MSI rounds Out Classic Series with CX700 & CR700 Notebooks [17.3-in Multimedia Notebook PCs with HDMI Out]

Taiwan’s MSI has been working diligently to build a fairly respectable product portfolio and its recent announcement Friday regarding its new CX700 and CR700 notebooks came as little surprise to most. These two 17.3-in laptop computers will serve to complete (if we can ever say that about MSI) their Classic series of notebooks and are meant to appeal to the multimedia set.

The CX700 and CR700 notebooks join the recently-introduced 16-in CX600 and CR600 duo, which, in turn, followed the debut of the 14-inch CR400. There isn’t really anything different when it comes to the external design of the two new units, but they do feature a 2.1-channel speaker system, an HDMI output and LED-backlit display with 1600×900 resolution.

The main difference between the CX700 and CR700 is the graphics processing hardware. The CX700 uses ATI’s Mobility Radeon HD 4330 High Performance 3D card with 512MB of dedicated VRAM. The CR700 while the latter uses NVIDIA’s GeForce 8200M G GPU that shares memory with the system.

Both units offer a choice of Intel Core 2 Duo processors and 250GB, 320GB or 500GB hard drives and come preloaded with Windows Vista Home Premium edition. Bluetooth V2.0 with EDR remains an option on both systems. There is an integrated 1.3-megapixel webcam, wi-fi and gigabit Ethernet port and built-in microphone. Some additional toys include a 4-in-1 card reader, three USB ports and a DVD burner. There has yet to be any release regarding pricing for these or any of the other Classic series PCs.