MSI GS65 Stealth

Design

MSI has thankfully gone in a different direction regarding the look and feel of its flagship thin-and-light gaming laptop, focusing on a device with far wider appeal. You won’t find stark angles or red LEDs all over this laptop – rather, you’ll find a sleek, all-black device with subtle gold accents on its lid, within its dual hinges and surrounding its touchpad.

Those gold accents are also found highlighting the laptop’s heat vents, but nowhere else on the brushed, black aluminum frame. The result is one of the most understated gaming laptops we’ve seen to date – one that we would have no problem whipping out in a coffee shop much less at a eSports tournament.

As for how the laptop feels, the GS65 Stealth weighs just 4.14 pounds (1.88kg) and measures a measly 0.69 inches (17.53mm) thin. The laptop fits just fine in our backpack and doesn’t weigh us down, which is impressive considering MSI tells us it could have gone even thinner and lighter but opted for an Ethernet port and the goal of eight hours of battery life .

Display

As befitting a gaming laptop, MSI has gone with an FHD 144 Hz display with a 7 ms response time. As mentioned earlier, the display size is 15.6-inches.

An FHD resolution (1920×1080 pixels) is no match for Apple’s stunning Retina displays, but it’s a very sensible choice for a gaming laptop. The resolution is high enough that you won’t notice pixels unless you’re really looking for them and low enough that the graphics card can pump out pixels fast enough to take advantage of that higher refresh rate.

Ports

While the Strealth’s frame is definitely thin, it still has plenty of ports. On the right sits a USB 3.1 Type-A port, Thunderbolt 3, a Mini DisplayPort, HDMI and the power jack. You’ll find a pair of USB 3.1 Type-A ports, Gigabit Ethernet, a secure lock slot, a microphone jack and a S/PDIF jack for high-res audio.

Performance

As expected, performance was spectacular. The GTX 1070 is an exceptionally powerful card by any measure. However, the Max-Q branding means that the card in the GS65 was tuned to hit a performance-power consumption sweet spot that saps a noticeable portion of the card’s peak performance capability. Max-Q is the reason this laptop is so thin and light, though, which more than justifies the loss in power.

In my testing, the laptop easily chomping through every game and benchmark I threw at it. Games never dropped below that magical 60 fps mark even at maximum settings. In Rise of the Tomb Raider and Far Cry 5, at max settings, I saw an average of 78 fps. Doom hit a whopping 160 fps at Ultra settings. Video conversion time was also among the fastest I’ve seen. When it comes to performance, this laptop isn’t going to be holding you back.

The laptop runs quite cool for the most part, but under load, it can get very hot. While converting video, the CPU hit 88 degrees Celsius and the fans got quite loud. Even while gaming, it’s not unusual to see internal CPU temperatures of around 90 degrees.

Battery

I don’t expect a gaming laptop to survive more than 40 minutes when gaming and a couple of hours under regular use (web browsing, movies, etc.).The MSI GS65 pulled off 90 minutes of continuous gaming and almost 4 hours under a PCMark 8 workload. If I were to be doing something simple, like browsing the web, I think the laptop would have touched the 5-hour mark.