First AMD Richland A10 Powered Gaming Laptop Released by MSI

According to recent speculation AMD’s Richland APUs for desktops are right around the corner with an expected release date of June the 4th and their pricing has also been detailed and looks pretty aggressive.

Though it seems AMD Richland APUs for notebooks are now upon us as MSI announces the world’s first AMD Richland A10 powered gaming notebooks.

MSI’s GX70 and GX60 gaming notebooks will both incorporate the A10-5750M APU which it claims boasts an additional 40% increase in “visual” performance over the previous generation.

The AMD A10 5750M APU has a clock speed of 2.5 to 3.5GHz and can use the A76M or A70M chipset according to the spec sheet.  MSI have decided to pair the Richland mobile APU with the HD 8970M (for the GX70) and HD 7970M (for the GX60).

You can see the rest of the full MSI GX70 and GX60 gaming notebook specifications below:

I don’t know about you but I am excited to see AMD’s Richland APUs arriving in notebooks. Personally I can’t wait to see how they shake up the more budget orientated $400-$700 market segment of notebooks, and how they compete with equivalently priced Intel notebooks.

Though I think the potential of the APU is wasted by pairing it with a high end discrete gaming GPU, like the HD 8970M/7970M, as the advantage of the APU lays in the combination of CPU and GPU. The CPU component of the APU is probably going to be a bottleneck for high end discrete mobile graphics like the HD 8970M. The only advantage I can see the APU offering here is that with AMD Enduro technology the notebook can switch between discrete and APU graphics to save power, much like Nvidia’s Optimus technology that works between Nvidia discrete graphics and Intel HD Graphics.

According to our friends at Overclockers UK the MSI GX70 gaming notebook is arriving in the first to second week of June for £999.99.

Are you going to be grabbing an AMD Richland APU powered notebook? What are your thoughts on these Richland powered gaming notebooks from MSI?

Source: PR