MSI GE40 Review: a Slim Gaming Notebook

MSI GE40 Closing Thoughts: Give and Take

We’ve frequently discussed the balancing act that needs to take place when manufacturers are designing a laptop, and that balancing act gets even more difficult when you’re creating a thin and light gaming notebook. If you simply throw caution to the wind, it’s definitely possible to create an awesome notebook that runs fast, performs well, and looks great—but it’s going to cost you. The Razer Blade notebooks are perfect example of this, except that the Razer Blade 14 basically drops the ball when it comes to the LCD. MSI tries to pick up the fumble with their GE40, but unfortunately their display happens to be even worse than the Razer Blade 14 panel! Here’s the thing: a somewhat mediocre display with a reasonable resolution isn’t the end of the world. If you’re able to overlook the LCD and its poor contrast ratio, the GE40 hits a lot of the right notes.

For starters, the CPU and GPU pairing are just about ideal. The 37W i7-4702MQ isn’t the fastest CPU on the block, but it’s generally fast enough to keep the GTX 760M happy. The GTX 760M is also a good pairing for the 1600x900 LCD resolution—it might be able to handle 1080p without antialiasing in some titles, but there are also going to be instances where you’ll need to drop down to high or even medium detail levels to get acceptable performance (e.g. Metro Last Light and Company of Heroes 2). NVIDIA’s top-of-the-line GTX 780M in some cases offers nearly three times the performance of the GTX 760M, at least at our Enthusiast settings; at our Mainstream settings, in quite a few titles we don’t even see a 2X performance increase. Finally, in light use we were able to hit nearly nine hours of battery life with the GE40, and if you’re willing to lower the LCD brightness further you should be able to exceed that mark.

It’s not just about performance either; I won’t say that the GE40 is the greatest looking notebook I’ve ever seen, but it also seen worse. Get rid of the black glossy plastic, and perhaps switch to a neutral silver color instead of black, and aesthetically the design would move up from a middle-of-the-road six out of 10 to a solid eight. The keyboard on the other hand is definitely better than average these days, with the only real omission being keyboard backlighting. I like the inclusion of dedicated document navigation keys on a 14-inch laptop, and having those keys in a column on the right is my preferred layout. Frankly, I’m still a little baffled why most modern 13.3-inch and 14-inch laptops have abandoned this layout. The touchpad also has actual buttons rather than integrating those into the touchpad surface; I know some people prefer the latter, but I’d rather have buttons.

Take all of the above and slap on a $1270 price tag and we’re talking about a viable and reasonably priced slim gaming notebook. (The model without an SSD costs about $100 less, but that’s not a compromise I’d recommend.) Without jacking up the price, about the closest alternatives I can come up with that offer a similar or perhaps slightly better gaming experience are much bulkier: ASUS G75VW (last-gen IVB CPU and 670M GPU), MSI GX60 (faster GPU, much slower CPU), the Lenovo IdeaPad Y500 series (i7-4700MQ with SLI GT 750M), or MSI’s own GE60. Depending on what you’re after, one or more of those might be a better choice, but they’re not clearly better in every area.

What it really boils down to is this: are you willing to turn down detail levels a bit in order to get acceptable gaming performance, are temperatures in the 80s and 90s “safe”, and can you live with the mediocre LCD? It’s a shame you’re forced to make that kind of decision, but at least the price is more palatable than the Razer Blade 14. Hopefully MSI can release a revised model that fixes some of the oversights: give us better cooling, keyboard backlighting, a silver chassis (or at least something less prone to collecting smudges and fingerprints), and a good LCD and this would be a winner.

The truth is, we’re probably still a couple years away from seeing this level of performance in a laptop this size that runs truly cool and quiet (<75C and <40dB); physics can be such a drag that way. But the Razer Blade 14 runs a bit cooler and quieter while boasting better performance, and slightly larger notebooks are faster, cooler, and quieter. The GE40 ends up being reasonably fast with temperatures that are a bit higher than we'd like but still technically within spec, and the price is quite reasonable. Fixing the LCD would go a long way towards earning an outright recommendation; as it stands, we can only sigh and think about what might have been.