Gadgetory

now how do you know when a laptop is extremely thin well when this is the box that it comes in this is the box for the MSI gs5 slim a6 core 12 thread 8th gen processor laptop that's capable of gaming productivity and pretty much anything you can throw at it and the best part is it doesn't look like crap Squarespace makes it easy to build a professional-looking website or e-commerce site without having to have any programming knowledge with their huge template library you can find the right look and feel that you want for your website Squarespace also makes it easy to handle domain registration and transfer with their built in domain management tools there are literally millions of websites right now being powered by Squarespace for people like you and me in fact I used it to sell my custom cycling jerseys because I don't know how to build an e-commerce site so I just used one of their templates to find out how easy it is to build your next website just head on over to squarespace.com and when you're ready to launch go to Squarespace comm / JS 2 cents and save 10% on your next website or domain or better yet just click the link in the description below now I've looked at quite a few MSI laptop since I've started this channel and they've always kind of had a three-tier system with their laptops like the Titan which is the big really big no-holds-barred you got a pretty much lift lates feel to carry it around but it can do anything you throw at it then there's also like the old Apache and then there's the what they call it the Raider now and then they always had their stealth series well this is actually kind of new for them to bring out a 15-inch ultra slim but powerful gaming laptop I'm gonna call it a gaming laptop and let me tell you what gaming laptops are very capable of doing productivity in fact the amount of power that you typically need to be able to run a game with the amount of offloading a lot of productivity programs do now with the GPU means that as long as you're running any sort of a discrete GPU in your laptop for gaming obviously it means you're gonna be able to do great productivity as well I've never had a gaming laptop not be able to churn through videos for me without an issue but I've definitely had thin portable laptops that had Intel iris graphics definitely not be able to play games and barely be able to handle some my productivity so this is what you get when msi actually tries to build you a thin portable laptop that's capable of everything now in terms of specs it's 4.14 pounds which is extremely light I mean the only time you find anything that light tends to be stuff like Microsoft Surface notebooks or something that typically is not going to give you very good gaming performance because it often omits the discrete GPU to keep weight and size down but this is a 15.6 inch eff HD 1080p 144 Hertz seven millisecond IPS display so it's going to be perfect for productivity color accuracy if you're doing photo editing or you're doing video rendering on the go because it has an Intel 8 June I 7 6 Core 12 thread CPU in here with 16 gigabytes of ddr4 2666 now it's configurable up to 32 gigabytes but it only has 2 slots or two sodium's slots so the European limited to obviously be able to run a mex of to 16 gigabytes sodium's which is how you get your max of 32 but it has a gtx 1066 gigabyte in here which is a you know i would have liked to have seen a max cube 1070 but this particular model has a gtx 1060 in it but in terms of size it's also only seventeen point nine millimeters thick at its thickest point so it's extremely light it's extremely thin and extremely capable now with regards to connectivity we've got a full size Ethernet jack on the side two USB 3.0 s mic and headphone jack on the other side we have another USB 3.0 a USB type-c a mini DisplayPort and a full-sized HDMI and of course our port for our power the aesthetics on this are fantastic in the past MSI has been really notorious for putting a lot of red accents and a lot of things on there gaming laptops that really scream gamer but this one here is very elegant it is a it is a matte black anodized finish with gold trim which looks extremely classy it doesn't even have a little oh go on the back anywhere the only thing that lights up on this obviously is the perky RGB backlit steelseries keyboard built into this but that obviously is configurable if you don't want that to be dancing around and doing remote puke then you can just set it to off or any static color that you would like but obviously we are here to talk about performance so that's what we're gonna do next alright something I wanna get out of the way here before we get into games is obviously this is a thin form factor all light ultra-slim gaming / productivity laptop it still uses a 180 watt power brick back there now although the power brick may be slim and also lightweight it still uses 180 watts so this is not going to get powered off of your AC plug on an airplane if you're traveling just want to kind of throw that out there because it was one of the things I did test and that is a no-go most planes cannot provide even half of that so you're gonna be stuck on the 4 cell 82 watt hour battery on this for gaming which will give you a less than desirable gaming experience and/or battery life so when I do my test I test with plugged in obviously because that is the max performance of this and when I was a traveling professional I never gamed on battery so that's kind of a use case I tend to go with and in typical MSI fashion we still have a bajillion control panels here that are just completely unnecessary so I'm gonna go ahead and turn all that crap off and one of the things the system will do to to try and conserve battery life is when you're not gaming it will use the Intel graphics the HD graphics it won't use the discrete unless you're you need it then it will actually switch into 3d mode to use to discrete graphics which will then give you better performance at obviously a cost of power draw or battery life now I can tell you in terms of fan acoustics they are much smaller fans so they're a bit higher pitched it is definitely noticeable but the speakers on this also don't sound that great they're only 2 watt speakers they're very low-profile they're right here and they fire up at the screen but the problem with that is it just sounds very tinny and not full so obviously if you want a good audio experience it's heavily recommended to wear headphones or Bluetooth headphones or whatever so refresh rate set to 144 display resolutions at 1080 and if we're going to advance our preset quality as high I don't think we want Ultra let's just go high remember it is GTX 1060 using 2.6 6 gigabytes of our 6 gigabytes of vram so we'll see where our average FPS works out to be so here's our FPS chart and here's our mid line right here this green line was obviously our average so you can see our min and Max is not too far deviated from that mid line but we are sitting at a minimum FPS of 60 average of 69 and a maximum of 84 so as you can see we're not getting any crazy frame dips on even a demanding game like Far Cry 5 but that's also a CPU intensive game when you're out in the world which I can't technically show you here because I don't have a game saved yet ok so GTA 5 is know when those games I like to test because it uses a good balance of CPU and GPU the world is huge and the textures and all that stuff are very sharp and there's lots of post-processing and all sorts of features on this like soft shadows and NVIDIA PC SS and all that sort of stuff FXAA is on we're on to XM SAV sneaks off population density is max that's for CPU population Verity a variety is maxed again for CPU very high I'm pretty much all the settings that matter while I look at that with all those settings cranked we're still getting anywhere in the 60s to the 90s Oh down to the 50s right there we definitely would like to see it stay above 60 but I mean I'm asking a lot of this laptop right now one of the reasons why I like to crank the settings when I do these tests is because I kind of want to show you guys what a worst case scenario would be so knowing if you turn some of those functions down and went from very high to high and turned off the max density and all that sort of stuff you know your FPS would go up but right now with the FPS even sitting in the 60s which is less than half of the refresh rate of the panel it still looks buttery smooth because it's a it's still a very consistent frame rate if that makes sense the thing is since were definitely above 60 and many of these tests were still not seeing tearing so that's what the benefit of having a high refresh rate panel is is because when you do exceed that magic 60 it just stays smooth and you don't see any of the tearing image on the screen because of you know obviously the way it draws the image but even in this fast scene right here is zero tearing sitting in the 80s on the FPS as the jet is just flying by the desert right here fairly consistent to sitting right around the low 80s and not moving around much Metro last light the title that a lot of people thought was just a benchmark it's actually a game if you didn't know that it's fairly fun to play but most people use it just for the benchmark cuz it's still fairly demanding and it's a good test with a lot of different functionality in it so running 1080p quality at very high no ssa a texture filtering zat 16x motion blur at normal and tessellation at normal so we're going to see how that does and then we'll check out the average and all that stuff so here's the FPS chart you can see as it went through the different scenes we have a max of 166 an average of 90 point 2 4 in a minimum of 20 point 5 4 you can see that minimums right there that little that little black line that went all the way down you can see that that's only one frame so definitely take that with a grain of salt that's just the benchmark there's one scene wearing it we're in the transitions it just stutters every single time no matter what your GPU is so you can see it's just right there but that is pretty damn consistent because you can see our averages are looking pretty good so that is that's impressive now what benchmarking wouldn't be complete without a Cinebench r15 run now this is a free benchmark you can go and download it yourself and compare your results to this system if you want to get a good idea of how fast or slow the system is compared to yours so that's one of the reasons who I like to include Cinebench r15 we're gonna go ahead and run the CPU test it's important to remember there is no overclocking on this laptop you cannot go into the BIOS and overclock it and there's no overclock settings inside of the MSI dragon dashboard and you know that ten thousand or with ten thousand I wish one thousand forty nine so about fifty points below the i7 3930k so this laptop is giving us at least in Cinebench a very similar score to a stock clocked extreme CPU that ran on the x79 platform so at the end of the day what you're left with here is a lightweight ultra thin portable laptop while all laptops are portable but it's more powerful than many modern quad core desktops we're talking desktops built fairly recently this is more powerful than many of those and ones that I have built myself so that kind of makes this a no-brainer for college students traveling professionals or anyone that just doesn't want to be far from their games and wants a kick-ass laptop this is definitely one to take a look at I'll put a link to it in the description below obviously a huge thank you to MSI for let me borrow this laptop to test it out and give you guys my opinion on it so we're gonna go guys thanks for watching if you've got any other laptop you think I should take a look at this is the summer months many of you are going to college or you just want a good laptop I'm willing to test them out and give you guys my opinions so we're gonna go thanks for watching guys and as always I'll see you in the next you