The GP62 isn’t necessarily difficult to disassemble, but there are eighteen total screws—15 of one type, 3 of another in the optical drive bay—securing the bottom to the machine. Once the bottom has been removed, however, accessing and replacing all of the major internal parts is a breeze. You’ll find two RAM slots, a 2.5-inch and M.2 NVMe SSD bay, dual cooling fans, and the WLAN adapter.

Keyboard

The SteelSeries keyboard is always a pleasure to use, and this one is no exception. Key travel is good, feedback is satisfying, and the keys themselves are firmly affixed without any significant rattle and only a bit of wobbling under the fingers. The layout is also very comfortable, with large keys and good size and spacing. There is a number pad to the right side, and the entire keyboard is RGB backlit and fully customizable within the aforementioned software packages.

Touchpad

Synaptics provides the GP62’s touchpad, which is large with a somewhat rough, yet still mostly comfortable, surface. The two large buttons beneath the pad are rather loud and require a bit more actuation force that we might have liked, but they provide good feedback and are far superior to the average clickpad.

Measurements back up these impressions, with average brightness of 243.4 cd/m²—decent, but not great—and a below average contrast of 422:1. Brightness distribution of 87% means a fairly consistent illumination across the breadth of the panel. There wasn’t a terrible amount of backlight bleed on our review unit, but the TN panel already features weak vertical viewing angles, a limitation which is particularly evident in darker environments.

We measured 100% coverage of the sRGB color spectrum and 76% of AdobeRGB, both which are good values for a notebook of this class. These are good values; amongst today’s comparison field, only the Acer Aspire V17 Nitro does slightly better, with 87% AdobeRGB.

So, then, how does the MSI GP62 fare in direct comparison to its brethren in the realm of CPU performance? Actually, not very well. Thanks to thermal constraints (which we witnessed only in relation to CPU stress and, as we’ll see later, not under GPU load), CPU benchmark results for the MSI were consistently near the bottom of the pack across the board, with only the Lenovo Legion Y520 occasionally trailing. Fortunately, in most cases, the differences were relatively minor, with margins of around 4 and 10 percent common between category leaders and the GP62. However, in wPrime, the score of 324 seconds is around 30% slower than its peers.

How will this affect the system during real-world usage? Thankfully, not terribly much—at least, once we take into account the results of our Cinebench R15 multi-CPU loop test. Here, we saw just shy of a 3 percent drop in performance as a result of thermal constraints during numerous consecutive Cinebench R15 runs, which bodes well for the realistic performance of the processor in everyday use such as gaming. See the graph below for a detailed record of how the notebook handled this test. It is also worth noting that with the notebook’s built-in Cooler Boost 4 mode activated, these drops in performance are slightly delayed, but temperatures ultimately wind up in the same range after a moderate period of time.

The GP62 manages respectable results in PCMark 8 and 10, with only the EVGA SC15 besting it. 5130 in PCMark 8 Work Score Accelerated and an overall score of 4568 in PCMark 10 are good overall.

Our GP62 configuration shipped with dual storage drives: a 128 GB Toshiba PCIe 3.0 NVMe M.2 SSD alongside a 1 TB 7200 RPM HGST mechanical hard drive for storage. The combo does a good job overall in our benchmarks, even though the Toshiba is a bit slower than its peers in terms of write performance. Replacing or upgrading the drives is relatively straightforward as detailed in our Maintenance section earlier.

Thankfully, where it matters most, the GP62 7REX Leopard Pro delivers, thanks to its GeForce GTX 1050 Ti. While users obviously can’t expect top-end performance from this midrange GPU, the GP62 does a great job of flexing its graphical muscle in comparison to other notebooks of its class, even beating out the other GTX 1050 Ti machines by a slim margin in most tests. Fire Strike Graphics and Fire Strike Extreme Graphics scores of 6834 and 3590 are nothing to sneeze at regardless.

Our Witcher 3 ultra sustained performance test revealed no cracks in the GP62’s armor; frame rates remained stable in the range of 59 – 60 fps, with just a few dips and jumps to 58 and 61 on occasion.

Targeted stress testing reveals the GP62’s CPU cooling struggles, as clock rates reduce slightly to between 3.1 GHz and 3.3 GHz and temperatures skyrocket into the mid-90s C after just a couple of minutes of Prime95-induced stress. GPU stress, meanwhile, produces no challenges whatsoever for the system; clock rates remain stable at 1366 MHz, with temperatures never exceeding 71 °C. Finally, combined stress only slightly affects GPU clock rates (temperatures still never budge above the 71 °C mark), but CPU rates decline further on average to closer to 3.1/3.2 GHz. We recorded an absolute high temperature of a blistering 97 °C amongst the CPU cores during this test.

For the record, Cooler Boost does not change these results apart from simply delaying the onset of high CPU core temperatures somewhat. In our opinion, it should rarely be worth the considerable increase in system noise given its apparently marginal cooling benefits.

As expected, battery life is absolutely hammered by these power consumption readings—and in conjunction with the relatively small 41 Wh internal battery, we see some of the shortest runtimes in a modern gaming notebook. Thankfully, battery life is of negligible importance to gaming notebooks, but regardless, a web surfing benchmark result of below 3 hours is not going to turn any heads. Hang onto that AC adapter.