It’s not the most stylish laptop we’ve ever seen, but the MSI Megabook M670 provides an impressive combination of performance and features for such a low-cost system.

The plain matte-black exterior of the Megabook is attractive enough at first glance, but the interior keyboard layout looks a real mess. The reason for this is that MSI has squeezed a full-sized keyboard onto the unit – complete with a separate numeric keypad stuck onto the right-hand side of the keyboard area.

This gives the entire keyboard area a cluttered and cramped feel. And, to make room for the numeric keypad, the trackpad has been pushed off-centre, moving it to the left of the keyboard area. It looks odd, and it also feels rather odd to use at first, as you have to move both hands over to the left, rather than balancing them in the middle of the keyboard.

This is a dubious ergonomic design and the only people likely to benefit from the numeric keypad are heavy-duty business users who do a lot of spreadsheet work – who are unlikely to be looking at a £500 laptop in the first place.

At this point, some people may simply decide that they don’t like the keyboard design at all and start to look elsewhere. But, if you don’t mind the keyboard arrangement then the Megabook has a lot going for it. The 1.8GHz AMD Sempron is one of the more powerful processors found in this group, providing strong performance in most of our benchmark tests.

It’s also good to see that MSI has been able to back this up with 1GB of memory – the only machine here to go above 512MB. The 80GB hard disk is fairly modest, but should still be adequate for most home users.

The Megabook is also the only laptop to produce anything respectable regarding 3D graphics performance. Its Nvidia Geforce Go 6100 isn’t going to break any records with its 12fps in Far Cry, but it’s the only machine in this group to reach double figures in this test, so you can at least take the o ccasional stab at playing games.

The Megabook’s real strengths lie elsewhere, however. Its powerful processor means that it doesn’t have the best battery life, yet it still manages more than two hours of DVD playback, and just a few minutes short of three hours when running ordinary productivity software.

That obviously makes it a good choice for playing video or music when you’re on the road. The brightness and image quality of the screen worked well for DVD playback too. It’s also good for multimedia tasks such as video editing, thanks to its built-in Firewire port and S-video output.

The Megabook does have a potential Achilles’ heel, though. It could be a bit more solidly built and – even more so than with the Fujitsu Amilo – the upper panel that houses the screen feels a little bit too flimsy for our liking.

It should be hardy enough for most home users, but we’d think twice about using it as a business machine or letting the kids play with it. Even so, there’s no denying that the Megabook is a surprisingly powerful and versatile laptop for something in this price range.

This article is part of a group test of laptops.
See also:

Introduction
Acer Aspire 5101 AWLMi
Asus A6Rp-AP026H
Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pi 1505
Hi-grade Notino W5600
Toshiba Satellite Pro A120

Graphs and table of features can be read via our pdf downlaods above.