MSI Alpha 17: The mid-range gaming laptop with AMD technology

With the Radeon RX 5600M, AMD also has a graphics card for laptops in its lineup that is suitable for mid-range gaming. Its performance is just below that of an RTX 2060 laptop GPU from Nvidia, and it brings modern games smoothly and in Full HD onto the screen. The graphics settings only have to be reduced in very demanding titles.

MSI combines the graphics unit in the Alpha 17 with an AMD Ryzen 7 4800H processor to deliver a high-performance gaming laptop. A 512 GB SSD serves as storage drive, and 16 GB of RAM is available as well. Half of the latter is soldered, and the other half is installed in a single RAM slot. Although this limits the expansion options a bit, there's a free M.2 slot for another SSD in return.

Not only does the MSI Alpha 17 show the aforementioned gaming features in everyday use, but it can also hold its own in office mode. System operation is extremely smooth, and battery life is also more than decent for a 17-inch gaming device at over 7 hours in our practical WLAN test.

The display is not only large, but it also offers a refresh rate of 144 Hz. In combination with the good contrast ratio, gamers should be satisfied. From our point of view, only the color-space coverage could have been a bit higher, but this isn't particularly important for a gaming laptop.

Gamers looking for a gaming laptop that is as large as possible but not too expensive will, therefore, be in good hands with the MSI Alpha 17. Our in-depth review will show prospective buyers what to expect in detail.