MSI GS65 Stealth
MSI puts on it’s Sunday best in it’s latest ultra-thin gaming notebook.
MSI’s new GS65 Stealth Thin is unlike anything we’ve ever seen before from the Taiwanese laptop maker. This 1.8cmthick unit ditches the usual brushed metal ‘gaming’ facade for a laser cut near-unibody metal case that’s hemmed with a gold beveled top-edge. This compact square and slim profile is garnished with a mixture of fractally perforated air inlets and two architecturally inspired exhaust vents that look great, and also represent a largely reengineered thermal design that pays serious performance dividends. The GS65 even has the first MSI trackpad we’ve been genuinely impressed by and while the keyboard is a little softer than we’d like, it’s serviceable for a device this thin.
Up front is a speedy 15.6-inch 144Hz Full HD IPS display that squeezes into a 14-inch form factor, with an Intel Core i7-8750H CPU, 16GB of RAM, 512GB PCIe SSD, 80Wh battery and a Nvidia Max-Q GTX 1070 GPU inside.
The GS65 Stealth Thin 8RF has some pretty direct competition in Gigabyte’s 2018 Aero 15 (reviewed back in issue 454, page 24) which shares the same CPU, RAM and screen configuration, but swaps in a lower specced GTX 1060 GPU and a slower SATA 6Gbps SSD and a longer lasting 94Wh battery for a $450 discount. Obviously, the GPU difference is simply a matter of choice in this instance, but it’s a tough call as to whether we’d go for better battery life or a faster SSD on this type of device.
Naturally, these two systems perform similarly well in general CPU-heavy home and work tasks, despite the fact that the Gigabyte unit seems to have lucked out with a higher performing CPU, clocking a single-core Cinebench R15 score of 178 to the GS65’s score of 168. Across six cores, this difference manages to compound to between 17% and 23% better scores in HWBot 1080p encoding benchmarks, considerable from what is supposed to be an identical chip.
Graphical performance shows the other side of the coin, however, with MSI’s GS65 Stealth Thin 8RF performing between around 25% better on 3DMark benchmarks and between 10 and 18% better on real-world gaming tests than the Aero 15’s GTX 1060 GPU. That faster PCIe connected SSD that we talked about earlier happens to be a second generation NVMe drive that reads and writes at 2,515.5 and 2,028.1MB/s respectively, which is between four and five times faster than the Gigabyte Aero 15’s SATA 6Gbps SSD.
A combination of enhanced fan blade design and the re-engineering of heat pipe, sink and vents keep the unit’s thermals at a near optimum temperature, with the CPU never spiking over 95°C and the GPU keeping under 87°C. We were particularly impressed by this when we learned that the GS65 Stealth Thin was a millimeter thinner and 160g lighter than the Aero 15, despite having a faster GPU. While the movie playback battery life of the GS65 is less than the Aero 15 — 6 hours and 20 minutes rather than 7 hours and 8 minutes — that’s still a great result for such a powerful gaming laptop at this size. At $3,399, the GS65 is also reasonably priced for everything that’s included.