MSI GF65 Thin
The fact it’s built to a budget is obvious, but if you seek gaming power for under £1,000, buy it while you can
SCORE
Range starts at: £749 (£899 inc VAT) Model tested: £749 (£899 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk
There’s something reassuring about a laptop that knows its purpose in life. The MSI GF65 Thin isn’t trying to be all things to all people, merely an affordable laptop to play games on. It’s a mission unlocked with gusto, even if “Thin” lands just the wrong side of optimism.
For, in this company at least, the GF65 Thin is a chunky beast. It’s the only laptop on test to break the 20mm thickness bar, measuring 21.7mm, with the vast bulk of that due to the size of the chassis; the screen lid is very thin indeed, and so flexible that we suspect it wouldn’t deal well with a direct blow. Despite the brushed metal effect of the th chassis top, plastic is the ma material of choice for the rest of the chassis too.
The question is whether this matters – and w we’d argue that it doesn’t. Once yo you sit the MSI down on a desk, it looks every inch the gaming laptop, complete with fake grilles at the front. The necessary cooling happens on the bottom of this machine, so put it on a solid surface if you want it to keep going at full pelt.
Its power stems from two key components: GeForce RTX 2060 mobile graphics and an Intel Core i7-9750H processor. Both are built for speed rather than power efficiency, and while you can opt for a Meeting mode that drops the fan speed down a tad, there’s always a hum.
If you turn to the gaming graphs on p92, it becomes obvious what you get in return. Not only did the GF65 Thin top the charts, it demolished the opposition – it was three times as fast as its closest rival, the GeForce MX450-powered HP Envy 13, in both F1 2020 and Metro: Last Light. It also scored an excellent 5,801 in 3DMark’s Time Spy test (the Envy barely broke 1,000), and it was the only laptop here to achieve playable results in Metro
Exodus (59fps) and Shadow of the Tomb Raider (86fps).
All those frame rates were achieved at High settings at the screen’s native resolution of 1,920 x 1,080, and gamers will be pleased to see a 120Hz refresh rate. Pricier gaming laptops go higher, but that’s a great inclusion in a sub-£1,000 machine.
Compromises have been made when it comes es to colour reproduction. tion. sRGB coverage ge is a lacklustre 54% and its accuracy is woeful with an average erage of 4.91. Nor does es it shine for brightness, ightness, with a peak eak of 269cd/m 269cd/m2. The good news for gamers is that a contrast ratio of 1,173:3 means you’ll be able to see into dark corners.
We think most gamers will like this keyboard too. Buttons press down with a firm action and, thanks to backlighting, it’s easy to see what you’re hitting in dark conditions.
The backlighting is basic, and the colour is red or nothing, but again we draw your attention to the low price. For the same reason, we can forgive the weedy compact touchpad; it’s a laptop that would benefit from a mouse.
Two USB-A 3 ports sit on the right-hand side, b but it’s a shame that MSI didn’t di put at least one of them on o the left. In part because it m makes life easier for left-han left-handed players, but also b because this is the only VR-ready VR system on test and Windows
Mixed Reality sets require
“The GF65 Thin was three times as fast as its nearest rival, the GeForce MX450powered HP Envy 13, in F1
2020 and Metro: Last Light”
you to plug in via HDMI and USB using a shared cable (until the last few centimetres). There are four more ports on the right: two USB-Cs, Ethernet and a 3.5mm jack.
Luckily, the latter isn’t required to enjoy music, with plenty of volume and a modicum of quality emanating from the built-in speakers. They’re heavy on the treble, but voices come through clearly; this makes it possible to hear the action over inevitable fan noise in games.
You can also adjust the fan noise via the selection of profiles and, before we conclude, it’s worth noting that this is a powerful system even away from gaming. The six cores and 12 threads of the processor come to the fore in multicore tasks, which is why this system jumps from midtable in our single-core photo-editing test to third place in the video-editing task (and overall). The downside is battery life: the 51Wh unit only lasted 4hrs 38mins in our test.
There’s one other notable sacrifice MSI makes to hit its budget: a 256GB SSD. But we have good news because you can add a second M.2 SSD PCIe without replacing the initial disk. Removing the back is a bit fiddly, but follow the online videos and you shouldn’t hit any problems.
As we said at the start, rt, this is a gaming laptop op built to a budget, g and nd that shows in parts. But if f you seek high frame rates s for under £1,000 then it’s a great choice. We suggest you u don’t think too long g about it, though. MSI has already produced an
RTX 3060 replacement eplacement that costs £1,400… 0…