Review MSI GX660R Gaming Notebook

 

 Gaming for the Masses. Not long ago, we reviewed the pre-production model of the MSI GX660R. Now that the GX660R is on the market, MSI sent us another model, this time it's the same one that's lining the shelves of stores and available for you to buy. Some improvements have fortunately been made to this model in areas we had criticized in our previous review. 

A couple of days ago, one peculiar notebook package box landed on my desk. It was my friend Dedy Irvan who brought that box to our lab, earlier today. At first, I thought it was the MSI GT660 notebook that I had previously tested, but no, I was mistaken. Instead, the box contains the MSI GX660R gaming notebook! I immediately pulled it out of the box and hit the power button.

The exterior is very much identical to the MSI GT660, with a shield-like look and a piano finish to add some nice shines to the all-black surface. An MSI symbol is located at the back of the screen. Since it looks just like the GT660, perhaps it would be better if we simply skip the additional cosmetic details and go straight to the insides.

 

The technical specification is down-right impressive, for a notebook at least. The GX660R coupled an Intel Core i7 740 QM processor (4 cores, 8 threads) with 4 GB of DDR3 memory and an ATI Radeon HD 5870 graphics card with 1 GB of on board memory. Pretty serious ‘eh?
What we consider most interesting, however, is that letter “R” on the end of the model number. What’s so good with that? Simple, it indicates that the notebook combines two 500 GB, 7200 RPM hard disk drives in RAID 0 configuration.