Ever seen a really slim gaming laptop? No, right? Well there now seems to be one from MSI; The MSI GS65 Stealth Thin. It is perhaps one of the slimmest laptops in the industry while also being the slimmest of company’s very own laptop.
Boasting an 8th gen, hexa-core Intel Coffee Lake processor, the laptop is a gamer’s dream. This is because there are just a few gaming laptops right now, with the latest generation of Intel processor, which is supposed to deliver 20 percent more performance, than its predecessor; the 7th gen Intel.
Therefore, even if you don’t plan on using the laptop for gaming purposes, it can still be quite useful for productivity purposes as well. Although, of course, the laptop is targeted towards gamers, as it has a dedicated Nvidia GeForce 1070 Max-Q GPU which also supports Virtual Reality when the time shall come. Delivering high frame rates, and smooth performance for a laptop which is very thin, perhaps it can be the best buy for those looking for portability.
Though of course as with other gaming laptops, this laptop gets hot too; perhaps a bit more.
Design
Starting with the dimensions, the laptop measures At 14.1 x 9.8 x 0.7 inches, which means the laptop is just 0.7 inches thick! (or rather thin). You won’t be finding any gaming laptop thinner than this with the latest specs. Not only this, but the laptop doesn’t weight that much either with just a weight of 4.1 pounds. Other laptops of the same screen or similar screen size usually cross the 5.5-pound mark pretty easily.
On the other hand, the laptop body is completely colored in black and matte sandblasted aluminum alloy, apart from the logo. This time, the logo which is a red-and-white dragon sigil isn’t using back-lid LEDs. Instead, MSI opted for something rather cliché this time; the logo is just a black-and-gold emblem. Though, of course, the laptop’s design isn’t ordinary, as the top of the lid is lined with a diamond-cut golden strip. To make the laptop appear more flash, the side-vents are also coated with some amount of gold as well.
The laptop hinges are pretty flexible, which means they can be rotated totally 180 degrees. This is because the laptop isn’t just meant for gaming but for work purposes too. If you were to view the laptop screen from some distance, the other person should probably be flipping the screen orientation to 180 degrees.
Inside of the laptop is also in black aluminum, apart from some components. For the power button and touchpad, gold is used to line them.
Ports
Being thin doesn’t mean that the laptop loses out on any ports. There is literally a plethora of them on either side. On the laptop’s right side there is a USB 3.1 Type-A port, Thunderbolt 3, a Mini DisplayPort, HDMI and the power jack. This means that you are going to be future proofing yourself with the laptop since it supports the latest Thunderbolt too.
While on the left side of things, you will be getting to see a pair of USB 3.1 Type-A ports, Gigabit Ethernet, a secure lock slot, a microphone jack and an S/PDIF jack for high-resolution audio as well, which isn’t found on other common laptops.
Display
On the display side of things, the laptop has a 1920 x 1080 screen resolution. The refresh rate is pretty great at 144 Hz. The screen is capable of producing perfect and vivid hues while maintaining the detail level.
Not only this, but the sRGB color gamut for the laptop stands at 150 percent; that’s a lot since the industry average for the gaming laptop is at 141 percent. It clearly beats out other great gaming laptops like Zephyrus at 120 percent, the Alienware 15 at 114 percent and the 1510 at113 percent.
As for the brightness, the tests recorded the MSI Stealth’s screen brightness to be 288 nits, which is great for a gaming laptop. Although compared to 1510’s 306 nits, or the Alienware 15’s 374 nits it might seem a bit less, but trust us it is pretty good. You can easily view the screen under the same, without having to worry about not getting to see the screen.
Keyboard and Touchpad
The key travel might seem a bit short at 1.4 millimeters, but you can style type quickly using the island-style keyboard, which has keys with strong 77-gram force actuation. Therefore, you won’t be finding it difficult to reach a typing speed of 70 words per minutes easily.
As with other gaming laptops, this laptop also boasts individual back-lit color for each key. Therefore you can play around with different colors you like, and choose the best one.
Another great thing is that you can also create macros, courtesy the SteelSeries Engine 3 software. 10/10 for creativity.
The Touchpad is pretty great too, with sufficient size to support gestures. Gestures are quite responsive as well. Though the laptop’s trackpad doesn’t have the two left and right click buttons, so you would have to rely on gestures for that.
Battery
While battery life might be an issue on most gaming laptops, this one happens to have a great battery life. Surfing the web at a screen brightness of 150 nits, the laptop lasted amazingly 5 hours and 40 minutes, compared to the premium gaming laptop average of 3 hours and 49 minutes. This is courtesy the power-efficient GPU used for the laptop’s display.
Price and Configurations
The laptop starts at a price tag of $1,799 which has 256GB M.2 SSD and a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q GPU with 6GB of VRAM powered by the Intel 8th Generation Coffeelake processor. You can also spend $200 extra to get an MSI GS65 Stealth with 3.9-GHz, six-core Intel Core i7-8750H processor, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB M.2 SSD and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Max-Q GPU with 8GB of RAM at $1,999. If you want the premium model, then you should perhaps go for the one available for $2,999 which doubles the storage and RAM capacity to 1TB and 32 GB, respectively, in a Super RAID 4 configuration.
Considering the base model’s price tag, and the laptop’s specs, perhaps it is one great laptop for those who routinely plan on using the laptop for both work and gaming purposes.