Review: MSI GE60 2OE

Tested

Review: MSI GE60 2OE

Gaming notebooks used to be a rare bunch due to the fact that they drain power like nobody’s business and can be used as capable room heaters. Fast forward to the here and now and we have almost every major brand coming up with their own spin on the gaming notebook concept, courtesy of more efficient and powerful components. MSI is more of a recent entrants to the party but, based on what we’ve seen, its products can compete with the rest of the bunch with multiple gaming notebook designs catering to a variety of gamers. The GE60 2OE belongs to MSI’s G-Series gaming lineup and is second only to the GE70. Does this live up to its bigger brother? Let’s find out!

Knight Rider
Like its fellow G-Series gaming notebooks, the GE60 2OE adopts a black-red paintjob. The chassis looks well-built though it does flex when you apply force to it. The lid is glossy, which means it will gather smudges and fingerprints, so you might to keep a cleaning cloth handy. The palm rest – made from aluminium – also gathers smudges too, oddly enough. It’s probably because of the black paintjob that makes them more obvious. Again, you might want to clean it often lest you get a nasty illness. Starting at 2.4kg, you can carry the notebook around in your backpack for short periods of time. However, if you’re a mobile warrior it might not be to your liking.

Cold Steel
Notebook keyboards can be a hard thing to get right, so MSI used gaming peripheral brand Steelseries to do that part instead of trying to wing it in-house. So far, I would say that the collaboration has paid off. The keys offer decent travel and are evenly spaced, resulting in a more comfortable typing experience. There’s no odd key sizes either so no re-learning of keyboard layout required. A number pad resides on the right side thanks to the large size of the notebook. This means churning paperwork should be no issue with this keyboard. While it comes backlit as well, it glows only blue and not the rainbow palette found on the higher end G-Series notebooks.

Finger Finesse
Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the trackpad. Multitouch gestures are iffy, sometimes registering and, on many occasions, not. The lack of mouse buttons is a bit of a problem personally as I need some form of tactile feedback to know the clicks register. I rather have that old style click instead of the shallow dip the trackpad on the GE60 2OE offers. Then again, I’m pretty sure that most of you will not use the trackpad in lieu of a proper mouse, so I’m willing to overlook that niggle.

Portable Powerhouse
Of course, what is a gaming notebook without powerful innards? An Intel Core i7-4700MQ processor is the brains of the operation that comes coupled with 8GB of DDR3 RAM to make things speedy. A 128GB RAID 0 SSD contains the operating system while a 1TB hard drive stores all your games and media. Gaming chops comes in the form of an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 765M. Oh, there’s also a DVD drive thrown in for good measure. It is slightly unfortunate that it’s not a Blu-ray drive. That, I feel, would have paired well with the 15.6in matte display, which has a maximum resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels.

More of a Sprinter
With such potent parts, the GE60 2OE is expected to deliver. And it does! The notebook nailed it on PCMark 8 (as you’ll find out in the sidebar) and in Batman: Arkham Origins, it scored an average 87fps on 1080p with most of the Ultra eye-candies enabled. Thanks to the SSD, booting to Windows 8 took seconds. Suffice to say, this notebook will blaze through whatever you throw at it, whether it be web browsing, word processing, gaming or video editing. Sadly, as expected from a product like this, battery life is not very encouraging, consuming 82% of juice in a span of 1 hour and 16 minutes. You may have to search high and low for power sockets when you travel should you choose to bring it along.

Plug ‘Em In
The large size of the GE60 allows for quite a bit of expansion options with multiple connector ports found on both sides of the notebook. On the left, you’ll find the mic and audio jacks, a trio of USB ports (two of which are USB 3.0) and a HDMI port. As for the opposite end, there’s a lone USB 2.0 port with a VGA connector and an RJ45 plug. By the way, the notebook’s networking capabilities are enhanced with Killer Gaming LAN, which prioritises gaming latency and video streaming over other network activity.

Hot Topic
The GE60 2OE suffers from a common problem found in large gaming notebooks – heat. It kicks in when you perform intensive tasks like gaming and benchmarking, and you will definitely notice it as the fan whir into overdrive with a warm stream of air coming from the vents on the left. While the fan sound is not annoying, it is noticeable so take note of that. All in all, you’re getting a powerhouse capable of playing the latest and greatest titles without sacrificing on portability.

Dimensions: 383 x 249.5 x 37.6 – 32.3mm
Weight: 2.4kg
Display: 15.6in, 1920 x 1080 pixels
Processor: Intel Core i7-4700MQ
Memory: 8GB DDR3
Storage: 128GB RAID 0 SSD + 1TB SATA HDD
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 765M
Optical Drive: SuperMulti DVD
Operating System: Windows 8 Pro 64-bit