MSI's X610 is an interesting concept. It uses a 15.6" LCD/chassis, and the fact that it's very thin and weighs just over 4.5 pounds is definitely a nod to the MacBook Air. Also like the MacBook Air, the X610 forgoes the inclusion of an optical drive. Or perhaps the lack of an optical drive is more like a netbook, and the X610 certainly has similarities to netbooks, at least when it comes to CPU performance. Unlike most netbooks, MSI chooses to use an AMD processor, and while that would normally mean substantially more performance than an Intel Atom CPU, the AMD Athlon Neo MV-40 isn't going to set any speed records. Using a 65nm process, the Neo MV-40 is a single-core 1.6 GHz part, rather like the original Athlon 64 only using updated process technology.

So what we have is a relatively large chassis that's very thin, no optical drive, and a CPU that aims to be "fast enough". If you couple that with a reasonable integrated graphics approach, you should be able to get good battery life without compromising on weight or size. Except, MSI decided not to use an IGP solution and instead includes ATI's Radeon Mobility HD 4330. The discrete graphics solution isn't super fast, but it's definitely a lot faster than any current IGP and it provides all the necessary features to support high definition video decoding.

When we said the MSI 610 was "interesting", then, what we really mean is that it's interesting in the same way that Frankenstein would be interesting. MSI has chosen to mix some very low power design element (AMD Neo, a thin chassis) with other elements that are diametrically opposed to such a design (15.6" LCD and a discrete graphics solution). The question we are here to answer today is whether the final creation is impressive, or if MSI added too much brawn and not enough brains. Here's a look at the system specifications.

We should also note that the X610 is currently destined for release in the UK/Europe and it is unlikely we will see it in the USA. If after reading this review you are interested in purchasing such a laptop, let us know in the comments. Since MSI is already creating this system, they could easily sell it in the US if there's enough demand. Of course, pricing is also going to play a role in determining how successful the MSI X610 is. The X610 is essentially the AMD version of the MSI X600, a product already available in the USA. The X600 uses an Intel Core 2 Solo processor but otherwise has the same basic design as the X610 (15.6" chassis, ATI HD 4330, no optical drive). Battery life on the X600 is supposed to reach up to six hours, making it a viable alternative to netbooks if you don't mind the larger size, but with an MSRP of $800 it costs twice as much as most netbooks. Considering the competition, that's simply too much for the X600 and we think a price of around $500 for the X610 is the most people are likely to pay.

MSI X610 Overview

The MSI X610 is a nice looking system when you get right down to it. Our biggest complaint is that the model we received includes the ubiquitous shiny black exterior. The X610 is also available in white, which would be a better choice if you don't want to see fingerprints all over the system. Thankfully, the Palm rest doesn't have a glossy surface so it's not quite as bad. It's also impressive that MSI was able to make such a relatively large chassis weight just 4.6 pounds. That's still heavier than the MacBook Air, but it's less expensive and larger. Here's our image gallery of the X610, including a profile shot comparing it with the Acer Aspire One 751h - yes, it's thinner than that particular netbook.

Based on appearance alone, there's plenty to like with the MSI X610. It really doesn't feel that much heavier than your typical netbook, even though the size is substantially larger. All of the usual features and accessories are naturally present, but they are upgraded relative to what you get with most netbooks. Instead of Fast Ethernet you get Gigabit Ethernet, and likewise you get 802.11n instead of 802.11g. MSI also includes a VGA port, which is standard on all netbooks/notebooks, but they add an HDMI port which is not something you usually find on netbooks. Naturally, the LCD is a lot larger, although MSI sticks with a relatively low 1366x768 resolution.

One aspect of the X610 that we absolutely love is the keyboard. This is not the same springy, cheap feeling keyboard that we found in previous MSI laptops; it has good tactile feedback in the layout is very nice. You get a full size 10-key input, with a layout that matches what you find on desktop keyboards. The only difference is that the 0 key isn't quite as large, due to the encroachment of the nearby cursor keys. It looks like MSI still has an interest all of horizontal space that they could have used around the keyboard, and it would have been nice to have dedicated Home/End/PgUp/PgDn keys on the right similar to other laptops (i.e. ASUS and Dell often use such a layout). Overall, though, we have very few complaints about the keyboard. It even has the control key and the preferred lower left corner (instead of swapping its position with the Fn key).

Another interesting aspect of the MSI X610 is the battery. It's extremely wide and deep as well, occupying a large portion of the bottom of the laptop. However, it's extremely thin -- less than half an inch, not counting the lip that curves up at the rear of the notebook. MSI deserves credit for putting the time and effort into designing a battery casing and chassis that work well together. The battery is a large part of what allows MSI to have such a thin notebook. Rated at 60Whr, it should also provide decent battery life, but as we will see later the discrete graphics (and perhaps the CPU and chipset) appears to diminish the mobility aspect of the X610.

X610 Application Performance

You can read about our testing setup and the other laptops used in our previous GIGABYTE M1022 review. As an amalgamation of netbook and notebook designs, the MSI X610 straddles the fence between those two markets. Considering the suggested price of €500, the X610 is going to compete more against entry-level notebooks (i.e. Gateway's NV52/NV58 models) than it will against netbooks, although certainly there are users that will be interested in a multimedia netbook that doesn't weigh a lot and the X610 fits that niche nicely.

We will start our performance comparison with general application testing, including PCMark, CINEBENCH, and video encoding tests. Since MSI ships the X610 with Windows Vista (32-bit), we are also able to run PCMark Vantage this time around. As we have discussed elsewhere, PCMark05 has some odd results under XP in some of the tests that skew the overall score. We will include detailed PCMark05/PCMark Vantage results where applicable so you can see the individual test scores.

The general application performance results establish a trend that we will see repeated in many areas. Compared to netbooks, the MSI X610 is faster than any current Intel Atom offering. That's not likely to change until Pineview/Pine Trail at the very earliest, and even that isn't a guarantee that Intel Atom will surpass a reasonably fast single-core Athlon (or Core 2) processor. On the other hand, the Gateway NV52 with its QL-64 processor easily beats the X610, and the NV58 is anywhere from 2-3.5X as fast. You might say that's not a fair comparison, but keep in mind that the Gateway NV58 is a $600 laptop, the NV52 is a $500 laptop, and X610 is currently targeting a €500 price tag. It weighs less, but it's also substantially slower.

Turning to the detailed PCMark results, outside of a few tests that clearly favor Windows Vista, the general pattern remains the same. The two Gateway laptops are usually first and second place in the MSI is third, followed by the various netbooks. There are individual cases where that doesn't hold true, but most of the time that's related to hard drive performance. Only two tests have the MSI X610 clearly in the lead, and it should come as no surprise that both tests involve graphics. In PCMark05, the 3D Pixel Shaders and 2D 64 Line Redraw tests have the X610 leading by 200% and 50%, respectively. It's also interesting to note that PCMark Vantage Gaming suite still has the X610 trailing the Gateway laptops by a significant margin.

All of the above tests focus primarily on CPU performance, and they take advantage of multi-core processors. That definitely puts the Neo MV-40 at a disadvantage, and we will see if the discrete graphics can turn the tables in other benchmarks. It looks as though the HD 4330 GPU in the X610 potentially offers three times the performance of the HD 3200 in the NV52. However, games also require CPU performance at times, so depending on the game engine we may or may not see the HD 4330 flex its muscles.

X610 Gaming and Graphics Performance

Since the MSI X610 includes a discrete GPU, discussing gaming performance is relevant. We will include the netbooks in the 3DMark results, but it should come as no surprise that even the fastest netbook is clearly outclassed for the time being. 3DMark also tends to put more of an emphasis on the GPU -- especially in some of the older versions -- so it's interesting to see how the HD 4330 compares against the HD 3200 in such testing. Unfortunately, actual gaming often depends a lot more on balancing CPU and GPU performance; as we will see, there are several instances where the AMD Neo MV-40 is simply unable to run certain games adequately, even at minimum detail settings. A faster dual-core chip would have gone a long way towards solving that problem.

Starting with the 3DMark results, the MSI X610 initially looks like a very promising gaming solution. It's over twice as fast as the NV52 in 3DMark03… but then it's 72% faster in 3DMark05, 48% faster in 3DMark06, and only 29% faster in 3DMark Vantage. That means that the newer the benchmark, the less the advantage for the X610. We all know that the 3DMark suites are not necessarily games, but they do correlate to gaming performance in some instances. The real question is whether a game matches 3DMark03, 05, 06, or Vantage in the way it approaches graphics (or perhaps something in between). Let's move to the actual gaming performance results and see what the MSI X610 can do.

We already stated that there would be instances where the single-core MV-40 processor was inadequate for modern games, and the above chart shows at least six titles (out of 12) where the X610 is not able to provide adequate performance, even at minimum detail settings and an 800x600 resolution. Moreover, if we average the results from all 12 titles, we find that the Gateway NV52 and the MSI X610 are essentially equal.

We know from 3DMark that the theoretical performance of the HD 4330 is substantially higher than the HD 3200, but quite a few titles have the HD 3200 with QL-64 in the lead. There are two reasons for the higher performance from the QL-64. First, it has a clock speed that's 31% higher than the MV-40. That could account for the lead in some of the games, but it's also obvious that the second CPU core is coming into play on some titles. For instance, Assassin's Creed and GRID run 70% faster on the NV52. Call of Duty: World at War, Dark Athena, and Far Cry 2 have the NV52 leading by 35%, 43%, and 37% respectively, so they also appear to benefit slightly from the second CPU core.

Other titles don't require nearly as much CPU power, with the X610 coming out on top. The X610 leads by 43% in Crysis, 61% in FEAR2, 51% in Fallout 3, and 13% in STALKER: Clear Sky. Performance in most of the remaining titles is within 10%, although the NV52 leads in each case. The net result is that gaming is possible on the X610, but there are definitely limitations imposed by the MV-40 CPU.

We also ran some quick test of casual games like the Sims 2/3 and Spore. None of these titles has any difficulty running on the X610, with frame rates typically hitting the 30 FPS cap. There are also many titles where you can crank up the resolution and/or detail settings on the HD 4330 without lowering performance. Medium quality settings at 1366x768 only reached playable levels in Fallout 3 (27 FPS), but low-quality 1366x768 worked in Crysis (27 FPS), Empire: Total War (37 FPS), Fallout 3 (34 FPS), Oblivion (29 FPS), and STALKER: Clear Sky (28 FPS). World of WarCraft should also run reasonably well, although with me not being a subscriber (or interested in becoming one!) it wasn't something I tested. Considering people have run WoW on netbooks, the X610 should easily be up to the task.

X610 General Windows Performance

Quite a few people have asked for some general performance numbers in terms of Windows boot/shutdown, hibernate/resume, and sleep/wake times. These obviously vary quite a bit between runs, depending on what you've been doing on the computer. If you have a bunch of open applications, it will take longer for the system to enter sleep mode for example. We performed these tests on all of the netbooks and laptops from an empty Windows desktop, and we used the best-case result for each system.

As a side note, all of these tests benefit greatly from a fast SSD, though spending $200+ on an SSD for a $350 netbook may not be the best investment of funds. Regardless, SSDs will help application load times as well as Windows boot/hibernate/sleep times. We also need to note that the NV52 and NV58 run Windows Vista 64-bit and include 4GB RAM, which means they take noticeably longer in the hibernate/resume tests. We also included results with Windows XP 32-bit as a point of reference.

Not surprisingly, with Windows Vista and a single-core processor plus 2GB RAM, the X610 doesn't fare too well in typical OS boot/shutdown testing. It's by far the slowest laptop to start Windows, and one of the slowest for shutting down. The hibernate time is good, however, as is the wake time. One of the worst performances is in the sleep result, where it takes almost twice as long as competing netbooks/notebooks. It is also near the back of the pack when it comes to resume times.

It's worth noting that despite having a "quick boot" option enabled in the BIOS, BIOS POST times are extremely slow. The MSI X610 takes about 12.5 seconds to POST. Of course, the Gateway notebooks aren't much better, requiring about 8 seconds on the NV58 and 10 seconds on the NV52. Needless to say, the netbooks are clearly better optimized in this area, often taking only a second or two to POST. This is something that can be fixed, and frankly it should never be a problem on any current laptop. Unfortunately, manufacturers appear to be lazy in this area.

Battery Life Comparison

We run many scenarios for our battery life tests. Since most netbooks don't include optical drives, we previously ripped our standard test DVD to a hard drive and copied those files over. Ultimately, performance was similar to what we found with playing back HD DivX files, so we have instead chosen to focus on DivX HD, x264 HD, Internet, and idle battery life.

Video playback is one area where the HD 4330 is definitely a nice bonus, since it has no difficulty accelerating decoding on x264 and other codecs. Then again, the HD 3200 provides similar functionality and consumes less power; battery life likely would have been improved quite a bit by using an integrated solution instead of the 4330. What's truly ironic is that the X610 chipset actually includes integrated graphics, but they are disabled. An option to switch between integrated/discrete graphics in order to improve battery life would have been great.

Battery life on the X610 is another mixed bag. Despite having a dramatically slower CPU compared to the NV52 and NV58 along with a slightly higher capacity battery, it only matches the NV58 in Internet and x264 playback. It does manage to beat the NV52 (except in idle battery life where the HD 4330 consumes more power than an IGP), but realistically we're still talking about 2.5 to 3 hours of battery life in most cases. Remember at the beginning where we discussed how the X610 is part MacBook Air? Sadly, one part of the MacBook Air where MSI completely missed the boat is battery life. When you consider that you can get a Core 2 Duo processor in the MacBook Air that substantially faster than the MV-40, battery life and general performance definitely aren't reasons to get the MSI X610.

Power Requirements

As a corollary to the battery life tests, we also performed measurements of power requirements using the AC adapters and a Kill-A-Watt device. These numbers are only accurate to the nearest Watt, so a difference of 1W (i.e. from rounding) could obscure up to a 12% actual difference in power requirements. Also note that power requirements change when you switch to DC power, and power supply (power brick) efficiency comes into play when using the AC adapter, so the battery life tests are a better indication of true power requirements.

If you thought that perhaps the Neo MV-40 CPU wasn't doing a good job at saving power, at least relative to the QL-64 it clearly has a lower worst-case power requirement. It's all of the other equipment in the MSI X610 that consumes power, with idle power draw of 22W easily eclipsing the NV52's 14W. Place a significant load on just the CPU, however, and the X610 only increases its power draw by 11W whereas the NV52 jumps up 21W. Yes, the single-core AMD CPU is capable of using relatively little power. Unfortunately, it appears that the HD 4330 graphics chip is using at least 10W when idle, and 15~20W under load. The result is that the less power hungry CPU combined with a discrete GPU isn't a great low-power solution.

X610 LCD Quality

We ran our standard LCD quality tests using ColorEyes Display Pro to see how well this 15.6" LCD panel performs. Unfortunately, this is another case of LCD brightness improving at the cost of LCD contrast ratios. Also, color gamut, color accuracy, and viewing angles continue to be a sore spot for laptop LCDs. It is our understanding that TN panels use the least power, so until that changes it's unlikely we will see dramatic improvements in these areas.

Like many other laptops, the MSI X610 provides a bright ~250nits LCD that unfortunately only yields a poor 215:1 contrast ratio. LCD quality matters to many people, and if MSI had used a high contrast LCD it would have made the X610 a lot more interesting as a multimedia platform. As it stands, colors look washed out and images don't "pop" the way they do on a good display. Color gamut is slightly improved compared to other solutions we've tested, coming in at 53%, and color accuracy is reasonably good after calibration, but we're still a far cry from the 100% gamma LCDs we see on desktops and laptops like the Dell Studio XPS 16.

MSI X610: A Compromising Solution

MSI's X610 is a truly eclectic mix of hardware. Normally, we would expect a company to either pursue the long battery life target offered by netbooks, or provide higher performance with a balanced solution. Unfortunately, to date it doesn't seem like many companies are interested in providing MacBook levels of battery life -- and certainly there are many people that don't want to spend $1300+ on a new laptop. If you're interested in a Windows laptop that offers long battery life, netbooks still reign supreme and are very affordable. Acer also makes the Timeline and claims eight hours of battery life, although without testing the laptop we're hesitant to recommend it.

MSI's chosen hardware for the X610 is a strange combination of low-power parts with relatively high-power parts. We understand why users might want a Radeon Mobility HD 4330, especially if you're using an Intel platform where Intel's integrated graphics are the lowest common denominator among GPUs. From that standpoint, the MSI X600 made sense, though the $800 price tag was hard to swallow. The X610 should be a less expensive alternative, but considering the HD 4330 isn't substantially faster than the HD 3200, at least when handicapped by a single-core 1.6 GHz CPU, the design isn't going to be a runaway success. If MSI could get the price close to $500 (yes, that's cheaper than the current €500 MSRP), keep the weight under 5 pounds, and boost battery life up to five hours or more we think it would be a much more interesting system.

Compared to netbooks with Intel Atom CPUs, the AMD Neo MV-40 offers better performance with power requirements that are 2~3 times as high, so a smaller netbook based on AMD's Neo could be competitive. It would certainly offer better performance than Atom netbooks, in both the CPU and GPU departments assuming it uses an ATI IGP. We're certainly interested in seeing more of AMD Neo and perhaps getting a better package for the low power CPU.

If you happen to live in the UK (or possibly Europe), the MSI X610 is a solution for people looking for a reasonably lightweight laptop to function as a multimedia and light gaming system. You'll have to decide if the slower CPU with faster GPU is a better fit than something that uses a dual-core CPU up with integrated graphics. Either way you should get roughly the same battery life, but certain applications/games will favor dual core CPUs while others will prefer discrete graphics. The MSI X610 won't be the perfect solution for everyone, but there's a niche market that it just might satisfy. If you don't mind slightly faster than netbook performance (with significantly faster graphics performance) with less battery life and you want a bigger laptop that doesn't weigh a ton, the MSI X610 could be exactly what you're after.