By Evan Ackerman
The MSI GX600, which showed up at Computex today, is supposedly the world’s first “Turbobook” with a built in overclocking button that boosts CPU speed by up to 20% when you enable it. The rest of the laptop is about average for a Santa Rosa based gaming platform, with a Core 2 Duo processor, 15.4″ WXGA, Nvidia Geforce 8600 with 512mb of ram, and up to 250 gigs of SATA HD space and up to 4 gigs of ram. It’s also got a full numeric keypad, which is a nice feature, and weighs about 6 pounds.
Although a turbo button on a computer sure sounds neat, is it really a turbo button? When I think “turbo” I think of a boost of speed that is significant enough to somehow cause physical damage if you leave it on… ‘Cause otherwise, why not just leave it on all the time? If you remember the days of the generic mid-90s off-beige tower PC, you may recall a turbo button that worked along a similar and vaguely useless principle. So from this perspective, the “turbo” button is in reality an “economy” button that lets you underclock the computer when you want to save battery life, which (in the case of the GX600) is moot since the turbo button only works when the computer is plugged in. In that respect, laptops like the Vaio which have a selectable speed/stamina button to actually underclock the chip to save battery are more practical, if less cool.
Price not yet set.
so the “turbo” feature saves battery life?
The turbo button overclocks the machine by 20%. And yes, overclocks.
This might be handy if you want that extra gaming power while not on the go…