Table of Contents
Introduction
Let’s discuss about the new MSI GS65 Stealth 144Hz Gaming Laptop. GS series meaning Gaming Series, this machine has an awesome keyboard and nice looking metallic body. It’s really nice and cold to the touch very sleek design. It looks very thin for a gaming laptop where usual gaming laptops are heavy, bulky and flashy. The branding in GS65 model is very subtle, very unique. We have these really nice gold accents and chamfered edges and I’m very impressed with this design overhaul. It’s truly something nice and thus I also decided not to go with the flashy look. Instead something a little more plain in the front, no crazy colors or anything.
MSI GS65 Stealth – Hardware and Performance
MSI GS65 got a USB 3.0 port, a Thunderbolt port with USB C DisplayPort HDMI power plug ventilation we got an additional ventilation on the back as well so it will be a total of 4 ventilation systems. There’s a little Kensington lock area in Ethernet port, 2 additional USB 3.0 ports and a headphone jack and a microphone plug. Even though it has the desktop grade Nvidia GTX 1660, it actually runs really really well. I recently used an Alienware machine that had a RTX2080 and this literally performs like a RTX2080 to me.
It’s just mind-boggling how can a machine running a worse processor and an introductory level GPU be running so well it’s quite impressive actually. I think what it is is games are now a little bit more optimized and the hardware is really starting to mature. Especially on thin laptops even while I’m gaming and thermal throttling the whole way through I see no performance drops. This is exceptional because they’ve found a way to manage the temperature profile of the machine and not have you feel any hiccups during overheating which is absolutely amazing.
How easy to upgrade RAM and SSD in MSI GS65 Stealth
Most of you may ask if this machine is loud or does it get hot. All gaming machines get hot and all gaming machines are loud this is simply something you just cannot avoid its part of having a gaming machine. . I was very shocked to dismantle this device I used an eye fix-it kit to dismantle it and do the teardown well the thing that shocked me the most was that there was a ridiculous amount of screws to get the back plate off. You know that to me was a red flag I was thinking if there’s that many screws it must be really difficult to take apart.
At first glance it doesn’t look like you can upgrade literally anything and there’s a flap. Once you remove the heat flap you notice that nothing is accessible for upgrades which is very surprising. Later I determined it was the motherboard which is actually flipped over and the only thing you can initially update would be the battery and the wireless card.
I’m very surprised to see that for an MSI because normally they design the laptops in a way that makes it easy to upgrade. There’s tons of screws to remove and there’s ribbon cables and the whole process just takes a very long time. So I was very disappointed when I first got in here but something to keep in mind is that if you do decide to upgrade you can upgrade the RAM and the SSDs. There’s two SSD slots and two RAM slots. Before you can gain access to both of those you’ll need to literally unplug and unscrew just about everything.
I spent a good 30 minutes removing all of the ribbon cables that connect the motherboard to the screen to the battery. Removing the battery cord I had to do at last because it was extremely hard to get to it. You have to basically get the motherboard loose first before you can remove or unplug the battery which is a little dangerous because you kind of want to unplug that first but you can’t get enough grip to remove it. Once everything is unplugged and unscrewed you’ve got access to the motherboard.
Thermal Issues with MSI GS65 Stealth
If we look here we see that there’s various ventilation systems that one for the GPU, the CPU just pretty cool and then you got the RAM and you have the SSDs. Overall it looks really neat it’s just a shame that they had the motherboard upside down. I think it was due to thermal cooling reasons so it kind of makes sense but and they really don’t have to do it that way.
MSI GS65 Stealth – Look and Feel
I was very surprised to see that they had a little notch to lie to open the screen and the hinge is very kind of loose and easy to open. I really liked that the screen has great flexibility and overall I feel like the machine is built fairly well. I did a hinge test where I just kind of open and close the laptop a couple times just to see how fluid it is. And to see if there’s going to be any problems.
You can also notice that there’s a nice metal texture and chamfered edges I really like that at the top of the keyboard. We have speaker system goes all the way from the left to the right and a power button which is pretty cool. The power button also features those nice chamfered gold accents, a nice job balancing the bezels on the screen. Even though the bottom bezel is thick it’s not bad because the screen goes all the way to the edges.
Overall it’s a pretty good utilization of the screen real estate with a given space. One thing that makes this screen unique is the fact that it’s 144 Hz IPS screen with one millisecond response time and G-sync. Basically what this amounts to is an exceptionally smooth gameplay experience. If you’re playing any kind of shooters or games that require you to have extreme response time.
Trackpad is very smooth, it’s very large an all glass trackpad clicks really well and the scrolling was exceptionally smooth. You know what the scrolling literally felt like a MacBook which is very rare I’ve never seen in a windows laptop. It has such good drivers the keyboard itself I think could be a little bit better the keys are kind of mushy and they don’t have a lot of travel.
Some Drawbacks of MSI GS65 Stealth
But you know what, for gaming they’re fine I did find myself miss clicking sometimes but you just have to get used to this particular type of keyboard and you shouldn’t really have any issues. This machine gets scorching hot like if you put it on your lap it will burn you if you’re gaming that’s the biggest downside of this machine. The other drawback is the upgrading which is extremely hard to do.
You have to like take apart the whole motherboard and flip it over. It’s like everything’s on the wrong side. You can take out the wireless LAN card but who needs to do that ever pretty much nobody. It makes the RAM upgrades kind of difficult and heating is also difficult however it’s not impossible.
Final Thoughts on MSI GS65 Stealth
It’s still a really good machine and I’m really impressed with the Intel 9 series 6 core CPU and the Nvidia 1660 GTX Graphics card. It operates great, ran all my games just fine so other than that it’s a great machine. I have really no complaints and I’m impressed of how thin it is. I do like the metal build quality, gold accent colors and the subtle design overall. I will be replying to all comments so let me know what you guys think and if you’re interested in particular to have a laptop or content definitely let me know.
