I used to be in a position to max out at 120 frames per second whereas enjoying Doom Everlasting on Extremely settings, and even acquired round 70 fps in Starfield on Medium. Starfield dropped all the way down to a still-playable 50 fps on Extremely, although I acquired it as much as 80 fps on Extremely by enabling body technology. I’m not a fan of this characteristic as it will possibly generally result in some bizarre smoothing results—to my thoughts, it hits the identical nerve as motion smoothing on TVs—however your mileage could differ.
By way of battery life, your finest wager is to maintain your charger close by for gaming periods. The almost 100-watt-hour battery is huge, however so is the facility draw. It lasted round three hours of heavy gaming, and nearer to 6 to seven hours with extra typical use.
These limitations make the MSI Stealth 18 finest suited to being a workhorse laptop computer you may play video games on on the finish of the day. Working media modifying apps like DaVinci Resolve and Blender was clean, and I hardly ever seen efficiency issues whereas engaged on it. Most gaming laptops would run equally with comparable GPUs, however the brand new Meteor Lake CPU provides you a little bit of future-proofing. Corporations like Blackmagic are engaged on adding support for NPUs generally, so if there’s an space the place Intel’s NPU is probably going for use sooner or later, it is doubtless media creation first.
There is likely to be higher laptops purely for gaming—the Razer Blade 18, for instance, trades a lower-resolution display for a whopping 300-Hz refresh charge. However in case you’d moderately have one highly effective laptop computer for work and play, the Stealth 18 is a strong funding.
All of the Proper Extras
The design of the Stealth 18 feels a little bit bit extra gam3r than I like, however I can dwell with it for all the additional little touches MSI has put on this factor. For starters, it comes with a NumPad. I don’t care what anybody else says, NumPads are nice, and I recognize that there’s a strong gaming laptop computer with one. It’s most helpful whereas doing numerous video modifying duties, much less for gaming, however in case you’re like me, you’ll recognize its presence.
The remainder of the keyboard is equally pleasant. The font on the keys appears to be like strikingly much like the font Sony inexplicably used for both PlayStation and Spider-Man branding again within the aughts. The chiclet-style keys are flat, with no dimples, however they’re raised sufficient to really feel straightforward to differentiate whereas typing, although my commonest mistake was hitting the brand new and largely pointless Copilot key, which takes up room close to the house bar. The trackpad is tremendous clean. It may very well be a bit greater, however I solely wished this whereas related to a second monitor.
{Photograph}: Eric Ravenscraft
There’s an Ethernet port, HDMI port, and the proprietary charging port on the rear of the machine, which is an extremely handy location for plugging the laptop computer right into a desk workstation. It’s not fairly as handy as a laptop docking station, however it’s much less cluttered than cables protruding the perimeters. I’m additionally a fan of the devoted fingerprint sensor, which makes it simpler to register to Home windows and unlock password managers.
Total, the MSI Stealth 18 is a powerhouse, even with out the NPU. At $3,300 for the RTX 4080 mannequin, it can save you a couple of hundred {dollars} in comparison with comparably-specced (minus the refresh charge) laptops just like the Razer Blade 18. Simply make certain to maintain your wall charger helpful.
