PC Club Enpower ENP660: Back to School
by Jarred Walton on August 14, 2007 7:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Conclusion
The PC Club Enpower ENP660 (MSI MS-1637) turns out to be nearly identical in most ways to the HP dv6500t. The main difference is in the configuration options you find at either vendor. The result really isn't too surprising, but it does allow us to look at other aspects of the systems to determine which might be the better choice.
The first area most people are going to look at is price, and at present HP has a slight advantage. The dv6500t has a $100 instant rebate running right now, and the net result is that it ends up being $125 cheaper (give or take) than the ENP660. HP also offers more customization options, although all the important ones are covered by both companies. With HP being a larger company that has a worldwide presence, you can expect 24/7 technical support. PC Club's call center is open from 9 AM to 5 PM PST, Monday through Friday.
With pricing and support going to HP, what does PC Club really have to offer? For some, local brick-and-mortar stores; for most others, we can really only see one thing that would make us choose the ENP660 over the dv6500t: the keyboard. That might seem silly, but when you consider the amount of typing some people do, that might be enough to sway their decision - especially people who like number keypads. Sure, you can always go buy a cheap keyboard and plug it into your laptop, but that doesn't work very well if you're traveling in a plane, car, bus, etc. At present, that would be a pretty expensive keyboard upgrade, but prices fluctuate over time and if the difference is only $20 or even $50 we could see quite a few people preferring the PC Club notebook.
If you want a good display, you're going to need to look elsewhere - and judging by what we've seen, you might not be able to find a decent laptop LCD without spending at least $1500-$2000 these days. That's the only serious drawback to this particular laptop. We also mentioned earlier that we encountered some system instability during testing that was somewhat interesting, and we wanted to take a minute to cover that now.
We would really love to say that 802.11n wireless networking is the greatest thing ever, but so far the Draft-N equipment is living up to its "draft" name. We remain hopeful that most of the issues will get worked out over time, but as it stands the only crash we experienced while using the ENP660 appears to be networking related. We were testing with a NetGear WNR834M router, and we didn't encounter any notebook problems when running in 11g mode (though the router does still need to be reset a couple times per week). When running in the higher bandwidth 11n mode, not only did we lose network connectivity on occasion (which can most likely be attributed to the router) but we also had Windows Explorer stop responding while accessing a network computer. It didn't just stop responding either: we eventually had to force reboot the system. Besides the crash, network stability in general was not as good when running in 11n mode.
Raw transfer rates are roughly two to three times as fast as 11g when everything works properly (up to 7.6MB/s versus ~3.3MB/s), but if you actually need to transfer large amounts of data you're still far better off with a wired Ethernet connection. The jury is still out on whether or not 802.11n can actually provide consistently fast, reliable wireless access. At present all we can say for sure is that we had difficulties using a NetGear router with the Intel 4965abn adapter. We certainly wouldn't let Draft-N support be a deciding factor in our purchase of a laptop.
The ENP660 does end up meeting its goal of being a reasonable student or home office laptop. Is it substantially better than competing models? Not necessarily, but neither is it substantially worse. It's one of many garden-variety notebooks that you can find for sale these days, and for the less demanding users it will do a good job. And we like the keyboard - more 15" and larger notebooks should follow MSI's example. Perhaps it might even help a few accounting students with their financial homework.
The PC Club Enpower ENP660 (MSI MS-1637) turns out to be nearly identical in most ways to the HP dv6500t. The main difference is in the configuration options you find at either vendor. The result really isn't too surprising, but it does allow us to look at other aspects of the systems to determine which might be the better choice.
The first area most people are going to look at is price, and at present HP has a slight advantage. The dv6500t has a $100 instant rebate running right now, and the net result is that it ends up being $125 cheaper (give or take) than the ENP660. HP also offers more customization options, although all the important ones are covered by both companies. With HP being a larger company that has a worldwide presence, you can expect 24/7 technical support. PC Club's call center is open from 9 AM to 5 PM PST, Monday through Friday.
With pricing and support going to HP, what does PC Club really have to offer? For some, local brick-and-mortar stores; for most others, we can really only see one thing that would make us choose the ENP660 over the dv6500t: the keyboard. That might seem silly, but when you consider the amount of typing some people do, that might be enough to sway their decision - especially people who like number keypads. Sure, you can always go buy a cheap keyboard and plug it into your laptop, but that doesn't work very well if you're traveling in a plane, car, bus, etc. At present, that would be a pretty expensive keyboard upgrade, but prices fluctuate over time and if the difference is only $20 or even $50 we could see quite a few people preferring the PC Club notebook.
If you want a good display, you're going to need to look elsewhere - and judging by what we've seen, you might not be able to find a decent laptop LCD without spending at least $1500-$2000 these days. That's the only serious drawback to this particular laptop. We also mentioned earlier that we encountered some system instability during testing that was somewhat interesting, and we wanted to take a minute to cover that now.
We would really love to say that 802.11n wireless networking is the greatest thing ever, but so far the Draft-N equipment is living up to its "draft" name. We remain hopeful that most of the issues will get worked out over time, but as it stands the only crash we experienced while using the ENP660 appears to be networking related. We were testing with a NetGear WNR834M router, and we didn't encounter any notebook problems when running in 11g mode (though the router does still need to be reset a couple times per week). When running in the higher bandwidth 11n mode, not only did we lose network connectivity on occasion (which can most likely be attributed to the router) but we also had Windows Explorer stop responding while accessing a network computer. It didn't just stop responding either: we eventually had to force reboot the system. Besides the crash, network stability in general was not as good when running in 11n mode.
Raw transfer rates are roughly two to three times as fast as 11g when everything works properly (up to 7.6MB/s versus ~3.3MB/s), but if you actually need to transfer large amounts of data you're still far better off with a wired Ethernet connection. The jury is still out on whether or not 802.11n can actually provide consistently fast, reliable wireless access. At present all we can say for sure is that we had difficulties using a NetGear router with the Intel 4965abn adapter. We certainly wouldn't let Draft-N support be a deciding factor in our purchase of a laptop.
The ENP660 does end up meeting its goal of being a reasonable student or home office laptop. Is it substantially better than competing models? Not necessarily, but neither is it substantially worse. It's one of many garden-variety notebooks that you can find for sale these days, and for the less demanding users it will do a good job. And we like the keyboard - more 15" and larger notebooks should follow MSI's example. Perhaps it might even help a few accounting students with their financial homework.
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Kayaker123456 - Friday, December 28, 2007 - link
Be careful of buying anything from PC club. I took a computer and brand new case in for work and both cases were damaged. They stripped the alumium screws out on my Lian Li case and screwed in steel ones that stripped the holes. The black piano mirror finish on the Antec Solo case was scratched. Spoke to corporate and was told that they are not responsible. The have a poor rating by the BBB as they do not respond to complaints.Dadoftwo - Wednesday, August 15, 2007 - link
In your opinion, what is the best notebook/laptop money can buy, under $1000? Primary purpose would be for my daughter, a soon-to-be freshman in college majoring in accounting.JarredWalton - Thursday, August 16, 2007 - link
Look at some of the Turion X2 offerings. HP has some that come in at under $1000 with quite a few upgrades. The V6000Z for example - get a 1.8GHz CPU, 2GB RAM, and Office Basic 2007 for right around $1000. Dell's Inspiron 1521 is also pretty decent, and you can get a better LCD (say 1440x900 or 1680x1050) with 2GB and spend right around $1000. Basically, laptops don't tend to give companies a lot of ways to differentiate on the low end. Most $1000 or under laptops will end up being relatively similar - you can add memory and get a smaller HDD, or get a nicer LCD but have less RAM, or some other tradeoff.daytex5 - Wednesday, August 15, 2007 - link
Did the reviewer actually TYPE on the keyboard? After purchasing the the ENP660, I was initially impressed with the board's solid feel, but was quickly frustrated that such a broad case would include a compressed keyboard. Many of the right side keys (Backspace, Enter, period, etc.) are half-size or smaller. Even worse, the right-side Shift key is the size of a standard letter key making it difficult to hit. Whoever made the decision to include the ten-key numeric keypad was not keeping the target audience in mind.
JarredWalton - Thursday, August 16, 2007 - link
I used it quite a bit. It's a personal preference, obviously. The point is, outside of the keyboard there's really nothing else that separates this laptop from other laptops with a similar price and features - except for example the dv6500t is actually $125 cheaper. I like the numeric keypad, and I tend to use the left shift when typing. I was never bothered by the slightly smaller key size or the off-center location of the keys. However, I am sure plenty of people would feel differently.IntelUser2000 - Tuesday, August 14, 2007 - link
It says on Page 13: "At times we even see the CPU exceed its normal 1.80GHz clock speed, and likewise the memory runs a little faster than DDR2-667. However, this only occurs for short periods of time and the system stability was never compromised by the changing frequencies."If you paid attention to the Santa Rosa platform, you'll definitely notice that the increased speed isn't the side effect, but a new feature. Santa Rosa platform has Enhanced Dynamic Acceleration Technology, which allows core speed to go up to one bin when one of the two cores are inactive.
I didn't know it also changed the FSB frequencies though.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, August 15, 2007 - link
The thing is, these are very short changes (like less than .5 seconds), and they occur when the system is only moderately loaded - like playing a WMV9 encoded movie in this case. It could be overclocking for Santa Rosa, but it's not even 1 bin. It's overclocking because the FSB is running at 350 MHz instead of 333 MHz for a brief moment. I realize Santa Rosa allows OC'ing of one bin, but for that I would expect a one bin increase.strikeback03 - Tuesday, August 14, 2007 - link
Have you tested ASTRA32 on any other laptops which definitely have a newer/better panel? Unless HP uses the same OEM as the MSI barebones system, it would seem odd that there is that large a stock of old AU Optronics LCD panels laying around.JarredWalton - Tuesday, August 14, 2007 - link
The most recent LCD manufacturing date that I've seen on a laptop came with the Gateway E-155-C (Jan 2006). However, I wouldn't be surprised if AU Optronics had a bunch of old inventory that they clearanced, which could then be used in laptops to keep prices down.Astra32 reports March 2006 on a Dell 3000WFP and December 2006 on an HP LP3065. It definitely does report more recent dates, then, but is it truly accurate? It might be wrong, but AUO does make a lot of LCDs, and the performance of the MSI/PC Club LCD leaves a lot to be desired. I find it hard to imagine that a more recent LCD would have a black level of nearly 1.0 nits.
AUO also has a list of panels they produce, http://www.auo.com/auoDEV/products.php?sec=noteboo...">found here. The panels used in both the HP and MSI notebooks (and a couple other notebooks) don't show up in that list, though later version are there. At the very least, I thinks it's safe to say that the LCD used is an older model. 30 months old? Maybe not, but then why continue to use a 1280x800 panel on a new laptop if not for price reasons?
madonna grey - Wednesday, October 21, 2020 - link
I have been looking for this information for a long time. By the way, recommend a laptop that will be very convenient for studying.