MSI has become quite popular with the gamer crowd in recent years, and its dedicated Gaming Series laptops represent the company at its finest. While there's a lot of gaming focus, such as the excellent GS65 Stealth Thin, there are also parts of its lineup that will appeal to someone who's just looking for a powerful portable.
Simply sublime
MSI's Stealth has long been one of the closest things to a proper gaming Ultrabook, and the GS65 is an absolute marvel of engineering. It offers an 8th Gen Intel six-core i7 processor, up to 32GB of RAM, GPUs from the GTX 1060 up to the RTX 2070 from NVIDIA, and a useful Thunderbolt 3 port. Gamers will also love the 144Hz refresh rate display. It's certainly a piece of laptop eye candy to look at.
Creators delight
MSI is best known for gaming but the PS63 is a remarkable 15-inch notebook targeted at the creators out there. It's sleek and sophisticated in its appearance, while inside housing an 8th Gen Intel Core i7 and either a GTX 1050 or 1050 Ti GPU — a perfect balance. With super-fast NVMe storage, 16GB of RAM, USB-C 3.1 and even a fingerprint scanner for Windows Hello, the PS63 is exceptionally well equipped.
Budget gaming
Gamers on a tighter budget will love the GV62, since it ticks the boxes for both solid performance and attractive price. It makes use of Intel's quad-core i5-8300H with eight threads, and pairs it with NVIDIA's GTX 1050 Ti GPU, which remains a sweet spot for budget laptop gaming. It's neatest trick is having 16GB of Intel Optane memory to help speed up that 1TB HDD, and the SteelSeries keyboard is really nice to use.
Ridiculous power
It's large, thick, heavy, and utterly insane. That about sums up what you're getting into with the GT75 Titan, one of the most powerful gaming laptops you'll come across right now. You get either an 8th Gen Intel Core i7 or Core i9 processor, an RTX 2070 or 2080 GPU, 144Hz 17.3-inch display with G-Sync, 32GB of RAM, a ton of NVMe SSD storage and Thunderbolt 3. It's not the most portable laptop you'll ever see, but what a machine it is.
Big screen
If you're hunting for a 17-inch laptop with plenty of gaming performance, the GP73 fits the bill. You get a large, anti-glare display, but without a massive chassis to house it in. Inside it houses a 6-core Intel Core i7 processor, a GTX 1070 GPU and 16GB of RAM that you can upgrade yourself to 32GB if you wish. The most excellent SteelSeries keyboard is out front, Killer networking will make sure your connection is rock solid, and the whole package is excellent value.
Great value
One of MSI's first laptops to contain 9th Gen Intel processors and NVIDIA's new GTX 1650 GPU, the GF63 is a really good value package for laptop gaming. It comes with 8GB of RAM out of the box, but is user-upgradeable to as much as 64GB, uses NVMe SSD storage for superfast data transfer, and with its battery life of up to 7 hours, it lasts a fair while off the charger for a gaming laptop.
If we had to choose...
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There are a couple of choices in MSI's current lineup that jump out, and even better still they're not both for gamers. It's hard not to recommend the GS65 Stealth Thin, a laptop that still seems impossible. A sleek, super-thin chassis that houses not only the necessary power to play PC games, but a high-refresh rate display to play them on.
It also doesn't scream "I'm a gamer," with a fairly understated style and a pretty sophisticated design. The same can be said of the most excellent PS63 Modern, a creator-targeted laptop that we like a lot. It's gorgeous to look at, powerful to use, and not particularly expensive, either.
The PS63 can also do a spot of lighter gaming, but ultimately that's not why it exists. It has a perfect balance of specs for the likes of photographers and videographers, and even has Windows Hello security built in for that extra piece of mind.
