MSI has announced its latest gaming beast, the GT660. This is not a refresh of one of the older, 15 or 17 inch gaming laptops, but a brand new 16-inch model based on an Intel Core i7 processor and the Nvidia GeForce GTX 285M. The overall design has also been revamped to look like a mix of Alienware’s latest or Asus’ gaming models like the G51Jx. It comes in a sober black design with red illuminated highlights that has apparently been given an iF Product Design Award.

In addition, the laptop has three DDR3 slots–allowing for a total of 12 gigs of RAM. In terms of storage, there are two hard drive bays in the MSI GT660, but there’s no word on RAID0 capability as of yet. One feature that seems to be returning from previous MSI gaming laptops is the overclocking feature that lets you boost the internal clocks by pushing a button above the keyboard. Another interesting new addition is a high-speed USB 3.0 port.

As a previous owner of an MSI gaming laptop my first reaction is that this is a major step forward, but we’ll wait for some benchmarks to surface before drawing any conclusions. The only thing lacking would be the latest mobile Nvidia GPU, the GTX 480M, but that might be remedied later on.

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