MSI X610: Supersizing the Netbook?

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.