Purchasing New Gaming pc

I just wanted to hear from anyone who has had a MSI GT660-004US for longer than 3 months how they feel about it now. I am considering to buy one and I am just worried that it's reaching the end of its prime already. I just wanted to know if:

1. it plays Black ops and other 1st person shooters well with
2. If it's audio is as good as advertised, and if there's any reason to buy the Razer surround sound headset
3. If it's as fast as it's being advertised
4. And lastly if its a laptop that will last 4 or 5 years with just upgrading the memory in 2-3 years.

 

If you want something that will last a number of years, wait a few weeks for Intel Sandy Bridge laptops to reach retail channels. Those will last a heck of a lot longer than the current crop of Core i5/i7 CPUs.

 

1 problem with that solution is I leave for deploy soon, and the newest MSI coming out is only 15.6 in, I want atleast 16 in screen with led back light. the one coming out this month doesn't have that.

 

In any case, when new MSI notebooks are gonna hit the market, they will bring down the prices of "older" GX660 or GT660 's

 

Price now is fine, found it new on Amazon for 1498 w/ mail in rebate. I just want to know if its worth the money I'm going to put into it and if It's going to play the games I want to play for the next 5 years, and I will upgrade memory when its about 2-3 years.

 

Five years is stretching it with systems you can buy right now. A quad-core will have longer legs than a dual core. If you can put up with running future games at less-than-native resolution and lowered detail settings, you should be able to get the 5 years you desire out of it.

If the machine you buy has 4 GB of RAM, that will be more than enough even 2-3 years down the road. Use the money you would spend on that to buy a solid-state disk. You sacrifice some capacity, but the performance boost over a traditional platter drive is out of this world. I'm running two SSDs in my GX740, a 40 GB boot drive and a 240 GB for my games (I keep my movies and music on a portable external drive). It's awesome. A lot of money but it's totally transformed the machine.

 

The gt660r-004 comes with a nvidia gtx 285m, and also comes with 6gb ram, with 2 7200rpm 500gb HDD. The only thing I am worried about is the graphics card, but I looked on the nvidia website and it's not really that old, and it keeps up with the gtx 460 which is what's going to be put in this computer coming out this month. It even out performs it in some facts. Plus I can upgrade the memory from 6GB to 12GB at the end of year when I get home.

 

if graphics card is your biggest worry why not have a look at the gx version which comes with ati/amd 5870

 

I have a hp now with a Radeon HD 4650 in it and I haven't been impressed. I played Starcraft 2 on here and it's not running to standard, and with further research at a website called notebookcheck.com the 285M is comparable.

 

As someone who pretty much exclusively used NVIDIA cards from 2000-2010 (with a few exceptions here and there), I can tell you the Mobility 5870 is a great GPU. The 4650 you have now is a low-end unit. The GeForce 285M is a last-generation part that will run out legs faster than the 5870. If you insist on an NVIDIA part, get nothing less than a Geforce GTX 460M. Bear in mind, though, notebooks with that GPU tend to be a bit more expensive. The 5870 has plenty of life left, and AMD has improved the quality of its drivers considerably.

 

Okay so I know of another laptop company called Malibal that has a system called the Satori, my only concern is I've never heard of them... any comments?

 

Those are new Clevo barebones, same as sager, deviltech or similar brands. They just take a stock Clevo barebone system, put the parts you order and put a sticker with their name on it. Overall, Clevo is one of the largest notebook system OEM producers and they produce quality notebooks. You'll find more info in Clevo section on this forum

 

Is 8gb ram going to be enough for the next 3 years, or should I just shoot for the 12gb?

 

4gb is enough for next 3 years.

 

So I'd be good for a while then if i went with 8gb?

 

All depends on what you're using the laptop for. Gaming doesn't take much RAM, maybe 6GB will the the max you'll ever need to game in the next 5 years (doubt you'll need more than 4GB really). If it's anything that'll become obselete fast, it's your GPU

 

Hi!

I don't think it's entirely realistic to expect today's computers to handle the games of 2014-15 well with all the settings cranked up. So if you go into this knowing that you'll probably have to sacrifice some higher quality settings in future games then most high-end notebooks today should serve you well for years to come. A high-end DX11 capable GPU would be advisable though...

Hard drive and the amount of RAM are not an issue as both can be easily upgraded along the way. What I would be most concerned about, though is build quality. There have been quite a lot of hinge problems reported with MSI laptops at least in the past. And the plastic used in my GX 640 is not of the sturdiest type. This of course says nothing about the build quality of the GX/GT 660 which I don't know anything about. But that's what the other people are here for
All I can say is that so far to me it seems that MSI have really gotten the performance-to-weight-to-buck ratio down but have still some way to go on the build quality side. And in my opinion the latter is the most important factor to consider if you want the laptop to serve you well for many a year.

Cheers