With the GT725 MSI gives us bright colours just so we know it's part of the gamer range. With a powerful graphics card and a decent processor, it would seem to have everything required for a good gaming experience.

Handling, design and build

Between the Asus G50V, the Toshiba Qosmio X300 and this model, the MSI gets our vote for looks. It doesn’t go overboard with the gamer aesthetic, which is limited to a red border. This is sufficient as far as we’re concerned thank you very much.


The keyboard takes up a good part of the available space. Only the coloured bands and another band for the power button encroach. Some keys are smaller than usual: the arrow keys and certain keys around them like the "enter" and the right "shift" (more of a problem). As on many MSI computers, the "ctrl" and "Fn" keys are inversed on the bottom left of the keyboard and are the cause of many typing errors. On the right you’ll find a standard 17 inch number pad. Above it, there are of course the series of touch controls for films or activation of Wi-Fi and other functions. The touchpad and click buttons may well surpise you as they’re cut into the casing.

The Webcam image is good but the microphone muffles your voice. No screen capture however – we scored a black image each time we attempted the operation.

This laptop has the following connectivity: 1 RJ45, 1 modem, 3 USBs, 1 HDMI, 1 VGA, 1 Express Card 54, 1 e-SATA/USB, 1 FireWire and 4 mini jacks. Nothing more to add.

Under the machine, under the first panel, after the removal of 4 screws, you can access the RAM and a standard graphics card cooling system. A second panel, attached by two screws, gives access to a hard drive (500 GB Western Digital Scorpio).

e-SATA/USB, FireWire, 4 mini jacks	Express Card, SD reader and USB (underneath)
HDMI, VGA, battery and power supply	Model, RJ45, 2 x USB

Processor Power

Windows Experience Index 5.3. CPU 5.3 - Memory 5.9 - Graphics 5.9 – Gaming Graphics 5.9 – Hard Drive 5.7.

Clocked lower than the T9400, the Intel P8600 (dual core), gave a good account of itself in our test procedure with a similar score to the Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Xi3650 (which has a T9400). The P8600 was only undone on one test, file compression in WinRAR, where it is 12% slower.

Overall this machine does well and scores 102 in our index (100 for our reference model, the Fujitsu-Siemens) thanks, among other things, to its excellent results in PCMark Vantage.

When reading Full HD video (Blu-Ray files), it consumes 63 watts at about 53% of the CPU, this without any graphics card acceleration. With acceleration activated, only 5% of the processor is used. Overall, 60 watts are still used.

Gaming

What we have here is an ATI Radeon mobility HD4850. In theoretical testing it gave excellent results with 3Dmark Vantage. What about in practice? Yes! We had no problems running Crysis in high quality mode with 8x anti-aliasing (AA). Same thing with Race Driver Grid, perfectly fluid in "Ultra" mode and 4X AA. World in Conflict also ran smoothly at "very high". The only problem is that heat is expelled to the right. If you’re right-handed, keep your fingers out of the way!

Audio

Very fully equipped here with two ins (micro + line in), a line out and a headphones + optical out. A remark here: if you’re going to have so many ins and outs, why not have the mini jack/optical socket on the line out rather than the headphones out? This would mean you wouldn’t need to plug and unplug the cables all the time, especially as use of headphones is strongly recommended. The speakers are particularly bad, weak and tend to saturate.