so here it is we’re finally doing it we are finally doing it my friends this is the msi gs66 stealth one of the most requested reviews that we received alongside the dell g15 special edition which is also in the work so definitely stay tuned for that now why did it take so long for you to publish this review eber i’m sure that’s a question that a lot of you have in mind uh basically in early may right before we were about to publish this video or this review msi sent revisions to both the embedded controller and the bios that updated both that was being shipped inside retail units so this new update supposedly optimized fan speeds which then lowered temperatures which also allowed the notebook to hit high frequencies without impacting fan noise so if we post this video in like late april or early may um it wouldn’t really show the true performance uh especially if you’re picking up this laptop it wouldn’t really show its true potential so we took the time to properly evaluate what this notebook is capable of so let’s get started right after this the be quiet purebase 500 is a perfectly sized handsome mid tower with the usual silent properties on the front panel and foam on the interior with two quality fans included plus a modular top section to expand the cooling potential give you hardware a new home with the purebase 500.
Okay so let’s get pricing out of the way the gs66 stealth starts at sixteen hundred dollars and for that you get a 10 gen core i7 10 cent 50h processor with six cores and 12 threads 16 gigabytes of ram 512 gigs of storage and an rtx 2060. the sample that we have over here comes with that same cpu twice the memory the same amount of storage and an rtx 2070 super max q gpu oh and the upgraded 300 hertz display over the 240 hertz on the base model and the price 2300 us dollars now naturally you can go balls to the wall and spec this thing out with intel’s fastest eight core 16 third processor a terabyte of storage and an rtx 2080 super max q just be comfortable paying three thousand dollars so where does the gs66 stealth align with the competition well there’s the razer blade 15 advanced model uh the gigabyte arrow 15 the asus rog zephyrus s15 i really want to get my hands on that model and pricing for all these notebooks are pretty much the same uh when you compare spec to spec so with that out of the way let’s talk about exterior impressions i’m genuinely impressed with the build quality and design of this laptop the stealth branding certainly fits the product design the chassis is crafted from cnc aluminum for the most part not entirely like the unibody design found on the blade 15.
I love the laser etched logo on the lid gives it a nice sleek look i’m sure batman would rock this as his daily driver the hinge is pretty solid one of the unique things about this notebook is that you can lay the screen 180 degrees flat just like that now i don’t know if this is something that you do often but it is a feature now msi does say that they’re using metal rivet materials inside the hinge to make it smooth there is less wobble which is nice so you shouldn’t be worried about it when you’re typing or using this thing on your lap one thing that really bothered me the most was the plastic rail at the front to give you a little bit of context we treat every notebook that enters the studio carefully but on our sample the plastic railing on the edge chipped now this unit could have shipped out of the factory in this condition or it could have occurred during shipping but i poor sleeping then msi’s choice of implementing this plastic rail at the front just doesn’t fall in line with the premium notebook mantra that they’re trying to go for uh with the gs66 stealth it just sticks out like a sore thumb and if you type a lot or spend hours gaming the transition from the palm rest to this plastic isn’t that smooth it just feels like two pieces were glued together this might not be a huge deal breaker for a lot of people but some people do care and i thought that was worth mentioning now the palm rest does pick up fingerprints but i guess it’s expected because a lot of these notebooks that come with an anodized black uh finish does are they are prone to
fingerprints so you know it’s something to keep in mind i mean the blade 15 is a great example of picking up fingerprints so this is just right up its alley the interior space is pretty clean with a fairly good keyboard layout personally i’m not a fan of the font choice i wish they went with something low profile there are a few things that i need to point out the function and control buttons are really close to each other so you might hit one or the other by accident also for some reason there are two backsplash keys on this keyboard i don’t really get it i mean why would someone need two of them obviously there’s one below the backspace key which is a standard way of putting things and there’s another one beside the function and control button i didn’t notice at first mike had to tell me that oh yeah there’s another backsplash key just so you know the keys themselves are pretty good msi has always had a close partnership with steel series to deliver a solid typing and gaming experience it feels roughly the same as my blade 15 i’ll be there’s just a little bit more travel distance on the gs66 which should complement typists unfortunately rgb lighting is not that great it doesn’t get bright especially when you compare to the blade that laptop is the gold standard for keyboard backlighting in my opinion also there’s no visual indication when you’re adjusting the brightness levels they do go up in five step intervals but you have to guess every single time when you’re adjusting it to your preference it was really frustrating for me the trackpad is awesome it is a glass surface which makes navigating through windows a breeze i love having the smooth surface also paired with a high refresher display it’s just a perfect combination and it’s something that you have to
experience in person the integrated primary left arm buttons they feel solid and tactile nothing to complain here so this is the webcam test on the gs66 stealth now i’m gonna shut myself for a sec so you can listen yeah that i feel like they’ve placed a microphone in between the fans now keep in mind that i have placed this laptop in the silent profile which means the fan speeds should be spinning at a lower rate but that’s not the case so yeah if you plan on using this for business meetings just get yourself a proper microphone because this is totally unusable like how did this pass quality control like msi what are you doing the built-in speakers sound pretty bad they’re technically bottom facing but msi has redirected the sound through this thin cutout on the palm rest so when you’re listening to something the sound resonates to the chassis and then it escapes through these thin grilles and let me tell you they sound way too harsh especially with the trebles there’s absolutely no bass so there’s no depth to the sound you’re listening to in fact the tough a15 from asus that i checked out last week sounded way way better than this moving on to ports on the left hand side you have power in thunderbolt 3 with support for pd charging up to 65 watts and displayport 1.4 pass-through hdmi 2.0 and a type-a usb 3.2 gen 2 port switching to the right you’ve got a lan jack two more type a 3.2 gen 2 ports a type c port and an audio jack so it’s a good selection unfortunately there is no full size sd card reader so if you’re a content creator that might be a bit of an issue that’s because when you look at the competition especially from gigabyte the arrow 15 that has a full-size sd card slot the razer blade 15 advanced model just got it heck the new dell xps 15 comes with a full-size sd card slot so i think you really need to prioritize um you know what you need and what you use and then make the purchasing decision now just be aware that if you have stuff plugged into the right-hand side and if you use an external mouse you might constantly start bumping into those cables especially with that lan port
right over there so i want to wish you the very best if you use that lan port because yeah just be prepared to bump switching gears to the display it’s a 15.6 inch 1080p panel with a refresh rate of 300hz and its ips level though it isn’t g-sync compatible it’s very color accurate as you can see it covers 100 srgb 76 adobe rgb and 78 dc ip3 so it’s very close to my blade 15 so if you’re a content creator or photographer or if you value color accuracy this will not disappoint you the viewing angles are nice there’s good contrast i just wish that the screen was a bit more brighter because it only gets as bright as 330 nits i think this is something that we’re gonna start see common among high or fresh rate displays they just won’t get brighter but i hope that changes sometime soon speaking of high refresh rates this is my first 300hz display and coming from my blade 15 featuring a 240 hertz screen i genuinely can’t see the difference i feel like the 300 hertz term is just marketing fluff to generate more sales but realistically if you are looking for a gaming laptop yes you should look for a higher friction screen but i don’t think you absolutely need a 300 panel i think you’ll be completely fine with a 144 hertz maybe even a 240 hertz display if you can pick it up at a lower price point that would be the best bang for the buck type of option and also let’s just get real for a sec most visually debating titles or games
that look really nice can’t really hit 300 frames per second because of the current hardware situation and there are also other frame caps for certain games as well so these are certainly some things to take into account when you’re shopping around for a gaming laptop under the hood you have instant access to two ram slots which are preoccupied maximum supported memory is 64 gigabytes the main 512gb nvme ssd is right over here and there’s an extra m.2 slot for expansion which is nice it’s something that the blade 15 advanced lacks the drive speeds are insanely fast this is one of the fastest drives we’ve encountered with read speeds approaching 3.
5 gigabytes per second the rights are a bit on the lower side but it’s still wicked fast guys now msi has been bragging about having the world’s highest capacity battery in a laptop in this case it’s 99.91 hours which is the legal limit obviously so naturally you’d expect good results well that’s not the case because there’s a lot of background applications running behind the scenes for example we have msi true color which is the one taking care of the display then there’s the steel series engine 3 software that takes care of the keyboard then we have the killer lan networking software for the wi-fi card and then finally we have msi dragon center which is obviously the performance control option that lets you switch between profiles and takes care of all that stuff all these applications when you add them together it consumes about three to five percent of the cpu usage plus associated memory usage as well so that definitely impacts battery life so as you can
see on a light load test refreshing a chrome web page on loop it only lasted for about eight hours which is good but it’s nowhere near the tough a15 that i checked out last week featuring a power efficient amd cpu the tables have really turned this time guys the same story goes with our heavy load test don’t expect too much out of this thing okay so now let’s get into performance to be honest with you don’t expect too much out of this new 6 core 12 thread processor the core i7 10750h offers a respectable improvement over the 9750h but when you compare to what amd offers with the ryzen sun 4800h it’s a joke i really think you need to evaluate what your needs are for example if you compile a lot of code or used rendering based applications like blender you should really look into amd offerings they’re much faster and should save you a lot of time now before we get into the results let’s take a look at how the cpu and gpu behaves over time under heavy load starting things with autodesk maya which is cpu intensive temperatures shoot up all the way up to 95 c they stay there for a little bit and then slowly round off to about 90 c which is very hot for an all core load guys it actually stays that way for the rest of the test all core frequencies started 3.8 gigahertz but it was only a matter of time for it to throttle
between 3.4 and 3.5 gigahertz this is actually pretty respectable clock speed so it looks like msi is sacrificing temperatures for performance in this case during gaming the cpu temps averaged higher than we expected but that also made sense because the heat produced by high loads on both the cpu and gpu eventually add up the clock speeds boosted higher too since the processor wasn’t stressed at 100 we’re talking 3.6 or 3.8 gigahertz and there were a few instances where it boosted to 4.1 gigahertz but that didn’t really help with performance the 2070 super max q ran pretty cool actually noticeably cooler than the cpu averaging around 70 degrees celsius but we also can’t forget nvidia’s boost algorithms require pretty low temperatures to be completely effective the clock speeds start pretty high at 1800 megahertz but it fell off the cliff to about 1450 megahertz which is quite a bit above the official frequencies that nvidia claims now on to the rest of the results if you use adobe premiere to edit videos this notebook shouldn’t disappoint you with the new update optimizations have improved by a huge margin leveraging the cpu the igpu and the discrete graphics card in parallel however there is little to no reason to upgrade from the 9750h that cpu is still pretty strong guys you’re not
gaining a lot in that area resolve ran pretty fast on this machine do note that this is gpu focused so the 2070 super plus the relatively high clock speeds on the cpu comes in clutch but that tough a15 is not too far behind when it comes to video transcoding like i said earlier amd is your best option if you use handbrake for instance and wrapping things up with our winrar test that fast nvme ssd helps a lot to speed up with compression finally gaming performance was really good the rtx 2070 super can match an rtx 2080 non-super in frame rates for the most part you can comfortably play a 1080p set to the high settings but none of these games were able to leverage that 300hz display surface temperatures were pretty hot especially in the wasp zone and the exhaust on the right side blows out hot air like someone’s blasting a heater at your hand it’s good for winter but during summer especially when you’re using a mouse just be prepared to embrace sweaty hands i wouldn’t also leave this on my lap for longer sessions fan noise is pretty bad on the gs66 it just gets excessively loud during heavy gaming load scenarios so do keep note of that even during silent mode the fans still keep ramping up and you clearly saw that by the webcam test but i’m also gonna roll this clip right over here because on my sample i was able to notice coil wine as well so yeah that’s just unfortunate just take a listen all right conclusion time i have mixed feelings about the gs66 stealth i will give credit to msi for delivering a sleek and stealthy design but there are some things that i just wished that were just perfect one of the words i just wished if msi was able to connect the dots between some elements
seamlessly eber what does that even mean i mean what are you even talking about well that plastic rail on the edge i just can’t see myself getting over it i really wish if it was a unibody design the keyboard backlighting not the greatest especially when compared to the competition the speakers sound terrible the microphone quality is trash like how did this pass quality control i just don’t get it also this laptop is excessively loud during gaming scenarios so those are certainly some factors to consider now the performance is solid for the size but in my opinion i feel like there are better options out there especially you know if you’re looking for a faster cpu amd is definitely killing it lately now you are getting a better display it is nice but do you need a 300hz panel for gaming oh really guys i think you’ll be perfectly fine with a 240s display or even 144hz display that will save you a lot of money uh in my opinion see the gs66 stealth check marks what a gaming laptop should be it offers great performance but when you look at the rest of the picture there’s just a lot that leads to be desired so on that note thank you so much for watching i hope i was able to answer some of the questions that you guys had about this laptop and let me know what you guys think in the comments i’m signing off stay safe spend responsibly and i’ll talk to you guys in the next one
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