Most high-end MSI laptops aimed at gamers are big, bulky and often covered in LEDs and bright colours, but the GE620 breaks the tradition. Despite having a powerful CPU and Nvidia graphics card, the design is far more refined.

Underneath the brushed, metal-effect lid, the only indications of the GE620’s gaming roots are the red W, A, S and D keys, which should be familiar to fans of first-person shooters. The raised, Chiclet-style keys all have relatively short travel, but didn’t have a huge amount of tactile feedback. There’s a dedicated numeric keypad, which makes data entry easier, and several multimedia shortcut keys.

We felt the touchpad was slightly too small but it was smooth and very responsive. Our main concern was the single see-saw button, which had a noticeable dead spot in its centre. Even so, we only noticed it occasionally failing to register clicks, so it's something you'd quickly get used to.

There's no Blu-ray player, but the DVD re-writer is useful for watching standard definition films as well as burning home movies and backups. On top of this there are three USB ports, two of which are USB3, a multi-format memory card reader and integrated Bluetooth.

With a second generation Intel Core i7-2630QM processor and 4GB of RAM, performance is fantastic. The processor runs at 2GHz as standard, but can use Turbo Boost to speed up to 2.9GHz when some extra grunt is needed. As it’s a quad-core processor, even multi-threaded programs shouldn’t be a problem. Our multimedia benchmarks loved the extra cores, as the impressive overall score of 78 shows.