Hand-On with the MSI GT680R Gaming Notebook

MSI has been announcing quite an important number of multimedia and gaming-oriented notebooks recently, and during a local Intel event, that wanted to showcase the latest Sandy Bridge-powered notebooks to become available, we had the opportunity to spend some quality time with the company's 15.6-inch gaming notebook, the GT680R.

Much like almost any other gaming notebook, MSI creation also sports a colorful design that packs a series or red colored LED light meant to make the machine more attractive at LAN parties and other gamer gatherings.

But that's pretty much all the traveling that the GT680R will do, as the laptop weights a full 3.49KG, certainly not as much as the 3.85KG Asus G73JH, but enough to deter all but the most strong minded of users from carrying it around.

On the plus side, the high weight also means that MSI has an extremely well put together machine, although I can't say that I am a huge fan of the keyboard used in the GT680R.

As far as the hardware configuration of the laptop goes, the model that we got acquainted with was powered by an Intel Core i7-2630QM processor, which features four processing cores and comes clocked at 2GHz, paired with 8GB of DDR3 memory, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 460M graphics card.

This is used to drive the 15.6-inch Full HD display MSI installed while storage is provided by two SATA 7200RPM HDDs which, together, can store up to 1TB of data.

Other features include Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi b/g/n and Bluetooth connectivity, a 7-in-1 card reader, a 720p HD webcam, dual USB 3.0 ports, an eSATA port, HDMI and VGA video outputs and a 9-cell battery pack.



The audio system is THX TruStudio PRO certified and the notebooks also uses Dynaudio Premium speakers, but, sadly, the sound quality is average at best.

The recommended price for the MSI GT680R has been set at $1,649.99 US.