First off- I am in IT, and have very high expectations for laptops. I researched for almost a year before purchasing.
I have been shopping on and off for the last year, and when I buy Motherboards or other major components, MSI is always my first choice when shopping. I obviously found this laptop first when I was looking for something light, small, and can handle anything I throw at it, while looking professional when doing it. I didn't want anything bulky or screaming "Gaming Laptop" as I do other things than just gaming like Video Editing, Photo Editing, web design, Virtualization, etc. as my wife calls it, "Nerd Stuffs". I did however look at the Razor, ROG, and the HP Omen, when making my decision to spend ~1600+ on a laptop. I will list Pros and Cons:
PROS: The style, light, and overall thinness of this laptop. Its very light (4.65ish pounds), looks very sleek and thin, and when you have it sitting on your desk at work it doesn't look obnoxious like you are just sitting there saying "look at my gaming fancy laptop".
The Keyboard is very clicky, and mechanical. It has a great layout and customizing the colors per key is pretty slick. When you hit the "FN" key for hotkeys, the hotkeys light up red and turn off all other key lights making it easy to see where they all are.
The screen quality - 144hz 1080p IPS is very bright, crisp and clear. You would be surprised at how smooth window animations and game video actually are. The frame around is very thin and low profile.
The POWER! - This laptop plays Mass Effect on the highest settings without even kicking the fans up, (i know its an old game) but it definitely kicks my prior GTX660 in the pants with graphics. Rendering videos is quick as well! I got the 1060 with 6gb memory. Computer boots up in about 5 seconds, cold bootup to desktop.
Battery Life - With general working, emails, internet, etc the battery will easily last 5+ hours. I have not tested it gaming, as more than likely I will leave it plugged in when gaming anyways.
USB3.1 is very quick pulling files back and forth - Bluetooth works great with my MX Master 2s Mouse.
Lots of ports for video, USBC, Full Ethernet, etc.
CONS-
Honestly nothing major yet, but so far-
FINGERPRINT Magnet! It is a nice sleek metal frame, but resting palms on it will definitely leave prints, you can see every place you touched it between wipe-downs. MSI did provide a nice Microfiber Cloth to keep it wiped up.
The Stickers............. Seriously..... there is one large spec sticker that came right off, no big deal, but the PC MAG "brag" Sticker ---WOULD NOT COME OFF--- It took me about 15 minutes of carefully picking it off because it left so much residue that I ended up having to use goo gone to get it off, which I REALLY didn't want to do, but it was my only choice. It was totally crooked and I wasn't about to just leave it on.
Bloatware - It honestly wasn't THAT bad like other reviewers stated, it does come with 60 days of Norton's latest crapware (first thing I removed) but most of the junk is the Windows 10 standard junk - not MSI's fault really.
Laptop Speakers - The speakers are seriously nothing special. They do the job, but lets be real, if you are trying for amazing sound, you're going to be using headphones anyways. The onboard DAC is great with a lot of settings.
Hard Drive partition map- The OS is on about 65% of the drive. Then there are 2 partitions from MSI for recovery and tools. I burned the disks and saved images of them to my External, and on my FileServer and dumped those partitions to give me ~97% of the drive. MSI has a program installed to walk you though the process.
Overall- I really enjoy this laptop a lot. It was hard biting the bullet and buying, but worth every penny. It slips right in my backpack and can carry it around with me anywhere I go. It was perfect for me, and has yet to disappoint me yet performance wise. MSI definitely means it when they call it a "Stealth Thin" laptop.
Some things for people to consider:
When buying, think about how much files/games/etc you want to put on it. I bought the 256gb SSD, and definitely wish I got the bigger drive. Its not really a big deal though because I carry a 2tb Western Digital Passport so if I have a big project, I can store it there when I am not working on it; however games are HUGE. I believe Titanfall clocked in 50+ gb.
If you already have a standard sized laptop backpack, this will fit it. Mine was bought at Wal-Mart for 40 bucks when I really needed one, and this slips right in. No need to buy anything special if you don't want to.
Well, this was long winded, But I really hoped I helped all of you still reading make a great decision to buy this laptop.
| Standing screen display size | 15.6 Inches |
|---|---|
| Screen Resolution | 1920 x 1080 pixels |
| Max Screen Resolution | 1920x1080 Pixels |
| Processor | 2.2 GHz core_i7 |
| RAM | 16 GB DDR4 |
| Memory Speed | 4.1 GHz |
| Hard Drive | 256 GB SSD |
| Graphics Coprocessor | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 |
| Chipset Brand | NVIDIA |
| Card Description | Dedicated |
| Graphics Card Ram Size | 6 GB |
| Wireless Type | 802.11ac |
| Number of USB 3.0 Ports | 3 |
