MSI GS65 Stealth Review: The Ultimate Gaming Laptop

If you want the best gaming laptop at an affordable price, the MSI GS65 Stealth is an ideal option for you. It is the most compelling Nvidia Max-Q gaming laptop available in the market. Apart from that, it beats a lot of its competitors with a mile in design and style. Also, it will give you the ultimate user experience that every eathlete can wish and here is the best we know about this gaming machine.

MSI GS65 Stealth

With the MSI GS65 Stealth, the firm has successfully elevated its front line of laptops to elite standing; making the absolute best of the technology afforded it.

Design

Luckily, MSI has shifted its consideration in a distinct way concerning the style and character of its flagship thin-and-light gaming laptop, focusing on a design with considerably wider appeal. You won’t see abrupt angles or red LEDs all over this laptop – rather, you’ll find a smooth, all-black device with definite gold accents on its cover, within its twin joints and surrounding its touchpad.

As for the user experience of the laptop is concerning, the GS65 Stealth weighs just 4.14 pounds (1.88kg) and measures a measly 0.69 inches (17.53mm) thin.

Despite being sufficiently slim, it has provided the laptop not only enough space for lots of ports, but also a SteelSeries keyboard with plenty of travel and effective feedback. Furthermore, the keyboard is RGB backlit with 16.7 million color options and SteelSeries’s GameSense, which changes the lighting function to sync with gameplay in supported games.

The glass-coated touchpad works just accurately and doesn’t trigger movements when typing; indicating that it has great palm rejection.

Now, another reason we speculate MSI went a little thicker with the GS65 Stealth’s frame and heavier with its weight was to make space for its three-fan Cooler Boost Trinity thermal system.

Display

In our test, we found little to zero flaws in the nearly bezel-less display. Particularly, the display delivers an 82% screen-to-body ratio with bezels just 4.9mm wide, filling a 15.6-inch display into a 14-inch frame.

MSI succeeded to support a regular webcam position with a fair resolution of 720p, but back to that screen. Unluckily, there’s no Windows Hello facial recognition technology built into the webcam, there is a fingerprint sensor built into the power button.

Extra pleasing addition is the ability to turn the display contents upside down when the screen is bent 180 degrees. Finally, this is the brightest, robust and most color-rich display we’ve seen on an Nvidia Max-Q laptop so far.

Battery Life

If you are a pro gamer, you must be familiar with the fact that almost none of these devices are capable to bring a decent amount of life to our table.

MSI claims up to eight hours on a charge from this laptop, our experiments don’t come very close to that total. Though, the times we’ve noted are far better than, say, 90% of gaming laptops out there.

Features and Software

MSI has admittedly equipped the GS65 Stealth with numbers of pre-loaded software, but it efficiently avoids ‘bloatware’ situation by implementing valuable functionality. Especially, MSI’s Dragon Center 2.0 brings with it lots of system diagnostic and performance enhancement tools, like component load levels and the ability to free up memory space.

MSI GS65 Stealth Specs

• CPU: 3.9GHz Intel Core i7-8750H (quad-core, 9MB cache, up to 4.2GHz)
• Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 (8GB GDDR5, Max-Q)
• RAM: 16GB DDR4 (8GB x 2, 2,400MHz)
• Screen: 15.6-inch FHD (1,920 x 1,080), anti-glare, wide view angle display (144Hz, 7ms response, 72% NTSC color gamut, 16:9)
• Storage: 512GB SSD (M.2)
• Ports: USB 3.1 Gen2 x 3, Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C), miniDisplayPort, HDMI-out, RJ-45 Ethernet, 1/1 SPDIF (ESS Sabre HiFi)
• Connectivity: Killer N1550 Combo 802.11ac Wi-Fi (2×2 MIMO); Bluetooth 5.0
• Camera: 720p HD webcam
• Weight: 4.14 pounds (1.88kg)
• Size: 14.08 x 9.75 x 0.69 inches (357.63 x 247.65 x 17.53mm; W x H x D)

Price

The MSI GS65 Stealth starts at $1,799, which includes a Core i7-8750H CPU, 16GB of RAM, a 256GB M. 2 SSD and a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q GPU with 6GB of VRAM.