The MSI EX400X: Pulling its Punches

Gone are the days of laptops designed to be just portable computers. Nowadays you will be hard pressed to find a laptop that does not cater to a particular niche, whether it is gaming, multimedia, or business laptops. The multimedia laptop segment is an interesting one since it attempts to incorporate the best of all worlds and the MSI EX400X-040IN notebook is supposed to do just that.

The EX400X is a petite machine that weighs 2.25 kgs. It has a black glossy exterior and black and silver interior, and a glossy 14.1-inch screen. The build quality is quite good without overindulgence on plastics and overall the laptop looks well designed albeit in a minimalistic way. The keyboard area is cramped though and if you are used to large sized Enter or Shift keys, you will be disappointed. Also the placement of some of the keys (especially the Control key) is less than ideal. The touch pad is efficient but strangely it could not scroll either vertically or horizontally. We thought this was because of an absence of the requisite drivers but we could not find any on the CD that came with the laptop. Around the keyboard are a number of handy shortcut buttons with the help of which you can switch to your web browser, turn on/off the WLAN and the integrated webcam and other customizable applications.

Under the EX400X’s hood is an Intel Core2 Duo T7250 processor clocked at 2GHz, 1GB of RAM and a 160GB hard disk. For playing movies and lightweight gaming an AT I HD3450 with 256MB of RAM is also included. Connectivity features include support for Gigabit LAN and wireless, four USB ports and slots for Express cards and memory cards. There is no draft-N support though, one of the many features that the MSI is light on.

We began our performance tests with World Bench 6, our in-house benchmark, and the MSI’s performance was far from satisfactory. It scored 72 marks overall, a good 10-15 marks away from what could be considered desirable. We weren’t expecting much when we ran 3D Mark ’06 on the MSI and sure enough the result was an average 1651 marks. In PC Mark ’05 the MSI clocked 4316 marks and in PC Mark Vantage 2877 marks, both average scores. However, in the Cinebench dual core processor test, the MSI managed a decent score of 3709. We tested the MSI’s gaming capabilities with the benchmark tests of Doom 3 and F.E.A.R. Both games were set at 800x600 resolution with no anti-aliasing and medium settings. In both games, the MSI posted reasonable frame-rates of 35 and 36.

However, don’t expect to play Crysis or Far Cry 2 on this machine, it is better left for movies and music than games. Talking about music, the MSI has two speakers which are nothing to write home about. And although the onboard audio card does not support 7.1 channel sound, it is sufficient to play music and movies on. The battery-life is horrible though, as it petered out at the one-and-a-half hour mark when running a movie. The MSI EX400X is priced at Rs. 55,000 but looking at its performance, it could have been easily priced at least Rs. 5,000 lower. If you are looking for a laptop that does a bit of everything, you could consider this offering from MSI.