Just saying, I have a MSI Laptop. I bought it a little more than a year ago. Here are the specs:

Intel i7 3610QM Processor

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M 2GB GDDR5

8GB RAM

I love it and would definitely suggest their hardware. I haven't had a single problem with it and it is put together just as well as most other laptops in the price range are. Build quality isn't Apple or anything close to that but for what it is it is very good. So yes I am very happy with my purchase and I would consider purchasing another one of their laptops.

I would have gone with a Clevo. Faster CPU (albeit fewer cores), faster GPU, and much better screen.

Yeah I have two Clevo laptops. Can't get much better. Lot of resellers. I would have recommended malibal if you're closer to them. That said their screens are amazing. I didn't realize this until I started comparing mine against others. Most resellers have these LED Glossy "Glassview" displays. The quality of the screen is way higher than any LCD you'd find a normal gamer using. I made an image to help. On my clevo I can see all 18 squares easily. If you can only see the top row then this is what it looks like color corrected into your screens lower gamut. The range of colors is basically much higher and more vibrant. The difference is really evident in games with darkness.

That said for your price range you did pretty good.

I made an image to help. On my clevo I can see all 18 squares easily. If you can only see the top row then this is what it looks like color corrected into your screens lower gamut. The range of colors is basically much higher and more vibrant.

I'm on a retina MacBook Pro and I can just barely make out the second row.

You can not tell the screen quality from viewing a single very dark picture. It pretty much only depends on some settings like gamma in screen and graphics driver.

Its the little secret of shop people who screw up the settings of cheap screens (and often hide the controls so you can not adjust it), to make people buy the expensive ones.

There are websites with real calibration images for adjusting your settings, for example, http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/. It only takes a few minutes.