MSI has supersized its popular, super-slim GS65 Stealth Thin 15.6-inch gamer.
The GS75 Stealth (starts at $2,099; $2,999 as tested) brings not just a larger 17-inch screen to the arena, but also Nvidia's new, mobile-ready GeForce RTX "Turing" graphics chips (GPUs) for a performance boost.
Our test unit's Max-Q-tuned GeForce RTX 2080 has been dialed down to check heat output and fit in a thin chassis.
That reduces the graphics chutzpah a bit, but this remains a top-end gaming laptop capable of more than 90 frames per second (fps) at 1080p, with a 144Hz display to show off all those extra frames.
With a moderate weight, a sturdy build, and respectable battery life, the GS75 Stealth is an envy magnet, and it's currently the big-screen GeForce RTX laptop to beat.
Less concerned with portability? Alienware's 17 R5 remains our Editors' Choice for a superior build and evenly matched performance.
A Luxury Look: Still Slim at 17 Inches
The GS75 Stealth resembles its smaller-screen sibling, but it isn't a simple scaled-up remake.
The two Stealths share design language, as any good product line will, here with a sleek black look trimmed in gold accents.
The lid is outlined in gold, with MSI's instantly recognizable dragon logo a more minimal gold tracing than the red-and-black shield on most MSI units.
As on the 15-inch model, I like this color scheme a lot.
It sets the GS75 Stealth apart as a premium offering.
The build quality also feels sturdier here.
The chassis is solid-feeling aluminum alloy, with no flex on the speaker grille, unlike on the GS65 Stealth Thin.
The hinges, also now in gold, are a bit thicker and more rugged to support the larger panel.
I note a good degree of flex on the panel itself, if you push on the bottom bezel between the hinges, but under normal use, no one should be doing that.
Overall, the build quality doesn't feel especially premium or overengineered, but it's competent at worst, and it looks good.
MSI did a nice job ramping up this laptop from 15.6 inches to 17 inches while keeping the profile slim for the screen size.
It measures 0.74 by 15.5 by 10 inches (HWD) and weighs 5.02 pounds, admirable for a 17-incher.
The GeForce RTX-based Asus ROG Zephyrus S GX701 ($3,100.00 at Amazon) , another 17-incher that's also all about thinness, comes in at a near-same 0.73 inch but weighs almost a pound more.
That Asus laptop also relies on a somewhat convoluted retracting bottom flap and keyboard-deck ventilation system that has its drawbacks.
For its part, the GS75 Stealth uses a traditional laptop cooling scheme, with the bottom and side vents flush with the chassis.
It does get hot down there, but the Zephyrus S is hardly cool itself.
And, as you'll see in the performance testing below, the fancy mechanical system may not be strictly necessary.
A High-Refresh Panel, and More
The 17.3-inch screen has advanced features aimed right at its gaming audience, though it is missing a key one: support for Nvidia's G-Sync screen smoothing.
The panel bears a full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel, or 1080p) native resolution.
You may want the resolution to be higher for this price, but it pairs well with the screen's lofty 144Hz refresh rate.
At that resolution, this hardware is more likely to be able to push a high enough frame rate to make use of the lofty refresh rate.
The screen is also an in-plane switching (IPS) panel for better viewing angles and colors, and it has a 3ms response time, which is a little slower than you may get with some twisted-nematic (TN) panels but still on the faster side.
The picture quality is good, with bright colors and dark blacks, though it's slightly less impressive to my eye than the 17-inch display on the ROG Zephyrus S GX701, which also does work in G-Sync support.
From an aesthetic standpoint, the super-thin 5.2mm bezels make it look sleek and modern, with a high screen-to-body ratio of 85 percent.
Despite these thin bezels, MSI still kept the 720p webcam up top, where it belongs.
The keyboard on this system is designed in concert with SteelSeries, and if you've seen one of these designs on an MSI machine before, you know what to expect.
The translucent key edging isn't my favorite look (your mileage may vary), and the keytops feel a bit cheaper than I'd like, but the typing experience is comfortable enough.
You also get per-key backlighting on this system, customizable through included software.
I found the default pulsing pattern to be appealing, but having all of the keys lit up in one color will be more practical most of the time.
I'm more positive on the touchpad, which is both roomy and feels good to use.
It tracks smoothly and clicks in without feeling cheap or flimsy.
It's also trimmed with shiny gold, matching the lid detail.
The speakers are about average for a thin machine's.
They get loud enough to pump a game or movie, but the quality isn't overly impactful, even cranked up.
Under most circumstances, you'll favor your preferred gaming headset over these.
Connectivity and Components
Ports aplenty rim the GS75 Stealth, with both flanks outfitted nicely.
The left side holds power and Ethernet jacks, a USB 3.1 port, a microSD card slot, and discrete headset and mic lines.
On the right are two more USB 3.1 ports, an HDMI connection, and two USB Type-C ports.
One of the latter is overlaid with Thunderbolt 3 support.
Finally, before I get down to performance nitty-gritty, let's talk about the components driving the Stealth.
In the $2,999 test unit I have on hand, you get a 2.2GHz Intel Core i7-8750H CPU (a six-core/12-thread beast of a mobile processor), the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 GPU mentioned up top (in Max-Q form), a whopping 32GB of DDR4 memory, and a 512GB solid-state drive (SSD).
First, the last item.
That SSD comes partitioned in two, into virtual drives of 286GB and 168GB capacity, so that the system-image and -recovery mechanisms can live on the second drive.
You normally lose some space to Windows files and other essentials, but you're missing almost 60GB total with this setup, so that's something to consider.
A 512GB capacity isn't over-generous to begin with, given modern game sizes, and the ROG Zephyrus S GX701 we reviewed had a 1TB drive in comparison.
Outside of this specific test model, MSI offers six other SKUs.
That's too many to detail here in turn, but the cheapest starts at $2,099, and the range tops out with this $2,999 model on hand.
The differences are mainly in the graphics chips: The less expensive models offer a GeForce RTX 2060 GPU, while the midrange options make use of the GeForce RTX 2070.
Beyond that very key distinction, you'll spot slight variations in the onboard SSD storage size and the amount of system memory.
All six units share the same CPU and display.
The RTX Difference: Top Speed, Thin Package
I drew up a list of gaming laptops similar to the MSI GS75 Stealth to serve as points of comparison for PC Labs' benchmark tests.
Some of these share the same components and general size, while others fall in the same price range.
And some do both.
A cheat sheet of the key components in each unit is below...
The Alienware 17 R5 represents the best of the big-screen "Pascal" (that is, last-generation GeForce) laptops, while the Zephyrus S GX701 I've mentioned throughout this review is the other new GeForce RTX-based machine we have on the bench.
The MSI GT75 Titan is a hulking GeForce GTX 1080-based machine that can really elbow the two GeForce RTX systems (it's huge and thus far less thermally constrained), while the 15-inch-screen, GeForce GTX-equipped version of the Asus ROG Zephyrus S I reviewed (the GX531GS) helps give context to the other results.
Productivity and Storage Tests
PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark).
The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows.
We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet use, web browsing, and videoconferencing.
PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a specialized storage test that we use to assess the speed of the PC's subsystem.
The GS75 Stealth falls a bit on the lower ends of the PCMark 10 productivity test for reasons that aren't especially clear.
It shares a processor with both Zephyrus units and has more RAM than either, yet falls behind a little.
That said, this test is more generalized and less likely to tax the system, so it's not making full use of the CPU or extra memory.
It's also not that far behind, and in practical use, the differences here shouldn't be noticeable.
(Anything higher than 4,000 on this test is essentially gravy for the kinds of applications PCMark 10 simulates.)
On the PCMark 8 Storage test, MSI's machine was right in line with the others, as these all have zippy cutting-edge SSDs.
This means boot and load times (both desktop and in-game) will be noticeably quicker than on systems with a hard drive.
Media Processing and Creation Tests
Next is Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads.
Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image.
The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark.
Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image.
We time each operation and, at the end, add up the total execution time.
This stresses CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, so systems with powerful graphics chips or cards may see a boost.
On these two more strenuous tests, only the big-bodied Alienware and MSI GT75 Titan machines performed better than the GS75 Stealth.
Those units have superior Core i9 processors, so the improvement makes perfect sense.
Outside of that direct comparison, these are generally strong results for multimedia workloads, so you can rely on the GS75 Stealth for side projects or less-than-workstation-level professional tasks.
Synthetic Graphics Tests
Next up: UL's 3DMark suite.
3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting.
We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems.
Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff.
The results are proprietary scores.
The following chart is another synthetic graphics test, this one from Unigine Corp.
Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes.
In this case, it's done in the company's eponymous Unigine engine, whose different 3D workload scenario presents a second opinion on the machine's graphical prowess.
The GS75 Stealth does well on these tests, even if it doesn't blow away the machines based on Pascal GPUs.
All being powerful high-end systems, the field is about even here.
The less-demanding Sky Diver test has more variance, but the fidelity of Fire Strike is closer to where gaming laptops of this caliber will play in real use, and they all hit high scores, with the beefy GT75 Titan topping the chart.
Bear in mind again: This GS75 Stealth model and the Zephyrus S GX701 are using the Max-Q GeForce RTX 2080 GPUs to fit in the extra-thin chassis, so it's encouraging that they stack up to the full-power GTX 1080 GPUs found in the Alienware and Titan.
(Indeed, the Alienware's GTX 1080 is overclocked a bit.) You may have been expecting more of a jump between generations, but in short, the GeForce RTX GPUs seem to be making new thin gaming laptops competitive with last-generation thick laptops.
In-game frame rates may prove more illuminating here...which brings us to our next tests.
Real-World Gaming Tests
The synthetic tests above are helpful for measuring general 3D aptitude, but it's hard to beat full retail video games for judging gaming performance.
Far Cry 5 and Rise of the Tomb Raider are both modern AAA titles with built-in benchmark schemes.
These tests are run at 1080p on both the moderate and maximum graphics-quality presets (Normal and Ultra for Far Cry 5; Medium and Very High for Rise of the Tomb Raider) to judge performance for a given laptop.
Far Cry 5 is DirectX 11-based, while Rise of the Tomb Raider can be flipped to DX12, which we do for that benchmark.
Our current testing procedures are still relatively new, so we haven't collected enough data just yet for deep comparison charts.
But here's what we saw with the RTX machines so far...
The GS75 Stealth, though, showed plenty of power.
Far Cry 5 and Rise of the Tomb Raider both clocked well over 60fps at the tip-top settings, as you can see, and it shouldn't lead to any irritating dips while you play, since there's more than enough headroom.
The Zephyrus S GX701 and its Max-Q RTX 2080 were a tick behind the GS75 Stealth on each test.
That's hardly a different ballpark, but it's an especially notable difference on Rise of the Tomb Raider considering it's the same GPU.
The numbers remain high enough to better appreciate the 144Hz refresh rate, though, sweetening the pot in the Stealth's favor.
The 15-inch Zephyrus S's Max-Q GTX 1070 (not charted) is also an illustrative comparison.
It makes the Max-Q RTX 2080 look good: The GTX-bearing Zephyrus S averaged 79fps and 88fps on these tests at the same high settings.
That's quite far off these RTX 2080 systems' numbers, even though they're still comfortably over 60fps and can be attributed to the jump in both tier and generation of the GPU.
Judging by the synthetic test numbers, the GTX 1080 wouldn't be as far behind.
Battery Rundown Test
Finally, the battery-life testing.
After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video-rundown test.
(We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop in Airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the Blender Foundation short film Tears of Steel—with screen...
