Thoughts and rating

On the face of it, MSI's good-looking CX640 laptop has most of the bases covered. £600 is a reasonable outlay for a 15.6in machine with an Intel Core i5 2410M chip, discrete GeForce GT 520M 1GB graphics card, 4GB RAM, USB 3.0, and 500GB hard-drive. The seamless switching between integrated graphics and GeForce is taken care of by NVIDIA's excellent Optimus technology, and battery life, via Intel's HD Graphics, is decent, hovering around three hours for movie playback.

But specifications are just one part of a modern laptop. MSI's build quality could be better, particularly for the keyboard and trackpad, which are both sub-par, and a little more care with the bundled software wouldn't go amiss. It's little touches like these that dictate a laptop's appeal, we think, and MSI would do well to take another look at what competitors such as Dell are doing in this space.

Final

The MSI CX640 plies its trade in a cutthroat market that demands excellence to stand out. With average integration of quality components, the laptop floats in a sea of mainstream homogeneity. Worthy of being put on a basic shortlist if you're after an all-purpose notebook, it's a a distinctly reasonable proposition at £600.

The Good

Aesthetically pleasing
Above-average speakers

The Bad

Keyboard and trackpad are below-par
Software bundle not the most intuitive to use

HEXUS Rating

MSI CX640 laptop

HEXUS Where2Buy

The MSI CX640 laptop is available to purchase from Scan.co.uk.

HEXUS Right2Reply

At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.

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I do believe that this review epitomises the saying “damning with faint praise” ;)

Very interesting to see Llano's integrated GPU giving a discreet nvidia card a pasting - pretty daming to Intel's graphics, really.

I was really surprised too until I looked up the 520M. I thought the 520M was a 420M with a clock bump, not unlike what the 525M is to the 425M. The 420M is not far from the 5650M (about 10% slower) so it wouldn't make sense for a speed bump to not bring it closer, if not match the 5650M.

Except that the 520M is more like a 415M with a clock bump. The 415M only has half the number of shaders compared to the 420M. Driver advantage aside, is probably slower than Intel's Sandy Bridge. Apparently, the 520M is only meant to compete with Sandy Bridge, and manage to be a bit faster (and again with better game compatibility). So the game has stepped up enough that the best IGP/“fGPU” can take on nVidia's worst.

Not to take away AMD's accomplishment, the Llano is ahead of Sandy Bridge in terms of GPU performance, and ACF will be very interesting once they get it to work properly (I am optimist in the same way that I was about SLI/CF in the early days when lots of people questioned if they would ever be viable). But it's fair to say that Intel is not left completely in the dust in such a way that it's hard to see them catch up with their next offering. None of the benchmark in this review shows a Sandy Bridge laptop (edit: actually, I am being silly - this MSI laptop *is* a Sandy Bridge - it would've been nice to seen the Intel GPU benchmarked too though). You can see here the difference between the the Llano, SandyBridge and the old Intel IGP (so far behind it's laughable): http://www.anandtech.com/show/4444/amd-llano-notebook-review-a-series-fusion-apu-a8-3500m/10

TooNice
I was really surprised too until I looked up the 520M. I thought the 520M was a 420M with a clock bump, not unlike what the 525M is to the 425M. The 420M is not far from the 5650M (about 10% slower) so it wouldn't make sense for a speed bump to not bring it closer, if not match the 5650M.

Stupid naming system is stupid. As is the company that devised it. :mad: