MSI GE40 Review: a Slim Gaming Notebook
by Jarred Walton on July 16, 2013 3:00 AM ESTMSI GE40 Subjective Evaluation
There are generally two ways of looking at laptops like this: either you want as much performance as possible in the smallest form factor possible at the lowest price possible, or else you’re looking for a reasonably balanced system but you still care about things like the keyboard and touchpad. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that while I can get by with just about any keyboard and touchpad in a pinch, they’re actually critical elements in the overall experience that are very easy to get wrong. Thankfully, MSI actually does quite well with the GE40 in the keyboard area and slightly less so in the touchpad. Where they fall short is in the same place where the Razer Blade fell on its face: the LCD quality is poor, which is a shame as almost everything else works quite well. But I’m getting ahead of myself; let’s start with the overall build quality and impressions.
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The most succinct way of putting things is that there’s nothing particularly out of the ordinary with the MSI GE40; it’s a slightly dated design aesthetically speaking, but it gets the job done. The bottom of the chassis is made out of plastic, with brushed aluminum veneers on the top and palm rests. Unfortunately, there’s still glossy plastic on the display bezel and around the keyboard. As far as the idea that “black goes with everything”, I’m ready to leave black behind now as it’s very good at picking up fingerprints, particularly on the brushed aluminum (you can see this in the above gallery, and that's after wiping the surfaces down with a microfibre cloth). This is where the decision to use silver by Apple and ASUS (and others as well) ends up scoring points in my book. Considering that MSI did the right thing and equipped the GE40 with a matte LCD, I do wish they would get rid of the glossy plastic at least; it’s simply unnecessary.
Build quality is serviceable but not exceptional as well. The LCD cover is a little flimsy—not so bad that you’re afraid you’re going to break it, but it’s definitely not as rigid as you might find in higher quality laptops. Looking at the back of the LCD, we also find the “Dragon Eyes” (also referred to as “Devil Eyes” in some places, like on the palm rest sticker)—lightly glowing orange LEDs that attempt to add some visual flair. I don’t necessarily mind the idea, but I’ll be honest: they don’t shine nearly as brightly as you would expect when looking at MSI’s photos, and they're more orange than red. I suppose all they had to do was put some red plastic on the back of the LCD backlight and poke some holes in the cover, so no harm done, but that also means there’s no way to turn off the “eyes”.
Moving over to the input side of things, opinions on what makes for a good keyboard vary from user to user; personally, I really like having dedicated document navigation keys. Several years ago, the most common layout placed the document navigation keys in a column on the right of the keyboard, but for some reason we’ve moved away from that standard. Sometimes progress doesn’t actually move us forward, and I’m happy to see that MSI uses the tried-and-true layout. (In this case, MSI’s lack of aesthetic “enhancements” actually helps.) We are dealing with a chiclet keyboard, perhaps with a very slight amount of flex but nothing I’m overly concerned with. Key travel is good, the keys are reasonably sized, and about the only omission on the keyboard side is that there’s no backlighting. Backlighting would’ve taken this keyboard from being “good” to “great”, but it’s still far better than many of the laptop keyboards I’ve used in the past few years.
As for the touchpad, MSI uses ELAN hardware with rocker-style buttons below the touchpad surface. It supports all the usual multitouch gestures, including (in theory) the Windows 8 “side-swipe” gestures. While two-finger scrolling gestures work well enough, the Windows 8 swipe gestures are a different matter. Swiping in from the right hand side works properly most of the time, but try as I might I never could get the left swipe or top swipe to work. I don’t know if that’s a glitch with the drivers or something else, but since the first thing I usually do with Windows 8 is to install Classic Shell so that I have a real start menu, I’m okay touchpad experience. If you’re the type of user that wants the Windows 8 gestures to work properly, however, short of a driver update I cannot recommend the current touchpad implementation.
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We will get to the LCD numbers later, but while the 1600x900 resolution works well enough in games, the contrast is quite poor, and viewing angles are bad even by TN standards. Maximum brightness levels are also pretty limited; we measured around 250 nits, whereas the Razer Blade was able to hit 450 nits. For the most part such high brightness levels are only truly useful if you’re going outside, but battery life when the GPU is not engaged is such that the GE40 could easily be used all day.
One last item to address before we get to the benchmarks, the GE40 has a built-in amplifier to improve the quality of audio when you’re using a headset. I definitely didn’t find the audio bad when I had headphones on, but I will say that the Sound Blaster Cinema software isn’t able to hide the fact that the built-in speakers are pretty anemic. There’s no subwoofer, so bass response is lacking at best; if you’re looking for a laptop with awesome built-in audio, you’ll probably need to look elsewhere.
Now that we’re finished with the visual inspection and kicking the tires, let’s start this puppy up and see what it can really do.
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yhselp - Friday, July 19, 2013 - link
The revised conclusion looks great, the amount of detail you go into and the way you’ve put it all is very neat and clear. And yes, I absolutely agree with you -- the GE40 need a major cosmetic overhaul, the Blade is too expensive in general and the lack of a proper LCD in such a product is just outrageous. I genuinely wonder what happened, perhaps they were way into developing a 14.0” chassis and when they realized they couldn’t source a good screen of the same size it was already too late to go back to the drawing board?! Then again, their standard-sized 17.3” model lacks an IPS screen too. Anyway, I never argued these points, it seems as though this has turned into a GE40 vs. Blade along with Apple thrown into the mix sort of thing and that was not my intention.“Long-term” is a very elusive notion indeed. Hardware can always fail, but having a solid design and build quality goes a long way towards reducing the odds of failure, enables the use of more powerful components (at a certain cost, yes) and helps maintain optimal functionality throughout the lifetime of the product. Yes, fans are finned plasticy spinny little devils which can and do fail -- what can a man do... I know this reads like a bunch of marketing nonsense, but I really believe in those design ideals.
Razer and Apple sell $2000+ laptops, they also pocket significant margins (Apple for sure) so their main priority probably isn’t optimal cooling, but one that just gets the job done; that seems to be the unfortunately reality of today. Despite this they are one of the few companies making advances in “slim-chassis cooling solutions”. I only quoted the rMBP 15 since it was the first laptop to feature a 45W quad-core CPU in such a slim chassis. I wouldn’t bet on Apple, however, to go any further than perfecting their current design as they probably won’t need to cool a hotter CPU (or GPU for that matter) in the future.
Limited options and upgradability have become synonymous with truly optimized and thin designs. I am all for swappable memory and storage and I believe the industry can come up with a very slim, single-sided module which shouldn’t have a negative impact on slim designs. In my eyes, mechanical storage is a no-go for such designs (even a 7mm 2.5” drive); even if there’s enough space for it, it’d make more sense to put more battery instead. Nowadays, even mSATA looks big -- the smallest M.2 implementation looks better, especially for Raid 0 designs. Once you delve deeper even the keyboard becomes a problem, and you just can’t ship a great keyboard without proper travel. All these cannot become standard soon enough.
I would like to thank you for listening to feedback and taking the time to revise the conclusion. I hope I haven’t been too much of a nuisance. Have a great vacation :)
kondor999 - Thursday, July 18, 2013 - link
Excellent article. I just ordered a Sager-branded W230ST (4700/765m) which is considerably thicker than the GE40 and supposedly has a good LCD. I'm hoping that the increased thickness will potentiate sufficient cooling and therefore help avoid both throttling and excessive temps in general. There are no reviews yet, so wish me luck.sotoa - Thursday, July 18, 2013 - link
Nice article. I'm in the market for something this small and this was on my list (not anymore). LCD is junk? Classic!Please review the Clevo W230ST and fast! Hopefully the screen is as promising as it sounds plus 765m can hopefully be decent on 1080p.
yhselp - Thursday, July 18, 2013 - link
Even if W230ST's LCD is not as good, you can easily swap it with a 13.3" IPS 1600x900 screen from LG; this will also increase performance. You can't do this with the Razer Blade 14 or the MSI GE40 because of their unusual screen size -- there are currently no 14.0" IPS screens (900p or 1080p) on the market. Hope this helps.yhselp - Thursday, July 18, 2013 - link
I just saw that the W230ST is already available at Mythlogic and they list the screen as IPS. Their pricing tends to be among the best; customization options are plentiful too, e.g. you can get an 840 Pro mSATA drive.Clevo's cooling is generally better than MSI's so if you have to order right now and you've been considering the GE40, it's a pretty safe bet to get the W230ST.
ddonuts4 - Sunday, July 21, 2013 - link
Just a side note; the battery life of this laptop is so good because there is an extra battery in the optical drive slot. Although this is a welcome addition to a laptop, is shouldn't be overlooked. This laptop isn't much more efficient than any other, it just has a bigger battery.JarredWalton - Sunday, July 21, 2013 - link
Sorry, but that's just not true. The optical slot is where the 750GB HDD is sitting. I took pictures of the internals (see the first gallery on the first page) and there's definitely no extra battery to be found.chancar09 - Sunday, August 11, 2013 - link
When I am playing a game, I am willing to tolerate the temperature and noise. But I don't want to have high temperature and noise when I am just accessing the internet, or editing a document. Is there any way I could set it to a low temp, or low noise in these case, or is it automatically running slow under these conditions so it will be cool and quiet?xKeL - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
Great review, one question though, I see that the keyboard has been removed in one of the pictures, how does one go about removing the keyboard? I need to replace mine due to water damageDarknessrise13 - Sunday, October 13, 2013 - link
Could you guys do a review of the refreshed model of this with the 1080p display? The GE40 2OC-245. I'm wondering if the display refresh helps with the cruddy contrast.