MSI GS63VR-6RFAC16H22

Just releasing in 2016, MSI GS63VR-6RF Stealth Pro with super slim and thin design compared to Dell XPS 15 and Asus Zenbook Pro UX501 is an amazing innovation of MSI for this gaming laptop series. Beside the spectacular design, it still maintains strong performance by the much more powerful processors and graphics inside.

With the size of 380 x 249 x 17.7mm and 1.89kg weight, it is considered to be one of the slimmest gaming laptop of 15 inch series up to now as the remark of page Laptopmag in comparison between Gigabyte P55W, Alienware 15 and Digital Storm Equinox. Its design is so clean and simple that most users are unbelievable to think that such a lot of power could hide inside this impressively light gaming laptop. MSI also uses the steelseries multi-color keyboard in which every keystrokes can be set base on the gamer’s preferences through the Steelseries 3 Engine. And it is combined with the smooth trackpad for the gaming controls as well. GS63VR adopts a lightweight chassis using Mg-Li alloy in its design. Somehow it is supposed as the world’s lightest gaming notebook with the new definition of slimness gaming. From my perspective view, gaming laptop is coming in the new era where they don’t need to be too heavy anymore, but slim and powerful. And this laptop is one of the best gaming laptops which has a beautiful and smooth design like this.

Most reviews about GS63VR from many pages, such as: Laptopmag, Tbreak, appreciates the quality of the screen display as a significant advantage. The 1920 x 1080 matte display of the Stealth Pro in 15.6 inch panel shows gorgeously vivid colors, especially when changing to red. The reflections could not appear in this kind of laptop due to the perfect anti-glare coating from the IPS panel. The viewing angles could satisfy even the most difficult user since it is extremely great as expected with good color reproductions.

However, regarding Ultrabook Review, the viewing angles are totally good using the IPS display, yet it is desired more for the brightness and colors. In general from their comments, the color space is the main issue since the sRGB is just a mere 65%, NTSC 74% and aRGB 49%. As a result, some people would feel fine with this screen, but if you need to edit pictures or videos, or use it next to any decent monitor out there, you might have to think twice.

Powered by i7-6700HQ – the latest generation of Intel Core i7 processor, it requires lower power consumption whereas it still delivers better performance than the older processors, which lead computing to the next level. The Intel Core i7-6700HQ is a high-end processor based on the 14 nm microarchitecture from Skylake. It offers 4 physical cores (8 logical), initially clocked at 2.6GHz, and might go up to 3.5GHz and 6Mb in L3 cache. Hyper-threading Turbo Boost 2.0 and Virtualization are activated. This processor also integrates a “good but not best” graphics named Intel HD Graphics 530, which has 24 execution units, initially clocked at 350MHz and could reach at 1050MHz in Turbo mode which share the L2 cache and system ram with the processor. Its performance is good and sufficient for doing normal applications and watching movies.

As reviewed in Tbreak Media: “The quad-core processor and teaming up with a large room of 16Gb DDR4 RAM promises fast and snappy performance on the go”, I totally agree with this. Also, the 6th generation i7-6700HQ of Intel Skylake is the fastest to peak a short of the over-clockable core i7-6820HK for mobile computer as a remark from Mobile Tech Review. Although the official page of MSI has announced that the performance of the i7-6700HQ processor is 20% better than the previous generation processor i7-4720HQ, the power of those processors are actually similar except the lower power consumption of i7-6700HQ and the Intel HD Graphics 530 is better than the Intel HD Graphics 4600.

The GS63VR is powered by NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 GPU (with 6Gb of VRAM), but according to Tbreak, this card sports the same true desktop-class NVIDIA GTX 1060 Pascal GPU with slightly lowered clock speeds (around 100-150 MHz difference in the clock speed). As Laptopmag remarked, this laptop peaks 7.4/10 in the SteamVR performance test and beats the P55W’s with the rate of 6.6, but not the 8.4 category average. The NVIDIA Pascal technology also plays an important role in boosting popular games noticeably, for example, Witcher 3, Hitman, Grand Theft Auto. With this graphics card, it is easy to reach 40fps in Ultra, 56fps in High in above games.

Moreover, there is a review of Tbreak showed that the NVIDIA GTX 1060 is just perfect for 1080p screen resolution gaming, and it is not really meant for 4K resolution gameplay. In my opinion, the NVIDIA GTX 1060 GPU has done a very good job to performance the game in full HD resolution. It is said that the NVIDIA 1000 series is promised to improve 40% performance in comparison with 900M series and NVIDIA has abandoned the “M” in the end of the name in order to bring the best performance with few differences between desktop and gaming laptop.

Powered by Steelseries Engine 3, the RGB keyboard is adjusted as user preferences. As mentioned on page Mobile Tech Review, the travel between keys are great with good damping and make users feel adorable when touching. With the free adjustment tool by users, they have many options to change colors to whatever they would like to use, for example, rainbow color or any single color.

The Mobile Tech Review commented that touchpad stink doesn’t exist any longer, so that that user has managed to forgo a mouse without grumbling, yet he also said later that it could not be compared to the best trackpads like Dell XPS 15 while about performing gestures, Laptopmag remarked that the 4 x 2.7 inch Elan touchpad when swiping with three fingers or rotating with two fingers is pretty smooth. Nevertheless, there are still some annoying troubles with the mouse when it moves unintentionally to another position. Eventually, the keyboard and trackpad still satisfy most people when there are sometimes exceptional annoyances which appear while typing and using the pad.

For heating, regarding Ultrabook Review, this laptop does tend to get pretty hot. Under normal loads, it is quite tolerable, but gaming loads might require a cooling pad for many gamers. Besides, following a remark of Laptopmag, playing Witcher 3 can reach 84 degrees Fahrenheit on touchpad whereas the system center hits 95 degrees Fahrenheit. In addition, the notebook’s undercarriage measured a hot 123 degrees, so if you think you can put the laptop on other laptops, it is not recommended. The laptop also may run a little hot when it is doing normal activities (103 degrees at the bottom of the laptop, and 86 degrees measurement for trackpad respectively).

“The quad-core CPU and high-end graphics are simply too power-hungry as are the bright displays. The 15.6” MSI Stealth Pro averaged 3.5 to 4.4 hours for productivity and streaming video tasks with brightness set to 50%”, said Mobile Tech Review. By contrast, Laptopmag has simply concluded that the existence of power is due to range of cost, particularly, with the Stealth Pro’s circumstance, it is the battery life. Their measurement shows that this laptop would last only 2 hours and 54 minutes on battery test when surfing the internet continuously using Wi-Fi connection. Generally, the battery is that something obviously weak in most gaming laptops, yet MSI has done their job rather well when making an extraordinarily slim and thin laptop on gaming demand, so that it is a bit difficult to request for a longer battery life. Perhaps, it will appear soon in the future.

The speaker, according to review of Ultrabook Review, have only two and they are not special at all. They get fairly loud, but you have to do some work for it by messing the setting in software. Nonetheless, MSI has made a perfect headphone jack which really improves the sound coming since the laptop is equipped with a Sabre ESS Hi-Fi digital to analog converter.

About the connectivity, the GS63VR has 3 x 3.0 USB ports, yet as a comment from Ultrabook Review, you might as well consider only two of them accessible at the same time, as the ports are so close together. This laptop also supports the Thunderbolt 3 which the reviewer was able to connect to the external graphics and get the significant boosts. However, the Ultrabook Review also indicated the weakness on connectivity that the memory card slot speed is merely USB 2.0 speeds. Consequently, copying file will be limited even if you are using the high-speed memory card. Furthermore, in a glance at the webcam, the Ultrabook Review noticed that the webcam of GS63VR is just 720p (HD quality) instead of 1080p (Full HD quality) which will have a pretty low image quality.

In summary, GS63VR-6RF Stealth Pro of MSI could be considered the most stunning laptop with the impressively slim and thin design in such a powerful gaming laptop. The manufacturer, MSI also follows up high-tech trends today by developing the virtual reality experience for MSI gaming as well as the integration of the powerful graphics card – NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 GPU, which helps to improve best performance when gaming in the Full HD resolution. In addition, the performance of GS63VR is incredible by using the latest generation Intel Core i7 processor. Another point that must be mentioned as an advantage of this laptop is the balance of power and portability: this is actually the most outstanding feature in this model.

Even though this laptop seems to be a perfect laptop, there are still some disadvantages existing, for instance battery is the first restriction as normal. Beside that, the trackpad sometimes can make users annoyed with inadvertent movements. The 2.0 USB speed memory card slot does not meet the user demands in transferring data nowadays as my individual view. The webcam in 720p quality instead of 1080p quality as advertised could cause a little regret from users. However, notwithstanding the unexpected problems, MSI probably manufactured an amazingly great laptop with much more unbelievable improvements, especially in the design with extremely reasonable price range (around 2000 – 2400 Euros). I just can say that it is incredible.

Press review by Capuchino Saber (2016)