Customer Ratings & Reviews

The thing that most attracted me about this laptop was the looks. I really like the black with gold trim. And the components under the hood was very respectable. I'm glad that the thin & light, sleeper gaming machine is the current trend. This laptop replaces my 4 year old, full sized gaming rig. I am upgrading from 4th gen i5-4670k to 8th gen i7-8750H and GTX 760 to GTX 1070MQ. As far as the processing power goes, I can't tell the difference as I don't normally use CPU intensive applications. However the graphics performance was definitely noticeable. This laptop can run The Witcher 3 on Ultra settings and maintaining 60fps without a problem. My old machine was struggling to keep up 30fps on medium settings. The display looks beautiful. I have never seen a 144hz screen on a laptop until now. When I went back to my old monitor for comparison, it was very noticeable. I never realized how choppy my mouse looked in 60hz monitors. There are some minor light bleed on the top and bottom right corners of my screen but it's only noticeable if I'm staring at a completely black screen. The keyboard feels a bit mushy. I wish there was a bit more feedback when you pressed down on the key but I haven't had any issues so far with the keys not registering. Plus, when I'm at home, I'll most likely dock the laptop on a cooler and use a separate monitor and keyboard for daily use. I like the back lit lights and all of its configurations. It comes with a gold color profile that matches the gold trim on the chassis pretty well. I would have given it a 5 star rating if it weren't for some issues out of the box. Updating the drivers is the first thing I do whenever I get a new computer and I encountered problems during the updates. The main offender was the audio driver. When I was installing the Realtek audio drivers (obtained from MSI website), it went into an infinite loop of the audio drivers uninstalling and rebooting. If it worked correctly, it's supposed to Uninstall old drivers > Reboot > Install new drivers. I had to research what the heck was going on and it turns out WIndows 10 will cut in during middle of this process and will install a version of the drivers from windows update and for some reason the Realtek driver keeps thinking that it needs to uninstall this driver and hence the infinite loop. I had to google "how to stop windows 10 from automatically updating drivers" and I had to do some registry editing and prayed for rain. I was able to eventually install it through some trial and error. I'm worried that all of this is going to go out of wack on the next windows update. I'm docking 1 star for the trauma I had to go through. Out of the box, this laptop gets extremely hot when in middle of gaming. I guess it's one of the trade offs of having such a small footprint. I was seeing CPU temperatures of 90C while gaming. GPU was a bit lower at 80C. There is an included MSI software to control fan speeds (Dragon Center). By default, Dragon Center doesn't ramp up the fans high enough. Knowing that I'll have this high of a temperature for prolonged period of time was concerning. I haven't repasted the laptop with new thermal compound because repasting with this laptop is a bit involved with its flipped motherboard. The flipped motherboard will also make things difficult when accessing the upgradable ram slots and the extra nvme for a 2nd SSD. Having the available upgrade slot is nice though. BTW, this version of GS65 (GS65 STEALTH THIN-037) has a slower SATA SSD instead of nvme. I'll probably consider upgrading when nvme SSD prices come down. Speaking of things that don't come with this version of GS65, the Killer N1550 ac wifi is replaced with Intel 9560 ac. The Intel wifi card was giving me over 200Mbps download speed on 5Ghz (which is my home internet speed) and the router is on the other side of the house (over 30ft) so no complaints here. Not sure if it's a good comparison but, my Nintendo switch was getting 50Mbps from the same distance. Overall I'm happy with the GS65 and if you can overcome the difficulty with the audio drivers, you have a very solid laptop with good looks and great gaming.

great performance for a slim gaming laptop very nice looking gets hot outside so it is better to use it on a desk or laptop stand not on your lap

This has every thing. The right processor and gpu for gaming and workstation applications ( I use Adobe Creative suite and it flies! ) Premier Pro and After effects work well and Photoshoping my photos form my A7RII are a breeze. I love this laptop. The rgb is amazing and the gaming performance is off the chart. The GPU has access to system memory in addition to its 8GB of GDDR5 The only things that could make this system more enjoyable are a 4k 120 factory calibrated true color display with a 1080 Ti if that were even possible (which as of right now in this form factor is not.) The last thing that may make this more fun is the addition of built of the infared facial recognition hardware in use by hp and dell for securely logging on and off. And maybe a tactile button for the trackpad. Overall this is the best laptop for the money over the new 2018 Razer 15inch , the MacBook Pros, and the HP spectres!

The size and the performance are so good they don't make sense. Tiny laptop with crazy strong performance. Cooling capabilities are great.

This laptop is easily the best on the market when it comes to price. This has better specs than the razor blade (what i originally wanted) and is cheaper. The laptop is truly phenomenal and the only thing that I would complain about is the heat at times can get a little too hot, but for the most part it does a good job at distributing the heat. This is a really good and well made laptop and would recommend that you buy.

Before this I had an laptop with 8gb ram and was also a dell laptop. Inspirons to be exact. And I loved it, ran it to its end. Only issue I had with the dell was towards the end it was overheating. Typical. I didnt think i'd find a laptop that would satisfy me as much as that one. And then I got this one and I love it. So much more power and its so comfortable. its like i didnt even switch but i did and love it.

The laptop is light and powerful. Startup was fast and easy. Stays cooler than expected while gaming. Glad I chose this over the Razer.

Pros: Excellent 144hz screen with thin bezels Great keyboard with full RGB back lighting Intel 8th gen i7 Fast SSD Trackpad works well Cons The hinge is a bit flimsy and plastic-y. Which is a bit weird since the rest of the laptop is a nice aluminum.

Have had it for a bit. The keyboard is fantastic (both the feel and backlight) and the screen is beautiful! This thing is SUPER lightweight for a gaming laptop (or any laptop). So far very satisfied.

LOVE this new machine! Finally a lightweight, thin laptop that is designed to fit use on daily basis going to meetings, write office docs, coding, and then do some gaming with AAA titles (on Ultra settings and high FPS) even for few minutes during work breaks. What I mean by a business laptop is the visual appeal fits taking it to board meetings and sales calls. It's not rigidly tough to meet military specification like Thinkpad brand, but Thinkpads do not have a gaming caliber GPU or 15.6" with slim bezel yet. Screen is vibrant, beautiful, and windows animations are smooth at 144Hz. No apparent bleeding that I can see. Battery capacity is very good for thin gaming laptop. Weight is super at 4.1lb for 15.6" screen. Keyboard is too shallow for my typist rhythm but it has good feedback for 1.4mm key travel. Big/wide keys minimize mistakes and therefore stress overtime. I don't use 10-key so it's important to have big keys and centered trackpad. GTX 1070 Max-Q is overclockable. Ethereum mining exceeds 26Mhz. CPU/GPU can run hot (80-90C) but not as loud as other competing laptops at this size. I have used Grizzly Thermal Conductonaut before on MSI GS43VR and will use it to drop 20-25C as commented by another reviewer, which will make this super quiet and very pleasant to truly game on my lap on sofa or in bed! It has a lot of ports. Mini display port is great, but HDMI 2.0 can truly handle my ultra-wide 34" with 3440x1440 @ 100Hz. Some laptop's HDMI 2.0 port cannot detect it (Asus Zephryus GX501VI). There are two M.2 SSD slots. Both are NVMe PCIe so can hold 2 super fast SSDs. One of the slot is SATA compatible and for BestBuy 037 model that's what comes with it - a SATA SSD. It comes with dual channel 16GB RAM (8GB x 2) can be upgraded to 32GB as well, but you'll need to replace both 8GB sticks with 16GB version. Power brick is slim and smal for 180W. The power is good enough for seriously gaming session, but may not charge battery fast enough simultaneously. I think I can just buy a big 230W AC adapter with standard 5.5mm barrel to use at home and carry the slim adapter for on the road use.

I like the power of this laptop, it plays games well. Battery life is of course lower than advertised, 4 or 5 hrs max just web browsing. The screen is good, but not very high resolution and not glossy so a bit hard to see with glare.

Recently bought this product and can confidently say that I love it. So far I have had no problems, it runs games and engineering programs such as solidworks great. The design is beautiful, so aesthetically pleasing. Ya the speakers aren't great but I use headphones 95% of the time and the other 5% of the time I'm not using them the sound quality doesn't matter that much to me. All in all great laptop a bit pricey but for the quality, design, and hardware I'd say that this product is not over priced at all.

This is a great laptop that has great performance and good battery life. The biggest drawbacks for not getting 5 stars is the use of plastic in areas gives some flex and I’d prefer the trackpad to be more like a MacBook. This laptop will not disappoint!

This laptop is absolutely great. It is very thin and light with very good specs. Mine seems to be under performing compared to other tests online but it could be some sort of driver issue or maybe it just needs to "warm up," i don't know. Anyway, its a great laptop but my only complaint is that the build quality could be improved and it tends to get quite toasty when gaming. Enough where the outside edge is hot to the touch. Still though, the 144hz screen is great and the panel just simply looks incredible.

powerful, beautiful, and light. This machine has exceeded my expectations and runs any game i throw at it with ease. thanks MSI

Very happy with this computer, only issue I have with it is the heat and loud fans. definitely get a cooling pad with it.

This computer does everything I need. I don't game but it's great for 3d modeling and rendering and the screen is beautiful.

You get what you pay for. Beautifully designed. Build quality is great. Light, slim, extremely quick. Definitely recommended.

Incredibly Fast and far lighter than I expected. Feels like I'm holding a MacBook air, but with actually good hardware!

I have had this laptop for a few weeks now and it has been awesome. I wanted a powerful gaming laptop that could double as something I can take to class or Starbucks without it being a massive weight to drag along. Runs War thunder, World of tanks and a few others well over 100+fps on the highest settings. Temps get into the 80's but average in the 70's during gaming on most settings.