February 14th, 2008Review of MSI Megabook S271
You want them smooth. You want them sexy. You want them complicated. And you want them not to be on fire a hole in your pocket. We are chatting about laptops and MSI claims to slot in all of the aforesaid aspects. Let’s see if MSI Mega book S271 lives up to its claim.
Features
The smooth laptop comes in full black matt finish. “Cute”, was the first word, the laptop earned for itself after enchanting it out of the box. The MSI name is imprinted in the middle of the laptop, with a silver circle around it. Frankly speaking, the name was actually spoiling the ultra-sleek looks of the laptop. Weighing around 2 Kg, it felt rather light as compared to the last laptop, I tested, ‘ACI Matrix’, which was almost around 3 Kg. I am bit disposed towards light weight laptops, as they really define the term ‘portability’. But, more often the ultra-portable laptops miss out few features and are low in performance. This is where MSI is striving to strike the right poise between presentation and weight.
Design
The touchpad is located towards the left side just below the space bar. The touchpad buttons are designed in a fashionable way. There are four hot-keys located at the top of the keyboard along with the Power button. All of these buttons have back enlightening lights.
The speakers are located just underneath the screen. On the front side, we have mini-fire port and the audio ports i.e. mic-in/headphones-out. There are seven LED indicators just below the touchpad.
On the left side, we have the
On the right side, we have the VGA-Out, 2 x USB 2.0 Ports, RJ45 (
Upgrading this laptop will be a tough one, as only the
The only feature absent in this laptop is the incorporated web camera, which is now bundled with most new laptops.
Performance
With the onboard Xpress 1100 graphic chipset, one can expect to play quite some games at medium graphics. Don t expects it to run Doom 3 even in lowest graphics. However, it can play many popular games such as Counter Strike, Warcraft 3, Unreal Tournament 2004, and even Half Life 2 without a lot of problems. The laptop performance is decent enough. However, an additional 512 MB of RAM would have made things smoother. The Xpress 1100 uses the system memory for sharing it with graphic memory. Dedicating 128 for graphic purpose, leaves the whole system only with 384 MB, which is quite low, particularly when one plans to run applications such as Photoshop. In fact, we wouldn’t recommend the buy of any laptop with less than 1GB of memory these days. Improvement memory on this one is a bit difficult.
Again, there will be a segment of opinion disagreeing with my analysis and vying for other laptops having better performance. Weight is one issue, which is often neglected while purchasing a notebook and only an experienced notebook user will know that weight is an issue significant enough to be considered especially when one plans to carry it everywhere he/she goes.
This laptop also comes in 4-Cell options, which make the laptop even lighter, but that will reduce the battery life by half. Since, we received the 8 Cell one, we have used our regular battery benchmark i.e. Battery Eater 05 software on it.
On full load, with maximum brightness, it gave us a battery life of 1 hour and 40 minutes. So, it can easily be assumed that with normal usage, once can expect nearly over three hours of battery life. That s pretty good for a light weight laptop.
The MSI Megabook S271 is available for a street price of Rs. 59,000/- with a two-year warranty. In terms of gaming, it will exceed any of Core 2 Duo laptops with Intel graphic chips. The AMD Turion X2 is also available in Nvidia Nforce 6150 Go core logic chipset with 430 MCP in Compaq V3000 series, which will give similar performance to the MSI Megabook S271. The Compaq V3000 competitor sells for around Rs. 45,000/-. However, it doesn’t come with any OS bundled. The MSI also scores over the Compaq laptop in terms of weight by almost half kilo lighter and in a smaller form factor. The price of Rs. 59,000 justifies it by the weight and the performance of the laptop. However, the only downside is the 512 MB Ram bundled along. A GB of RAM would have made things smoother and could have even boosted the performance score. One piece of advice, if you buy it, better upgrade to 1GB.
