A machine this big sporting Intel's Core 2 Solo low-power U3500 processor would be one of those oddities. This is a CPU you'd typically find in an ultralight laptop, like MSI's own . And while the X600 does sport a discrete graphics chip--something that certainly helps visual quality on DVDs--the actual pixel resolution is no more than that on the smaller, lighter X340.
Performance is just what you'd expect for a single-core, low-voltage U3500: On WorldBench 6, the X600 notched a score of 62. That's actually better than the X340, but it still trails the , which ships with a dual-core processor.
One thing the X600 does have more or less in common with other : battery life. It lasts 3 hours, 50 minutes in PC World lab tests--about 20 minutes under the average. OK, so we've got two strikes coming out of the gate. On to some better news.
When running light office and Web apps, the system offered pretty good responsiveness, considering the limited CPU resources. We started to see some fairly serious lag when paging through a large PDF file while Firefox 3.5 was running with a dozen tabs open. Running standard office apps, like Word or Excel, ran fine. And, really, if you're thinking of buying the X600, this is what you're probably going to use it for, anyhow. Think of it as a netbook with privileges.
Wi-Fi performance was good for a laptop in this class. Even complex Web pages loaded quickly, and we saw no significant issues in our 802.11n environment.