MSI P65 CREATOR
A mighty machine for work and play
The company better known for supremely powerful gaming laptops now has a machine for content creators
MSI laptops are evolving. The company is established as a reliable purveyor of mainly gamingoriented machines of questionable design maturity, and has now moved into delivering professional PCs with the more austere looks designers and content creators will find acceptable. Its slab-sided design is reminiscent of the MacBook Pro and, now, Razer Blade Pro machines it’s competing against. The case is plastic, though, which detracts from its overall classiness, but does help keep the weight down to just under 2kg.
Under the hood the P65 is a beastly thing. The 8-core/16-thread i9-988H CPU @ 2.3GHz base and 4.8GHz turbo is near top of the line from Intel’s current range and will eat anything thrown at it. 1TB of fast NVMe SSD storage is excellent, and is far in excess of Apple’s current penchant for teensy tiny SSDs. Graphics are handled by an Nvidia RTX 2070 – which begs the question – what is this machine for? The RTX 2070 is a stupendously powerful gaming
card, but is of zero use for professional or general content creation work (unless you’re doing 3D content and don’t want to pay for a proper workstation-class GPU). So, it will game with the very best of them, but if that’s of little or no interest to you then that GPU is a $1,000 component that just isn’t needed. A $4,499 option with a lesser GTX 2060 GPU is available, but that’s still a hunk of gaming power many won’t need, and that model drops RAM from 32 to 16GB.
In regular use we found the design a good one. The trackpad is large and smooth to use, and it packs it a fingerprint scanner, which is something many premium machines skimp on. The trackpad is very wide, though, which turned out to be an annoyance as our palms would inadvertently encroach, triggering screen actions, so typing means consciously avoiding it. The keyboard is decent. The keys are widely spaced and have a relatively soft spring mechanism. The font printed on them, though, is to our eyes too funky. It would be at home on a teenager’s gaming laptop, but for serious grown ups it all looks a bit juvenile.
The large 4k non-touch screen is pleasingly matte, and covers 100% of the Adobe RGB colour gamut. It all adds up to fill out a machine that can cut it with its established competitors, though is considerably more expensive than the competition thanks to MSI’s reluctance to make a laptop that doesn’t have premium gaming chops.