MSI GS75 Stealth 8SG

MSI just snuck another bombshell into the powerful gaming ultrabook category.

PRICE $ 4,799 au.msi.com

MSI massively upped its game last year with the GS65 Stealth Thin, receiving full marks from a range of independent outlets, but the GS75 Stealth 8SG we have here may be an even bigger success. At just 1.8cm thick it’s almost as thin as its smaller sibling, despite packing an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 (Max Q) GPU and a whopping 32GB of RAM. The GS75 Stealth 8SG has the only 17.3inch display of the roundup, yet its tiny bezels and better screen to body ratio make it difficult to tell that the GS75 Stealth 8SG is actually a bigger unit. The 144Hz screen is powered by a generous 80Wh battery that gets 3 hours and 18 minutes in PCMark 8’s Home battery benchmark — 30% more than the average laptop here. This unit comes with two 512GB Samsung NVMe PCIe SSDs that are configured in RAID 0, which effectively doubles NVMe SSD write times to an absurdly fast 3407 MB/s.

This unit ended up fractionally below average on direct CPU processing benchmarks, but it managed to do better in general work and home computing tasks edging above the middle of the pack. The GS75 Stealth 8SG generally had fps averages around 5% behind the top performing RTX unit on real-world game benchmarks, but it was never more than 10% off the leader.

The GS75 Stealth 8SG’s keyboard does feel a little mushier than many of the offerings here, but it’s at least nice to type on and the new ultrawide trackpad is an awesome addition that looks and feels great.