MSI Stealth 18 AI Studio A1V Review: No AI Needed Leave a comment

I used to be capable of max out at 120 frames per second whereas enjoying Doom Everlasting on Extremely settings, and even received round 70 fps in Starfield on Medium. Starfield dropped right down to a still-playable 50 fps on Extremely, although I received it as much as 80 fps on Extremely by enabling body technology. I’m not a fan of this characteristic as it might generally result in some bizarre smoothing results—to my thoughts, it hits the identical nerve as movement smoothing on TVs—however your mileage could fluctuate.

By way of battery life, your greatest wager is to maintain your charger close by for gaming classes. The practically 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 greatest 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 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. Firms like Blackmagic are engaged on including help for NPUs usually, so if there’s an space the place Intel’s NPU is probably going for use sooner or later, it is probably media creation first.

There is perhaps higher laptops purely for gaming—the Razer Blade 18, for instance, trades a lower-resolution display for a whopping 300-Hz refresh charge. However should you’d somewhat 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 somewhat bit extra gam3r than I like, however I can reside 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 respect that there’s a strong 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 respect 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 each 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 tell apart 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 greater, however I solely wished this whereas related to a second monitor.

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 computer docking station, however it’s much less cluttered than cables protruding the edges. 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 a number of hundred {dollars} in comparison with comparably-specced (minus the refresh charge) laptops just like the Razer Blade 18. Simply be sure to maintain your wall charger useful.