Gaming laptops could easily be tagged as the most heavily engineered portable devices available in the market. Not only heavily engineered, but they are designed with precision so as to make them sturdy as well as highly sophisticated to handle various visual and audio challenges faced by the gamers. In short, the best gaming laptops need to have powerful hardware and they need to be portable enough to be carried to a friend?s place.

Gaming laptops from Taiwanese consumer electronics major MSI have always held a special place in the hearts of die-hard gaming enthusiasts?a great piece of hardware that offers excellent value for money. MSI is calling GT680 as the world?s fastest gaming laptop. Not only does the company?s new GT680 bring a completely different design to the table, it also sports specifications to make the most powerful laptops quake in fear. As one of the first laptops to take advantage of Intel?s Sandy Bridge processor, this laptop definitely packs plenty of power. Under the hood, you?ll find a quad-core Intel Core i7 Sandy Bridge processor that will run at up to 2.9 GHz, Nvidia GTX 460M graphics, 8 GB of RAM and twin hard drives in RAID. In fact, MSI dubs it ?the world?s fastest notebook ever.? Can the GT680 live up to this claim and still maintain the company?s value reputation remains to be seen. But if you are planning to pay a hefty amount in excess of R1 lakh, you?ll certainly be getting some bang for those bucks.

Let?s start off with the design. Visually, it?s certainly a far more modest and attractive look overall. Hefty and sturdy looking, the MSI GT680 does not symbolise a swish design, however, we can spare that point as gaming laptops are loaded with various components that makes it quite a bulky thing. Probably it could have been more sleek and sensuously designed, but power packed performance is thought to be graced by a sturdy look.

The 15.6-inch LCD display adds to the nattiness of the laptop and the sub woofers offer surround system. The display and the look and feel resembles the very old MSI GT640 that we received quite some time back. One thing that may appeal to many and turn-off many as well, are the sassy LED lights that light up as soon as the laptop is switched on. By lighting up the sides of the display as well as the sides of the body, these lights may make the laptop look ultra-voguish as far as the gaming experience is concerned.

However, performance matters the most and probably holds the highest percentage. The MSI GT680 is powered by an Intel Core i7 Sandy Bridge 2nd generation that promises a blazing performance. The PC mark scores were 8,953, which calls for a treat for the gamers and performance seekers out there. Moreover, the pre-loaded Windows 7 does look quick along with multi-tasking.

If the graphics offered are mesmerising, gaming is a real fiesta. The laptop has Nvidia GeForce GTX 460M graphics with 1.5 GB of video memory, which is not a disappointment. We played COD 4- Modern Warfare, which was quite a treat, as the visuals were awesome and the audio output was almost ?true-to-life?. The score for 3D mark comes up is 13,916 and that says it all. Moreover, the presence of HDMI port for outputting content from the notebook onto larger displays makes the usage a pleasure. The score for the battery mark is just 1:24, which is quiet feeble.

There are certain points that may compel you to go for the laptop. Firstly, the Intel Rapid Storage technology that offers new levels of protection, performance and expandability for desktop and mobile platforms. Secondly, the Dynaudio speakers and THX TruStudio Pro offers a nice audio output, thereby making the gaming experience enjoyable. Not only this, GT680 provides USB 3.0 connectivity and Turbo Drive Engine for easy, one touch overclocking. However, a major drawback of the laptop is the poor response of the trackpad. While gaming or selecting or doing other operations, the trackpad showed poor response and was irritatingly slow.

In a nutshell, the MSI GT680 is a potential contender amongst the gaming laptops available today, with nice high definition display, surround sound and pleasurable gaming experience.

? CyberMedia www.LD2.in

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