Behlul Mohammed
TIf you need a device with a small size and a large specification sheet, thinks MSI’s GS65 might be just the device for you here are two types of people who will be checking out the MSI GS65 Stealth Thin (yeah, it’s a mouthful). Professionals such as designers and photo and video editors, and gamers. Both groups will be checking its portability, power and battery life.
The GS65 is a beautiful machine to look at. It has the sleek nature of any ultraportable notebook and the accents of most powerful gaming machines. The GS65 has a lightweight matte black aluminium body with gold accents and is easy to hold. It feels great to use but in order to keep it that way MSI seems to have made a few sacrifices on materials used — I didn’t like how the body felt hollow when pressed on behind the display or around the trackpad. The Per-key RGB keyboard is stacked well and has decent travel time. The trackpad though isn’t anything to write home about but then few laptops have great trackpads.
Ports-wise, you have to make next to no sacrifices on this device. The GS65 includes three USB 3.1 ports, an Ethernet port and dedicated mic and headphone jacks. There’s also a Thunderbolt 3 port (with a full four lanes of bandwidth for using an external GPU), HDMI, and DisplayPort, which allow you to use three external monitors at once if that is what you need out of this machine. Unfortunately, there’s no SD card slot, which is crazy because I would’ve loved not to have a dongle when importing images and videos to edit.
On average the laptop gave me around five to six hours if my daily consumption included my work and light gaming. If gaming time increased the battery life reduced. Like anyone else, I would have liked some more time out of the device but the battery life is acceptable considering the amount of performance I am getting out of this gaming-focused machine.
Power you ask? The MSI GS65 comes with plenty on tap. Powered by the Intel 8th Gen Coffee Lake i7-8750H CPU, the laptop is supported by 16GB of DDR4 RAM, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Max-Q and a 512GB SSD. In our usage the laptop handled anything we threw at it and didn’t seem to have any issues cracking through AAA game titles. Neither the keyboard nor the trackpad got hot at any point while pushing the laptop to the ragged edge but the body edges did heat up. The fans can get really loud as well. It’s a bit of a give and take.
One of the laptop features I enjoyed the most was the 15.6-inch FHD (1,920x1,080), 144Hz, 7ms, IPS-Level display. The MSI GS65 has thin bezels (without sacrificing the position of the webcam. 10 points to MSI), a wide colour gamut and a fast refresh rate. The experience of the display with its 144Hz refresh rate entailed super smooth frame rates and much more detail in every frame.
Audio isn’t the most impressive on this device. There’s no bass and the sounds are very flat. They were okay to use while at home but didn’t quite cut it when outdoors. The sounds from the speakers always dissolved around other external noises.
The laptop retails for Dh9,999 and is well priced. By well priced I’m not saying that it is affordable, but you have to pay for performance right? Most competitors with similar specifications are definitely higher-priced.
If you need a high-end machine for gaming, editing or anything that requires high-end specifications, you should consider the MSI GS65. This is definitely one of the most well-thoughtout machines on the market right now. This might be a gaming-focused laptop, but it’s just perfect for so many people in so many ways.