MSI Katana 17 HX laptop review: Room for improvement for the RTX 5070 gamer

The katana 17 HX B14WGK faces challenges not only within the MSI portfolio but also in comparison to its counterparts. Although the case is well-made, it tends to rattle and generally doesn't feel very high-quality. Cost-cutting measures can also be seen in the interfaces. Thunderbolt or modern USB ports (keyword USB 4) are missing, as is a card reader. In addition, there is a very high noise level under load, which practically forces you to use headphones. MSI could also improve the keyboard, which takes some getting used to, the speaker sound, the webcam quality, and the battery life.

There is little to complain about in terms of the display: apart from the poor brightness, the 240 Hz screen achieves good values almost everywhere. The fact that the GeForce RTX 5070 leaves mixed feelings is more a result of Nvidia's product decisions. Furthermore, 8 GB of VRAM is no longer sufficient in 2025, especially for resource-intensive applications like Indiana Jones, although GDDR7 at least mitigates the situation somewhat. Apart from that, the 17-incher is quite unspectacular, i.e. it doesn't stand out from the crowd either positively or negatively, so in the end it's just enough for a "good" rating.

In Germany, the MSI Katana 17 HX B14WGK with Core i7-14650HX and GeForce RTX 5070 is listed from around 1,800 euros (approx. US$2,065) at various online stores (i.e. playox.de)

The Katana 17's competitors include other RTX 5070 (Ti) gaming laptops such as the Gigabyte Aero X16, the Asus ProArt P16, the Schenker XMG Pro 16, or the in-house Vector 16 HX AI.

As mentioned at the beginning, the case quality is somewhat disappointing. MSI has dispensed with metal on the outside and opted for plastic over a large area, which tends to give way in some places and looks rather cheap to the touch. Meanwhile, there are several advantages to the generous opening angle. It can be opened up to 180°, which isn't a typical feature. With a weight of 2.7 kg, the 17-inch model is slightly to significantly heavier than its 16-inch competitors (1.8 to 2.6 kg). Basically, the case is very similar to its predecessor (which we tested in the AMD and Intel versions), although there are a few differences in the details.

MSI has opted for a matte IPS screen in 16:9 format with a resolution of 2,560 x 1,440 pixels, which offers a solid contrast ratio of more than 1,000:1 thanks to its relatively low black value (0.27 cd/m²). However, this comes at the cost of brightness, with an average of 272 cd/m², making it suitable only for indoor use. The color gamut, on the other hand, is surprisingly high at just under 100% sRGB or DCI-P3. The response times and color fidelity also give little cause for complaint.

The Katana 17 HX only belongs to the (upper) mid-range, mainly due to its 8 GB VRAM. Top: Thanks to two SO-DIMM banks, nothing stands in the way of upgrading the 16 GB RAM (2x 8 GB DDR5-5600). However, it is somewhat disappointing that MSI has only integrated one M.2 slot.

Since the installed Core i7-14650HX comes from Intel's Raptor Lake generation and contains 8 performance cores including Hyper-Threading and 8 efficiency cores without HT, is no longer quite up to date, the competitors are sometimes clearly pulling ahead in the CPU benchmarks - be it the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 or the Core Ultra 7 255HX or Ultra 9 275HX. As our tables indicate, the performance is closer to that of the Ryzen AI 7 350.

In terms of system performance, the Katana 17 brings up the rear in the test field, although the gap to the competition (except the XMG Pro 16) is fairly small.