MSI Pulse 17 reviewed: Gaming laptop with a questionable price-performance ratio

The MSI Pulse 17 leaves us with mixed feelings. On one hand, the gaming laptop is really quiet. In some of the benchmarks, we didn't even hear the fans at all. If we'd only look at the performance and noise volume of a laptop, the Pulse 17 would be extremely impressive.

But for a laptop, the connection equipment, network technology, and especially the display are also important. And particularly in those three areas, MSI either cut too many corners or simply made the wrong decisions. The Pulse 17 comes with a display that combines slow response times with a low brightness and bad color reproduction. With the exception of the contrast ratio, our measurement results are anything but good here. Even though the laptop is able to score with good transfer speeds in the WLAN, with the Intel AX201, it still doesn't support the newest network standards. This means that the Pulse 17 is limited to Wi-Fi 6 in the 5-GHz network. The laptop is limited even in the LAN, and the LAN chip used here is unable to deliver more than 1 Gbit/s.

And finally, there is also the connection equipment. At first glance it looks fairly practical with the laptop offering two USB ports on each side, so that the cables won't be in the way of your gaming enjoyment. But you will quickly notice that the single USB-C port in the device lacks support for Thunderbolt and PowerDelivery and that none of the USB ports is faster than USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5 Gbit/s). This is particularly annoying, since the manufacturer has wasted a whole series of PCIe lanes pointlessly with an M.2 slot that cannot be accessed.