's see what we're going to find here
so we're going to find a vent pole oh
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 the little super speed logo above them and then finally we have an
Express there we go uh whatever that is
it's 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 going to find
pretty much the usual Fair a Kensington lock a covered ventilation hole so
that's kind of that's kind of peculiar I wonder if they're using this 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 Lan we do have support for
VGA as well as HDMI video out and we
also have an EA 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 nice thing to see
and then here we have our blu-ray combo Drive which is uh nicely angled with the
shape of the overall notebook all right let's have a quick look at the bottom
although I'm not going to let you guys see that just yet so that uh my product
key can remain uh not all over YouTube and I'm
just going to install the battery really quick here or 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 got what appears to be
a speaker I I 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 with it getting damaged and shipping here's our
HD webcam up here at the top I'm going to go ahead and remove this and uh you
guys can come along for the ride because I don't have a cameraman to 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 see me in the reflection off the screen oh there's your microphone for
the webcam so it's right up there uh once again we've got 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 um hopefully I can uh get a fingernail under that and I can lift
that up there we go so there are our our
stereo speakers and here is their Sound by Dine Audio again I'm just going to
try and get an angle here where you guys can see it more easily and you don't
have so much uh 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 2.1 speaker setup 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 MSI logo we've got some buttons
up here which look to be touch sensitive buttons or either that or these are just
indicators so I'm going to have to find that out for you guys and I'm going to
be giving you guys my full Impressions on this notebook once I have a chance
down here in CES I don't know how realistic that is but once I do get back
I'm going to 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
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 going
to 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 wa as SD keys so yeah yeah there's a
little 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 uh textured finish so you shouldn't get too much grease built up I
don't really like uh 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 uh 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 um where your finger goes without
it sliding off or anything like that we've got some stickers here something
about ATI Mobility radon hd5870 Graphics
Windows 7 core i7 energy star and DTS
surround sensation
PC look at that I wonder if what are
these H 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 going to take a moment and actually fire it up here with you guys
there we go we got an MSI boot screen we've got uh appears to be
Western Digital 3 120 gig drives in raid
zero you can see they are configured in the raid BIOS that's such a cool feature
being able to have raid in a 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 uh in the near future I'll do another video for
you guys uh I want to play around with the overclocking feature for this 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 we're fired up and I'm going to spend some time now to
do some setup thank you for checking out my unboxing of the MSI GX
660r 060 us this is a core i7 and Mobility
Radeon HD 5870 gaming notebook