I used to be capable of max out at 120 frames per second whereas enjoying Doom Everlasting on Extremely settings, and even obtained round 70 fps in Starfield on Medium. Starfield dropped right down to a still-playable 50 fps on Extremely, although I obtained it as much as 80 fps on Extremely by enabling body technology. I’m not a fan of this function as it may well typically result in some bizarre smoothing results—to my thoughts, it hits the identical nerve as motion smoothing on TVs—however your mileage could differ.
When it comes to battery life, your finest wager is to maintain your charger close by for gaming classes. The almost 100-watt-hour battery is very large, however so is the ability 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 possibly can play video games on on the finish of the day. Working media enhancing apps like DaVinci Resolve and Blender was clean, and I not often 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 seemingly 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 fee. However should you’d somewhat have one highly effective laptop computer for work and play, the Stealth 18 is a stable funding.
All of the Proper Extras
The design of the Stealth 18 feels just a little 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 robust gaming laptop computer with one. It’s most useful whereas doing numerous video enhancing duties, much less for gaming, however should you’re like me, you’ll recognize its presence.
The remainder of the keyboard is equally pleasant. The font on the keys seems to be strikingly just 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 most typical 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 might be a bit larger, however I solely wished this whereas linked to a second monitor.
{Photograph}: Eric Ravenscraft
There’s an Ethernet port, HDMI port, and the proprietary charging port on the rear of the gadget, 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.
General, the MSI Stealth 18 is a powerhouse, even with out the NPU. At $3,300 for the RTX 4080 mannequin, it can save you just a few hundred {dollars} in comparison with comparably-specced (minus the refresh fee) laptops just like the Razer Blade 18. Simply make sure that to maintain your wall charger useful.
