MSI GX60: ‘First’ AMD-Based Gaming Laptop

High-end laptops in general built around AMD processors are few and far between. Full-featured gaming laptops are an even rarer breed.  Admittedly, there are a few mid-range and gaming capable laptops with AMD CPUs (or APUs as they are now called), such as the HP dv6z, but that’s more of an exception to the rule.

But here comes MSI and launches the GX60 – a laptop with a 15.6-inch display with anti-reflective coating and 1920 x 1080 resolution, up to 16 GB of RAM, a 128 GB SSD + 750 GB HDD or even dual SSD RAID configuration, most importantly AMD’s most powerful mobile GPU, the Radeon HD 7970M.

In all other cases, this impressive hardware kit would have been accompanied by an Intel Core i7 CPU, but in this case the processor is an AMD A10-4600M. The laptop has a lot in common with the Intel-based GT60, but the A10-4600M APU changes the game completely. It has four cores clocked at 2.3 GHz (with turbo mode 3.2 GHz). Although it’s a quad-core CPU it is more on par with a dual-core Intel Core i5 because of Intel’s Hyperthreading feature that doubles the effective core count.

Being an AMD CPU, the integrated graphics part HD 7660G is also present and capable of quite a bit of mid-range gaming. However, in this case it has been made largely irrelevant by the Radeon HD 7970M. This GPU comes with 1280 Radeon cores running at 850 MHz and 2 GB of GDDR5 memory.

One of the features MSI makes some noise about is the laptop’s capability of powering up to three external monitors with AMD’s Eyefinity tech. Another is the Killer E2200 WLAN module from Qualcomm Atheros that provides lower latencies for games by prioritizing this type of data traffic. The keyboard, like the GX60’s Intel cousins, is designed by SteelSeries.

Jesper Berg
Jesper Berg

Gaming hardware enthusiast since the 80286 era.

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