MSI GE62 7RE Camo Squad Review

Conclusion

We have to start by speaking about the elephant in the room. What’s that? You can’t see it? That’s because it’s camouflaged. Oh we crack ourselves up. Ahem.

So the Camo Squad does exactly what it says on the tin, with a fully camouflaged backpack (MSI logos apart), drinks bottle (ditto), mouse mat and actual laptop itself. It is fair to say that we’re probably not, being middle-aged guys, the target audience for such a product and we think it’s pretty much an eyesore. It’s just too annoying to stare at for long sessions. However, and this is the key point, we would prefer if MSI hadn’t lost the courage of their convictions and bottled it by having the display bezel and underside of the GE62 7RE be black. If you’re going to go with a digital desert camouflage pattern then go for it in full, with no concessions to realism or affordability. After all, this is never going to be used by someone genuinely hoping their laptop isn’t seen in the desert whilst they hack Al Qaeda. This is for people who want to express a certain personality type and are already hunting down the back of the sofa for the money to purchase it as we speak. So go all in. Not this half-measure type rubbish.

Whether you love or hate the design of the GE62 Camo Squad, you can’t deny that the performance and pricing are extremely competitive. The backpack alone must be worth 60 or 70 pounds, and a copy of Ghost Recon Wildlands with the Season Pass is £70. That already makes this laptop sub £1000. Anyone who has ever looked into buying a laptop knows that £1000 doesn’t get you much at all, so it is to MSIs credit that the combination of components in the GE62 Camo Squad works so well together.

We’ve often mentioned how, for gaming, a Core i5 is plenty of CPU power and the Camo Squad comes with the i5-7300HQ, a quad-core CPU which has a turbo boost up to 3.5 GHz. Throughout our testing it performed admirably, even when compared to an i7-7700HQ equipped MSI laptop we looked at very recently. Unless you plan on encoding 4K video or rendering your own Toy Story challenger then you wont be disappointed – and if you are planning that what are you doing looking at a non-HT quad core? The graphics card is also a surprisingly good performer. Sure you need to be realistic about which settings you apply, but it’s only a GTX 1050 Ti. If you are a little more cautious, mainly with anti-aliasing and extreme shadow settings, then you can get some very smooth frame rates from the Camo Squad. It also, by virtue of utilising an i5 and GTX 1050 Ti, doesn’t chuck out masses of heat. We’ve reviewed some monstrously powerful gaming laptops here at OC3D and nearly all of them were like sitting next to a fan heater, both in heat and volume. The Camo Squad though remained relatively cool and, best of all, quiet. Even under heavy loading there was none of that whiny fan annoyance that can plague other laptops.

What it boils down to is how much you can live with the design, because the components themselves work very well and the laptop comes in at a seriously competitive price point. If all you want in life is a desert camo backpack and a laptop to put it in, then your wish has been granted, and the MSI GE62 7RE Camo Squad wins our OC3D Gamers Choice award.

  

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