Published: January 31, 2017 | Source: MSI | Author: Bryan Waters

MSI GS63VR 7RF Stealth Pro 4K Review

Conclusion

With so many versions of the MSI Stealth Pro laptop available you’re guaranteed to find one to suit your needs and/or budget. All of them look fantastic in the brushed aluminium chassis and the black finish ensures that the Steelseries RGB keyboard really shines. The build quality is excellent too. Cheaper laptops can sometimes flex a little more than you might be comfortable with, but the MSI has no such issues. Even the screen is rigid for those times when you open it one handed rather than using the recommended two.

This particular model comes in four main variants. There are two 17 inch versions with 1080 and 4K displays, as well as 15.6 inch variants in 1080 and today’s review sample 4K options.

All of them come equipped with the latest Intel i7-7700HQ processor backed up by 16GB of DDR4, plenty of performance for all but the most unrealistically demanding tasks. The NVMe storage is a particular highlight, pushing 2 GBs read speeds without breaking a sweat, and at 240GB it has got more than enough capacity for a wide selection of applications. The sound is very good with the Nahamic Audio and speaker configuration giving rich, deep sound whether you’re fragging your friends, listening to music or just catching up with the latest CinemaSins video on Youtube. The keyboard and trackpad combination are equally excellent. Steelseries keyboards are now a fixture of the MSI laptop range and with good reason, providing a crisp typing experience allied to excellent RGB lighting effects. The updated trackpad has moved the LMB/RMB buttons beneath the main surface giving you a little extra space for those precision movements whilst still having a full set of features. There are no ghost clicks here that you sometimes get from overly sensitive trackpads. When you combine this fabulous feature set to the plentiful connectivity options, all of the latest greatest type, then you wont go away disappointed.

But, and there has to be a but, the decision to put a 4K screen on our review sample is a mind-bogglingly bad one. If ever a feature felt like it was designed by marketers in conjunction with the accountants this is it. Sure a 4K screen looks amazing in the specifications, but you’ll struggle to get playable frame rates with a desktop GTX 1080, let alone a mobile GTX 1060. Yes we know that there isn’t a distinction between mobile and desktop GPUs these days, but the laptop ones never quite hit the heights of their desktop brothers. Even if they did though a GTX 1060 will never be able to run a modern title at 4K. Ahhh we hear you say, it’s for extra screen space and 4K media viewing. Maybe, but it is impossible to read anything without magnifying the desktop, and if you’re magnifying everything back to 1080 sizes you might as well save yourself the Â£250 the 4K model costs above it and get that instead. And, on a 15″ display but even a 17″ one, you’ll never spot the difference between 1080P and 4K Media. Not a hope. The marketers want 4K because it looks good in the specs, but realistically you should steer well clear.Â

Unfortunately this means that, for this exact configuration, it’s just too expensive and for what you can get out of it. You need to enlarge everything to read it, and you can’t even benefit in games because with the GTX 1060 it’s a slideshow. Just grab the 1080 model of this and you’ll be delighted with an excellent product that’s much cheaper than this particular configuration and more usable for the bulk of users too.

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