“Something seems off here - the corresponding 512gb GS65 STEALTH THIN-053 is $500 more than this MSRP to MSRP. Anyone know what the difference in specs could be?”
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The trade-offs to achieve this price point were as follows: 1) Swapping the Killer 1550 wifi card for the Intel 9560 - In my opinion a negligible tradeoff as the Killer 1550 is at its core an Intel 9260. The 9560 is technically a newer chip and offers all the same hardware specs (1.73Gbps, BT 5.0, etc.) as the Killer 1550. The only advantage I can see in the Killer 1550 is the six-tier packet prioritization in the Killer utility, but for all practical purposes this won't be useful for most people, and may actually be more of a headache than it's worth. If you absolutely must have the Killer 1550 it can be found on Amazon for $30. 2) Swapping the NVMe SSD for a SATA SSD. The 512GB SSD in the Best Buy model is "OK" by gaming laptop standards. It still performs faster than a hard disk, but is slower than the performance NVMe drives on the market today. I have been using this model for the past week and have not been disappointed with the drive performance. I am adding an NVMe drive soon, but strictly for additional storage, not because I am unsatisfied with the drive that is already in it. After looking high and low, these are the only two compromises that I see in the Best Buy model. Other than these all hardware within it is identical to the higher priced, similarly spec'd non-Best Buy version. So it's still impressive that they were able to offer this unit at this price. To add to some of the other answers, MSI offers several variants of the GS65, some with 16GB RAM and some with 32GB RAM. If you are using this laptop primarily for gaming, 16GB is more than adequate to last the useful life of the laptop and beyond. The 32GB model is targeted for people who will be doing RAM-intensive editing and rendering work. 32GB of RAM is not necessary for gaming, and you won't see additional performance over the 16GB model.
Sorry, there was a problem. Please try again later.I found an MSI link that lists out the full spec sheet on all the configurations of the MSI GS65. Best Buy seems to be the only one that sells this configuration (THIN-037). The $2,500 configuration with a GTX 1070 is configuration THIN-053 and the $2,100 configuration with a GTX 1070 is THIN-054. The main difference between the three configurations is the HDD option. This particular configuration uses a SATA M.2 512GB HDD while the other two use NVMe M.2 hard drives (512GB and 256GB respectively). The NVMe drives should be a fair bit faster. Additionally the $2,500 configuration comes with 32GB or RAM rather than the 16GB in this configuration. In my opinion the configuration offered by Best Buy is the best configuration. You can pretty easily upgrade the HDD and RAM down the road if you find them lacking (at that point NVMe drives will likely be quite a bit cheaper than they are now). Full list of all configurations: https://us.msi.com/Laptop/GS65-Stealth-Thin-Intel-8th-Gen/Specification
Sorry, there was a problem. Please try again later.An MSI representative has informed me that the 512GB SSD that comes in this laptop is NOT an NVMe drive, which explains the price difference. I'll still keep my pre-order though, as a Samsung 960 Evo 500GB is $200 so I can have an NVMe boot drive, with a SATA storage.
Sorry, there was a problem. Please try again later.This model doesn’t come with a NVME SSD, which is a lot faster and more expensive. It has a SATA SSD, which is faster than a regular hard drive, but not the fastest.
Sorry, there was a problem. Please try again later.2099 MSRP for 1060 16 512 in offical website，update to 1070 for 1999？it doesn't make sense
Sorry, there was a problem. Please try again later.I noticed that as well. This model comes with only 16Gb ram vs the other which is 32. It's hard to say if there are any other differences. I've already placed my order and will be checking the panel and SSD drive speed to make sure nothings been cut for cost.
Sorry, there was a problem. Please try again later.The hard drive is not NVME and they also used an intel wifi card instead of the killer networks.
Sorry, there was a problem. Please try again later.There has 32gb ram version, and this one is 16gb
Sorry, there was a problem. Please try again later.I believe the more expensive models have faster PCIe NVMe drives. This may have a SATA SSD.
Sorry, there was a problem. Please try again later.So i did some digging on msi's website, the 037 variant that's being sold here comes with an m.2 ssd but the other variants like 053,054 etc come with an m.2 nmve ssd. So im guessing that this one is a normal pcie m.e ssd.
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