MSI GT725-212US Review

This is my first time in these forum and for some reason, I can't post in the actual reviews portion of the forum. Therefore, I figure this is the best place I can post this review. This is also the first review that I've ever done so feel free to comment knowing this beforehand. Thanks!

MSI GT725-212US Review
By Valen Celcia
Intro
The MSI GT725-212US is a newer model of laptop that MSI has started to produce. It’s focused on giving gamers a comparable laptop with high performance while diminishing the price tag that has become a staple with any gaming machine. This laptop certainly fits the bill as far as being affordable as well as giving high-end performance. The laptop comes with the following specs:
Screen: 17” (1920 x 1200) WUXGA Matte Finish
Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9000 2.0GHz 6MB cache
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon HD4850 512MB DDR3 VRAM Dedicated
Memory: 4GB DDR2
Hard Drive: 320GB 7200RPM SATA
Optical Drive: BD combo
Operating System: Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit
Wireless: 802.11n Wireless LAN
Battery: 9-cell Li-ion

Reasons to buy

As stated earlier, this laptop is meant to give hard-core gamers a laptop with the versatility of a desktop and portability without the high cost of one. This MSI is the priciest one of the bunch, topping out at $1,699, but other places list it as $1,599. This crushes any other laptop price of these same specs, such as an Alienware or Sager. Sager did have the NP5793 for a gracious price of $1,299, but, alas, it is no longer part of the line-up nor did it contain a quad-core processor standard. MSI is known as a top-rated brand of laptop, using the ever famous Clevo chassis. It’s also a sleek laptop, sporting red trim around the edge of the keyboard and front. Overall, an aesthetically appealing piece of machinery, even if the trim is a tiny bit outdated.

Build and Design

MSI did not choose to follow trends and go with a glossy plastic cover, but rather a brushed metal look. The plastic is solid and understated, giving the red strips a brighter feel. Open up the keyboard and you are greeted by a full keyboard plus number pad and a control strip on the top. The area around the touchpad and the mouse keys is of the same brushed metal type, giving a smooth surface with enough grip for your wrists to rest on. The touchpad itself is just right. Not too textured, but not too smooth. It doesn’t have an overlay for a scroll, but the right side is still used as a scroll bar. The buttons are not separated as usual, but are formed by an ‘S’ shape. They are not hard to press at all, but have a good amount of feedback and click. The keyboard itself is fairly easy to press with a little feedback, not so much as other Clevo models. There is a slight bit of confusion when getting used to the layout of the keyboard. For example, the ‘delete’ key is above the number pad and the backslash key is in between the left ‘alt’ key and the space bar. Also, the right ‘shift’ key and the arrow keys are smaller to make room for the four-column number pad. These are easy adjustments to make, however, and I have not had too much trouble with them. There is a bit of keyboard flex and screen flex, but not too much to worry about. It feels solid for as light as it is. Its weight is actually very light for its size and caliber, only 7.5 pounds as weighed for mine (They list it as 7.3 but it was closer to .5). The control panel in the front is easy to use and touch sensitive. The buttons are all pretty self-explanatory and there is touch key that is programmable for whatever the user defines it as. The screen itself is gorgeous and emits a perfectly clear picture. It’s not too bright, even on the brightest setting and all other settings are perfect if one is using the screen in a dark lit area. The matte finish helps cut out any glare that interferes with viewing perfectly. Tilted upward or downward, the screen becomes a bit darker, but colors are still vibrant. Side viewing is perfect with no bad angles. I noted some light bleed from the bottom on a blank screen but it’s nothing to worry about when in use. The whole screen is meant for the viewer and to be viewed.

Speakers

The MSI GT725-212US comes with a 7.1 channel surround sound set that, surprisingly enough, comes with a subwoofer. Yes, a subwoofer. Now, some have complained of the sound not being loud when turned onto the highest setting. This laptop is meant to be a personal one, not necessarily a presentation piece. If you need more sound, buy some external speakers because at the loudest setting, which is still pretty loud, it doesn’t have enough punch to fill an auditorium or anything of the sort. I turned it to its highest settings and was not blasted out of my wits. The subwoofer actually works. I could hear the bass quite clearly in several songs I tried. It’s a very precise sound system, giving the absolute sound with clarity. Overall, I believe it’s a very decent sound system.

Heat and Noise

Heating is not too much of a problem. Most of the heat comes from the right side where the graphics card has a vent. While it’s enough to be uncomfortable at times, it’s not so bad that you will burn your hand off using the mouse or that it will always be warm. Most of the time, it’s quite cool. The rest of the laptop is fine as far as heat management goes. I bought a cooling pad just to be on the safe side. Noise is not an issue, even while running games at full settings and such. About the only noise that I hear from the laptop is when it is loading a disc. The fan is very quiet and I have a hard time trying to figure out if it’s running or not! It always is, though, as you can feel the heat coming out from the vent.

Ports

Here’s the list:

USB: 3
IEEE 1394: 1
VGA: 1
HDMI: 1
E-SATA: 1
Audio Ports: Headphone Jack, Line-in, Line-out, Mic
4-in-1 card reader: SD, MMC, MS, MS Pro compatible
Kensington lock port.

The only problem that I can think of with these ports is that the USBs are a bit scarce. Of course, the E-SATA port also doubles as a usb port as well, so it’s not too much of a problem, just a nit-picky one. All the ports work seamlessly together and provide the best when it comes to plugging in a usb or any other device.

Processor, RAM, and Graphics

The time it took to get the laptop started from zero to log-in screen was almost exactly a minute, quite impressive for a desktop replacement. I had no trouble in installing games or programs. My Photoshop CS3 boots in 5 seconds, almost 3x less than my desktop! I had no trouble browsing through pictures or lag when it came to booting up other programs. The 4 gigabytes of RAM certainly make this laptop extremely fast, working along with the quad-core processor beautifully. The ATI Radeon HD4850 is extremely good at giving good performance while running coolly and efficiently. Its benchmark tests are comparable to an nVidia 9800 GTS or GTX model graphics card, without the extra use of electricity. As I’ve stated before, I can hardly hear it running while I’m playing graphics intense games. My test subjects were Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, Far Cry 2, and DiRT. Mercenaries 2 ran at all resolutions on high settings with ease, averaging 60 frames per second. Far Cry 2 took a little more toll on the card, but I finally concluded with running at full resolution on some mixed medium and high settings with fps averaging 65-70. DiRT was a bit tricky to correctly set up. After a fair amount of messing with the settings, I managed to eek out a solid 50 fps on medium settings at a lower resolution setting. I still haven’t tried the Turbo setting on the processor, so be looking for another report on that. I didn’t have too many benchmarking tools handy so if any of you want those results, you’re going to have to suggest some free ones for me. 

Battery life

Battery life on the MSI gt725 is fairly short compared to other laptops with the same battery. I managed to squeeze 2 hours 40 minutes out of mine on medium brightness. When relying on the battery, the screen automatically goes to a lower brightness setting and the turbo button becomes deactivated, thus saving some battery life from the start. There are several modes for the laptop as well. There is a gaming mode with higher brightness, a movie mode with decreased brightness, a presentation mode with decreased brightness, an office mode, which seems the same as the presentation mode, as well as confusingly named Turbo-Battery mode for saving as much battery life as possible. These tend to be useful only for the battery, rather than having it plugged in in the first place.

Wireless

The wireless receiver in the laptop is superb. I bought an entry-level N router from Linksys and set it up on my downstairs computer. I was able to go to the upstairs on the opposite side of the house and still get download speeds up to 500 kbps. The range is excellent, provided you have a fitting router as well. I wouldn’t recommend gaming at a far distance from your router, though, as you may experience some lag. 3 bars are enough for gaming online at a fairly low ping.

Conclusion

I would definitely admit that I am most impressed with this laptop. Its features for the most part are quite intuitive, its styling is decent, and its overall performance is superb. I would gladly recommend this laptop to anyone who is looking for a good laptop with top features for a great price.

Pros:
Great price
A lot of features
Very fast
Little bloatware
Gorgeous screen
Wireless is great

Cons:
Different keyboard layout
A bit of flex in the keyboard and screen
Maybe in need of some more usb ports
Heat is a bit uncomfortable at times

Please comment!!! This is my first review!!!

 

I just ordered one of these through a warehouse aggregator, hopefully I will get it next week. Did it come with 64bit or 32bit Windows. I'm thinking of just installing Windows 7 64bit. I am buying it strictly for games and hope to play Company of Heroes, Age of Empires III, Titan's Quest Immortal Throne, Sins of a Solar Empire, etc. at high to ultra settings since my Unibody Macbook Pro's nvidia 9600 can only handle med-high @1080p.

Cheers,

 

It came with Windows Vista 32 bit. I don't mind it but it would have been a plus if it had come with 64 bit. Oh well. It does what I need it too. Windows 7, as far as I've heard, has run excellently on this system. I haven't actually tried it out, but I plan to get it once it comes out. As for the games you listed, it should have no problem running them on high settings.

 

I agree they are impressive, I have the GT725-075US model that I put a Q9100 in it and it made a big diffrence in preformance. The screen is great for a WUXGA with no bleeding. The build quality is strong. I am very satisified. I got mine through newegg open box for $1249.00 which is a steal for this with such a high end GPU. I recommend one of these to anyone interested in buy one. Its well worth the money with the preformance you get..

 

Wow, I can really tell that this is my first review ever because I'm noticing all the things that forgot to add!:laugh:

One quirk that I noticed was no volume scroll on the side or anything. Volume is controlled through the Fn key + F7 or F8.

One other thing that I forgot to add which is probably the best feature on the laptop is that the Turbo mode kicks the processor speed up to 2.4GHz instead of 2.0. I said in my review that I have not tried this for gaming but I will definitely see to it that I do. I will add that to my review later.

 

How easy / difficult was it to upgrade the CPU? I am waiting for the QX9300 to drop to around $250 I can dream!

Cheers,

 

To upgrade the CPU is very easy. Just let me know when your ready to upgrade and I will certianly help you..

 

Here are the pics that I took from packed to unpacked:

http://s737.photobucket.com/albums/xx13/Valen_Celcia/

Enjoy!

 

Ha ha! It took me a while to read these last posts for some reason, but Nacr05, the turbo button boosts the speed of the processor. 2.26GHz with 12mb cache is about even with 2.4GHz and 6mb cache as far as overall performance. Unless the turbo button worked on your new cpu as well, then I would say you lost some money. Also, another little feature alert, this came with 2 dvds to burn your recovery on as well as software for the camera and WinRAR! I was very happy to find the latter as I have been using 7-zip for the past few years.

 

Great review man,

You can get a little more punch out of your speakers, with a few sound adjustments from the realtec pannel.

If you set EQ to powerfull, that kicks it a bit more, there are also dolby bass controls in sound pannel too .

But i do love the speakers on the machine, even if mine are a bit faulty hehe.

 

Thanks for the tips, Catacylsm. This will be helpful, not only to me, but to others who are looking as well.

 

Your welcome man, there are also quite a few speed guides out there that can really speed up your system.