MSI GS65 Stealth
MSI’s new gaming ultrabook is dressed to impress.
MSI’s Stealth laptops have traditionally carried the loud red-and-black colour scheme of the company’s broader gaming line, but this year’s GS65 Stealth Thin has matured considerably, wrapped in a sleek metal and goldbeveled unibody chassis and with a premium keyboard and trackpad combo. A speedy 15.6-inch 144Hz FullHD gaming display is fed by an Intel Core i78750H CPU, 16GB of RAM and either a Nvidia GTX 1060 or a GTX 1070 (Max-Q) GPU. Both these configurations come with a ridiculously fast (2000MB/s read/write) PCIe connected SSD, but this comes at a cost to overall space. While the premium rig offers a tight but adequate 512GB of total internal storage, the cheaper model offers just 256GB, which will hamstring the device for many. The CPU performance on this unit was a little less than we’d expected with a Cinebench CPU Multithreaded score of 918, about 11% lower than the Dell G5 15 and 18% higher than the Asus TUF FX504 — which are both running the same CPU and 16GB of RAM. The Nvidia GTX 1070 (Max-Q) GPU is a step up from a lot of the offerings here, netting average frame rates that were 16.5% better than a Max-Q GTX 1060 on the Dell G5 15’s Total War: Warhammer 2 (1080p, Ultra) test. The GS65 Stealth isn’t the best graphical performer, getting between 7% and 15% less than the average frame rates of the Razer Blade 15 (running identical components) across all the gaming titles we tested. Thermals were good and you get a 6 hour and 20 minute movie playback battery life to boot.