MSI Pulse 15 Unboxing Review! QHD, RTX 4060, $1499! 10+ Game Benchmarks! Display Test, More!

what's up and welcome back to another live stream with gizmoslip tech today we are going to be doing an unboxing review of the MSI pulse 15. now this is going to be one of the best mid-range more budgety options but not really super budget because you know it's 1500 bucks um so you're getting a bit more premium display on this it's going to be a QHD 165 Hertz supposed to be I think fairly bright and fairly vibrant but we're actually going to test that today with the display testing tool that I have uh Spider 5 Elite we're also going to be unboxing the bottom removing the bottom seeing what the inside looks like seeing what the upgrade ability is like we're gonna play a bunch of games on this guy and then we are going to uh test the speakers test the keyboard the trackpad the webcam uh we're gonna look at the ports we're gonna look at every single thing you can possibly look at about this laptop in detail uh for the most part um maybe um I mean there's obviously some stuff maybe you could do that we're not doing today but not really that I know of anyway we're gonna be freaking doing this it's going to be freaking out some oh it's a glorious day I can't wait to test the pulse 15. I think this is going to be one of the top picks if you're looking at a 1500 price point for a gaming laptop there are going to be some other options out there and we're going to go over all of those options and as a matter of fact we're going to do that right now um before we continue so the uh the first step is evaluating what are your possibilities uh besides this guy at fifteen hundred dollars and should you consider this as one of your options or not so let's go ahead and dive into that um so this is my uh 2023 gaming laptop ranked list now there are going to be a lot of laptops going in and out of this top deals section right now uh they're the start right now the starting price is at 13.49 but we'll have some other cheaper laptops in that top deal section uh very soon as a matter of fact I think this Acer Nitro 5 probably deserves to be in there it's it's a really nice deal overall the one I just recently tested I liked it a lot um but yeah anyway just know that if you're looking for a great deal on a laptop you can look in this top deal section and likely find a really good deal in your price range and we're going to go over some of the best deals at the 1500 price point uh that we're going to be competing that are going to compete really well against this pulse 15. so um anyway on this on this sheet just so you know how it works you there's a link in the description down below if you want to check it out uh if you click this expansion button or if you're on mobile you can tap on the laptop name it'll pop up with a card View and you can see pictures of the laptop this will let you see what ports are on it you can also look in the top right up here there are uh specs for the CPU the GPU how much RAM it has the SSD space the display and hopefully a little bit about the quality of the display if we have that information now uh in addition we have the price point uh the total size the battery size and then there's Links at the bottom for each laptop where you can buy it if it's available for sale and we update this list with all of these laptops and their pricing whether they're available in stock or sold out or what what sales are going on across tons of different websites every single day so just know that if you're looking for up-to-date information on which laptops are available which laptops are are not available if you're not sure if some laptop you're interested in is available you can check the list and see stock and availability as well as find Benchmark information if you go over to further to the right we do have a lot of Benchmark data here now for the time spy and cinebench R23 and we are also adding in God of War Red Dead Redemption and cyberpunk benchmarks I think we're going to change up which games we're going to be adding here but as I do the benchmarks we're adding them to the list and I've done now 15 16 different laptops and we're going to keep going through more and more laptops and keep adding more and more data to the list here so and you can see some of these left there's a lot more data down here and we are looking around the internet for more data as well and we link to the Benchmark sources so if you want to know where we found these benchmarks you can find potential reviews of these laptops for any benchmarks you do see on the sheet so just know there's a benchmark sources here as well and yeah and the on the left side you can also filter and sort this list so if your price ranges up to fifteen hundred dollars you can set the price range to be up to fifteen hundred dollars or 1200 to 1500 whatever you want or display size or weight or whatever so there's a lot of a lot of power a lot of availability um that you can take advantage of on this sheet and I would encourage you to do so the sheet now has 85 000 views thank you guys so much and know that if you do use the links on this list it does help support me as a content creator so there's no pressure to buy but uh one of the best ways you can help support me as a content creator is by using the links on the sheet when you do end up buying and you can't use it in like like certain browsers will block cookies and stuff like that that'll prevent any Affiliates from being tracked and and if you use something like honey uh or Rakuten then usually that'll also prevent me from being supported as a content creator I mentioned that not to not save you money but just so that you know that if you do use those Services uh it does I guess take basically the money that would go to support me and you get to save it for yourself so if you need if you want to save some money you can use those Services I'm not saying not to um but just so you are aware of what you're doing um so anyway awesome this is the list I have selected six laptops for us to talk about comparing the pulse 15. uh let me see chat looks like uh big Jesse just became a member welcome welcome Big Daddy thank you so much for becoming a member and supporting uh me as a content creator um uh soccer says I think I'm thinking of getting this one but didn't see you reviewing it so I waited yeah well we're going to be reviewing it today so uh is it better idea to get this instead of the katana 4070 that's the main one we're going to be comparing with against today because I did a very similar live unboxing Benchmark Review of the MSI Katana 15 this 1500 so we're gonna be comparing heavily against that one um Mars asked how fast is the 1300 620h uh compared to the 3900 HX it's a big difference um because you get a lot more cores and higher power limits on the 3900 HX JY says I have a good feeling about this yeah me too I think I think it's very likely this pulse 15 is going to be an awesome laptop um but we'll have to see right okay so moving on to our uh first up our comparisons all right so MSI pulse 15 we got an i7 13620h with an RTX 4860 it's rated to 140 Watts I'm going to be looking for 140 Watts uh when we're playing games and doing our benchmarks test but I don't know that we'll actually see that we'll see um I haven't done any tests on it yet but so far like I found out the Acer Nitro 5 that I reviewed was technically rated at 140 Watts but we never saw 140 watts in any game like it was literally like what 105 110 Watts was the most we saw so I don't know if we're actually going to see 140 Watts right now in this laptop but either way we'll still be evaluating performance and hopefully we're gonna get a high enough TDP to have great performance from the RTX 460. now this comes with 16 gigs of ddr5 5200 I uh that's ddr5 so it's going to be dual Channel no matter what a one terabyte SSD so that's nice you're getting an additional a larger SSD with the pulse 15 compared to I believe the katana and the katana came with a one terabyte as well but some of these around 1500 like this zephyrus g16 it only has a 512 gig SSD so um you wouldn't necessarily have to upgrade the SSD as quickly if you get the pulse 15 and then we have a QHD 165 Hertz this is supposed to be 100 DCI P3 color gamut display and as you can see it's a very similar build and design look for the pulse 15 when you compared to the katana though I don't believe it's the exact same one there is some differences we'll try to look for those differences as we do this unboxing all right so next up uh that we're comparing with is the zephyrus g16 now this has the same CPU the same GPU um but it only has 16 gigs of ddr4 3200 and this is in single Channel memory wise right so you're going to get more performance out of the zephyrus g16 if you upgrade the RAM to dual Channel um so that's very important to note the 16 gigs is soldered onto the motherboard 512 gig SSD so a smaller SSD and then you only get a full HD Plus 165 Hertz display and it's 284 nits as measured by my spider 5 Elite now the zephyrus g16 the thing about it is you do have Windows hello you have a nice speaker system on the g16 and it's just a bit more of a premium feel to the machine overall and I do really recommend the zfrs g16 but today because you look at this you also get a 16 by 10 aspect ratio with minimal bezel on it but there's certain things you're not getting as high value as the pulse 15 you have a smaller SSD you have slower Ram that's only single Channel and then you also only have a full HD display instead of a QHD display and I believe the pulse 15 display is going to be brighter as well so there's a lot of trade-offs between the Zephyrs g16 and the pulse 15 and I'm thinking that if you're after a better quality display the pulse 15 is going to be the way to go but we'll have to see we'll have to see by the end of today I'm going to be doing a summary of everything we find out about the laptop at the end so um if you only have a little bit of time I would recommend at least checking that part out as well MSI 15 Katana 15 this is one I reviewed recently now this has a 12th gen 12 650h a very similar CPU to the one in the in this Katana sorry the the pulse 15. you got an RTX 4070 it went up to about 105 Watts um and you do eight get you get either 8 or 16 gigs of ddr5 4 000 series memory oh depending on which one you end up getting I believe is this the this is the new egg right here so um this is the one that I reviewed right here and it did come with 16 gigs of RAM I don't it's ddr5 so it's going to be single channel it's going to be dual Channel either way but the display on this Katana is basically as cheap a display as you can possibly get it's a very low color gamut and very low knit brightness but at least you get a one terabyte SSD and the performance on the 4070 was I thought pretty decent like it was it was cranking out good frame rates um and but the thing is the display is really going to be a drawback and a hindrance to people who want a higher quality display now the katana 15 obviously is a very uh thin portable type of chassis and I I'm not saying uh that you should necessarily buy the katana 15. I think the katana 15 is really more for the people that just want pure GPU performance and maybe they're going to use it on an external monitor mainly that's the only situation where I think I'd probably recommend the katana 15 over the pulse 15 because the displays are so important to having a great all-around experience with your gaming laptop now uh next we're going to talk about three laptops on sale I'm gonna just check out chat real quick um a big Jesse says watch all your vids and land it on the blade 18 grab the I9 3980hx 40 90 64 gig version swap two swapped in two 99 uh Pros Samsung 9900 Pros followed your undervolt ofc guide and got 2200 time spy and 6 000 Speedway dude that's awesome congrats that's uh that's a great laptop dude um Peterson says is this actually 140 watt or is 140 watt gimmick in the 4060 and 470 currently Peterson we're going to find out um you know the manufacturers and Nvidia were saying it can go up to 140 Watts but I am doubting that it actually is going to be able to do that so uh we're gonna find out today uh because he says I grabbed a subscription uh thank you for everything you do thanks for all the awesome reviews yeah thanks dude I appreciate the support uh JY says are you also testing the last of us in our benchmarks we are testing Last of Us today yes we are indeed gonna test Last of Us I've installed that on I'm going to start installing Last of Us on every laptop um going forward as one of the key Benchmark games the only thing is basically none of them are going to have the shaders pre-rendered so that's gonna I don't know how that's gonna affect performance but Martin with the Super Chat thanks so much I appreciate it he says hi Brandon I use the gt77 2023 when there's a white background on the screen and a black object on it a dark shadow can be seen around the object is this a feature of many LED panels uh probably is that like reverse blooming I'm not sure I haven't really noticed that I haven't really seen that situation that wouldn't really come up uh much in real life usage so anyway can you compare with the strict scar 16 are you talking about a dark show so you're saying the situation is white background with a black object on it and then a dark shadow can be seen around the object I'd have to try that on the scar 16 I can't do it offhand and I can't do it in this live stream but um next live stream I do with the scar 16 reminded me maybe we can test it out okay um JY says are you also okay nevermind all right when you when am I gonna get the stealth 16 stealth 16 uh I may end up reviewing that but I'm going to probably wait for MSI to send that to me so I'm gonna have to wait for that I'm guessing probably a couple months from now is when we'll probably get around to the stealth 16. okay Lenovo Legion 5. this is one of the laptops on sale in the top deal section right here okay so we're gonna talk about three laptops right now in the top deals section um the Lenovo Legion 5 ryzen 7 6800 RTX 3070 TI um 140 Watt and it is 140 watt goes up to that higher wattage um 16 gigs ddr5 two terabyte SSD phenomenal value on the SSD for the money at 14.89 uh full HD 165 Hertz display and that that's the downside you're paying 1500 essentially 14.89 for only a full HD display um and then it's obviously going to be a larger heavier system uh when compared to something like the pulse 15 or some of these other laptops like this first g16 but you get a number pad on it so this one's on sale right now there's a link again in the description to this deals list and you got links to buy on all of these laptops next up we have the scar 15. I love the scar 15. I use this laptop for my own laptop for a long time RTX 3080 130 watt 16 gigs ddr4 3200 a one terabyte SSD a full HD 300 Hertz display that's a nicer quality display but again it's not QHD but you get an RTX 3080 right so you get 16 gigs of vram which is going to be awesome if you want to do 4K gaming or just ensure that you're more future proofed with your vram when compared to like the eight gigs of vram on the pulse 15 so that's one uh probably one of the major considerations plus you got a ryzen chip in there so the battery life is going to be pretty decent um and the so the scars the scar 15 I think is an awesome laptop with good speakers nice RGB um and I can definitely recommend this at the 1500 price point as well but it is going to be again a bit of a thicker system and a decent set of ports on this guy too not amazing ports um but but pretty decent now the this guy is uh interesting option the Acer Nitro 5 with an 8 core ryzen 7 6800 h r TX RTX 3070 TI up to 150 watts according to this 30 I don't I haven't tested that uh our 32 gigs of ddr5 32 gigs of ddr5 is that a type this that's impressive um 32 gigs of ddr5 uh one terabyte SSD QHD 165 Hertz with a high color gamut is what it's supposed to be again we haven't tested that but these are the claims by the manufacturer for 13.49 I don't anticipate this deal to to be up here for too long it's 750 off um so if you're looking for currently the best deal under 1500 this is probably currently the best deal under fifteen hundred dollars for right now probably better than the pulse 15 though in frame generation games the pulse 15 will definitely crush this 3070 TI in frame generation titles specifically but in raw rasterization performance this Nitro 5 should be better right because it's got a 3070 TI um at least by a bit and the display should be in the same ballpark of quality but 32 gigs of RAM is a nice upgrade on this Nitro 5 especially considering the price point and I'm sure this sale is only going to be temporary not permanent again this is a thicker heavier system at 5.5 pounds and about an inch 1.16 inches thick so know that the pulse 15 weighs 5 pounds right and it is also very thin about basically one inch thin overall for the chassis all right so those are the competition laptops that I would say are worth considering and um for right now like today if I was buying a laptop under 1500 those are the laptops I would consider this pulse 15 is I think gonna be one of the staple buys at around the 1500 price point for the rest of this year and could be the laptop a choice for a lot of people so uh that's why I'm super excited to review it and I can't wait to keep going so let's go ahead and dive into the unboxing now we're ready to go ahead and start taking this thing out of the box and seeing how nice it is all right so uh on the outside you can see we've got the MSI logo we've got a bit of info about the laptop um and then this box came shipped in another box if you buy this from Newegg so it's very safe um basically it's a triple box system for the laptop I like seeing that um oh that was loud okay so here's the uh pulse here's the pulse 15 box in this box uh is actually probably not quite as fancy as the cyborg 15 box uh but I'm okay with that I'm okay with a simple box solution as long as uh you know I mean at least it has a cool like printed design on it right so that's that's good anyway um let's go ahead and get this thing open voila okay so let me go and get the camera focused so the laptop comes uh wrapped in plastic now I did of course take this laptop out of the box yesterday when it came in the mail and installed all the drivers and off Windows updates and all of that so we're gonna I don't think I'm gonna put that there that's kind of sliding off um yeah I'm just gonna put on my lap for right now all right so inside of here we have our power cable and you can see it is also wrapped in plastic now it was wrapped in a tie it had a little uh metal tie on it um and I did actually wrap it up and put the tie on it but apparently I didn't twist it enough times so it came apart I try to make this look exactly as it was when I unboxed it right so the power cable itself is about six feet long for this side of the power cable which is nice uh and then so it's a nice good reach length with you know Wise or whatever um inside of here we have our power adapter cable all right sorry our power adapter and this is a chicone 240 Watts all right so a chicone 240 watt suit you know already this guy is going to be able to supply the juice of a high TDP laptop compared to some of the other budget systems we've been testing like the cyborg 15 and the gigabyte G5 those were only like 100 like 120 I think watt power adapters or something or 140 watt they were very low wattage so there's nothing else here uh we just have our little manual with the quick start guide which I'm going to bust this open and so we can see inside yeah yeah okay uh so we got our quick let me go ahead and get this positioned correctly so we can see a little better all right so we got our quick guide this guy I think this is the English side yeah there's the English side all right so this just tells you what the ports are and what to do uh for different LED statuses uh what type of Port it is USB 3.2 gen 1 HDMI all of that um essentially the only thing you really need to know about the laptop is make sure you plug it in before you start turning it on now they also have a helpline for MSI 188447-6564 hours a day Monday through Friday they are closed on weekends and holidays interesting that they're closed on weekends so hopefully you don't break down it uh at a bad time but at least it's at least it's like open 24 hours on the weekdays because a lot of support lines close um you know after like six o'clock all right so um thank you for supporting MSI scan and get benefits Now scan for more details um yeah I'm not sure I guess this is just to register your product I don't know what benefits you're getting maybe like a game code or something I I'm not sure what the benefits are if there are any that are really worth mentioning okay so uh next up we have the laptop let's open this guy up and I know there's a keyboard cover so we're going to take the keyboard cover off and there's the keyboard itself all right so that's all of the materials that are worth unboxing nothing too special with the inbox nice and simple packaging overall I'm gonna need two hands to be able to put this thing down there we go beautiful all right so let's take a quick look at the laptop itself all right so as you can see this is a metal top lid this is going to be a little bit higher quality top lid than some of the more budgety laptops that are all plastic so that's a nice texture and nice feeling I guess gives you a little more premium-ness than some of the competition laptops out there um inside here you can tell it is a plastic chassis and this keyboard is the exact same layout as the MSI gt77 Titan so you get the same number pad layout you get the same arrow keys with a Crosshair on the down arrow and Max fan mode on the up Arrow pause and play on the left Arrow we're gonna go over we're gonna go over all the keyboard functionalities another thing you can note is that the keyboard feels pretty dang good when I was typing on it for a more budgety keyboard it feels pretty good it's a membrane keyboard it's nothing too special it's still more of a budgety keyboard I think and at 1500 I kind of wish it had a better keyboard but I think this is gonna suffice for most people and you're gonna be able to type on this pretty well now the touchpad here is a smaller than average touchpad that is one downside um and I believe this is a plastic touch pad so something like this at first g16 has a glass touch pad you still get a plastic touch pad on this guy and it did work fine for me when I was using it um to set up Windows and everything and it doesn't feel too bad it's just smaller so you don't have quite as much wiggle room um you know and to move your fingers around or to do bigger three or four finger gestures you're gonna have to be a little more precise with it because you're going to run into the edge a little bit more often you can also see that because this is a 16 by uh see if I get the camera Focus there we go you can see that we've got a 16 by nine aspect ratio display and that does mean that we have a bit more of a bottom chin to this laptop all right so uh compare that to like the zephyrus g16 where you don't have the bottom chin because it's a 16 by 10 display that's a very important aspect of buying this laptop you're you're giving up certain things to get a nicer display in a cheaper price point um essentially that's the trade-offs you're deciding to make when you're getting this laptop now going around the laptop you can see the ports now notice that this this port see if I can get the light to shine down into the port here a little better um and so notice that that Port right there is a black Port versus a blue port and that is probably only a USB 2.0 I can go ahead and check let's go ahead and pop over the tech specs on the MSI pulse 15 and we can see we do indeed only have one USB 2.0 the other two USBS are 3.2 gen ones all right so that's nice and we do have a USB type c but note that it is not a thunderbolt 4 okay so that's important to note this is not a number not Thunderbolt 4 but the HDMI is a 2.1 which is really nice to see and we have Intel Wi-Fi 6 not Wi-Fi 6E and it's Bluetooth 5.2 so there's another couple trade-offs right there all right 90 watt hour battery at least according to this we're going to double check the watt hour battery when we actually open the bottom of the laptop up okay so we have one slower USB a one fast 3.2 gen 1. on the rear of the device we have no ports it's just two fan exhausts we also have another big fan exhaust over here on the right okay so it's you can see it's a double-sided fan exhaust and then on the right side we have a headset Port USB a 3.2 and a USB C 3.2 and then an HDMI 2.1 and a upward facing ethernet port so you can easily take on unplug and replug the ethernet port I love that um okay and I'm not sure if this logo lights up or anything special it does have a plastic cover on it I'm guessing it does not have RGB lighting does it have a plastic cover on it it feels like it has a plastic cover okay uh what's up everyone foreign turbo man wants to know why is there so little gains for the 40 50 40 70 gpus once you pass 105 Watts um I think the important thing to keep in mind with the the wattage claims by Nvidia is that just because they claim a laptop can go up to 140 watts does not mean that it actually is going to 140 Watts like it may be only going to 105. um in realistic workloads because it's splitting the power to the CPU and GPU so I want to see true 140 watt poles inside of the gameplay uh I'm pretty sure there is a plastic thing on there I should probably grab my plastic tools or you know my tools to get it off because it's not coming up right there um anyway so uh flipping it upside down now so you can see the bottom we've got this nice crisscross pattern I think this looks actually kind of cool um we do have a number of air intakes like air intake air intake air intake air intake air intake like some of these are air intakes and some of them are not and you can't really tell unless I flip it upwards and now you can tell when you look inside there so you can see those copper heat pipes for the high power components on the inside so it's kind of a nice touch that you can see inside the laptop like that now um let's go ahead and grab the tool kit and start taking this guy apart you do nice back of the head shot uh Robbie says are you gonna review the other zephyrus g16 with the 4070 and QHD I9 CPU uh yeah I I would like to review that one as well but uh we'll have to see timing wise because I already did a review on the other one um I think I think I would enjoy reviewing that one as well the the more expensive version it would be a great example of like RTX 4060 versus 4070 performance too so there's four screws along the top and notice that this is just Phillip head screws okay but you are going to want a magnetic head on your screwdriver and there is a factory warranty sticker thing here which is essentially pointless but if MSI tries to say they don't cover your warranty um I believe as far as I know it's illegal for them to not cover your warranty just because the sticker is um changed I mean I'm not a lawyer but I'm pretty sure that's the rule uh if you just because you broke the sticker doesn't mean they void your warranty if it looks like you actually did damage to the motherboard or internals because of mishaps and there's evidence of that then they can void your warranty but not just from the sticker being busted because you know any any old thing can break the sticker too okay so notice that some of these it's very important to note that some of these screws are small little screws okay and if you were to try to put this big screw through the small little screw hole and then you were to force it you'll literally like drill a hole through your chassis or motherboard so uh you're going to want to be careful not to accidentally put the screw in the wrong way or in the wrong hole you know correct screws correct hole I guess it's the what you want to do um so I've always it's always a good life skill to be able to put things in the right hole I wonder if my girlfriend heard that uh sailor Salem says Gizmo got any Phoenix laptops coming soon uh I don't currently have any Phoenix laptops but I am going to start um asking manufacturers to send me one as soon as they come out JY says huh britellin what's up welcome man um someone was asking about odor I'm not smelling any odor on this laptop at least let's hear Adit says to be honest not worth it worth 1500 for this I'd rather get I'd rather add like 500 more and get a premium Asus laptop with 4070 just waiting for the prices to be announced uh that that's totally a fair um like choice if you wanted to do that there's definitely more premium options out there I think this is going to be more for the person that has like this uh desirable for a premium quality display and they really want a 4 000 series laptop um okay so there's another short screw right there so you get like two randomly short screws so far um and I think I got all the screws out now let me just stand up to verify all right beautiful all right so into the am got this shirt from into the am they've got a lot of cool and colorful shirts um and there's a link in the description down below if you want to check them out I actually kind of want to show you guys uh the into the am shirts real quick just like like 10 seconds uh let me just get it pulled up so in the video description down below there's a link in here into the am this gives you 10 off of anything you buy from into the am but I just love the cut uh of the t-shirts and like the designs are really cool I actually just ordered a bunch more designs today like I got this mixtape one um I got this meta Beach I got this Abyss tea and uh the other big thing about into the am let's hear do they have it that's loud probably we don't need to do that I was gonna do uh I just want to show you basic teas I think should have it so I got some basic t-shirts today too but the cut on the shirts I think are what's really good so the other brands are like oftentimes have lots of extra bagginess which maybe some people will like that but I like having more of a cut like this where it's kind of a little bit bigger around the chest area but then it kind of gets smaller on the sleeves and around the waist a little bit so it kind of depends on the kind of cut you want but I really like the fabric and the quality of the actual t-shirts they're really really good okay so anyway so this is an this is one of the into the am shirts that I've had for about two to three years now and it's been awesome I've really enjoyed wearing it it's one of my favorite shirts um anyway because they got they got a lot of Spacey type of shirts too which I love space stuff um my screws are getting knocked around all right so I'm grabbing I'm grabbing the uh the pry tools here oh and if you do use the into the am link it does help support me as a content creator but today I did go buy into the am shirts with my own money so just to show you like like that shows you that I do actually really like the shirts and the products okay so I got it to start coming up over here on the right side there we go and it looks like this is another one of those MSI laptops where the rear of the laptop lip does go over the top of the back you can kind of see it right like this goes up over to here and so the pry point I believe the pry point on this part is going to be down below over here uh and does that also mean they may have a cover here I accidentally popped this back together there we go all right so I got the back up you really probably want to start with the back and then you go all the way around from one side to keep going around that's looking good it's a little tricky getting it to pop out on some of these there we go voila so now we have it completely popped out there is a link in the description to the tool kit I use as well all right so let's go and get the camera set up for a nice reveal of the internals how much watts is this 4060 it's supposed to be rated at 140 Watts we'll actually see what it gets to in the actual um gameplay today I'm not sure all right uh wow this is I I'm pretty sure this is different internals than the katana 15. um at least somewhat interesting Okay so we've got a 90 watt hour battery along the bottom here let me zoom in a little more so we got a 90 watt hour battery we've got speakers on the left and right side downward firing we've got a micron one terabyte SSD and there is also there is also some thermal padding underneath the SSD we got the battery connector right here if you need to if you want to test uh change stuff out on the motherboard you would want to change that here um one thing that I am noticing is that the m.2 slot there is an m.2 on the board here but because of this battery being where it is there's going to be no way to upgrade to that slot so basically the battery would have to be shorter if you wanted to upgrade the m.2 slot here um I'm gonna go ahead and just pop the memory out here this is our memory that we've got so we've got SK hynix ddr5 5600 1rx 16. so it is 5600 memory and it's going to be two eight gig sticks which is interesting it's an interesting choice for the memory all right and then let's check out the Wi-Fi module one thing that's definitely disappointing to me is that we don't have a second m.2 slot at least out of the gate here all right so we have an Intel ax 201 for our Wi-Fi module here and we got our little antenna plugins right here those look like nice and securely connected um overall overall upgrade ability on this is pretty minimal you obviously have your two sodium slots they're easy to access I like that part if you're going to want to upgrade the SSD size though you're going to have to actually you know uh buy a larger SSD like a two terabyte or four terabyte or eight terabyte SSD and there's definitely going to be room for a double-sided SSD here if you want to put an eight terabyte SSD now uh rip single Channel uh this is dual Channel memory uh JY but it's not uh dual rank I believe that's what you're talking about uh we'll have to see how the actual performance goes though it's interesting that that uh MSI claims only 5200 Mega transfers on the RAM and yet it is 5600 rank uh or speed Ram so it's interesting that they're choosing to down clock the ramp speed uh Mars says it is worth a hundred dollars extra if it is full power uh yeah maybe let's see here chicken fried Corgi says yeah I think the 40 70 might be worth 100 extra not sure reviews are mixed it depends on which laptop you're comparing it with um okay I think you're talking about the legion five yeah the legion five um the thing is I don't know if it's actually going to be full 140 Watt on any of the RTX 4060 laptops this year we'll have to see um anyway so let's go ahead and let's go ahead and evaluate the thermal design of this laptop next so uh you can see we've got this big metal pads this is going to go over the vrms on the GPU the CPU has a dedicated heat pipe right here notice that we got this other heat pipe right here this heat pipe is going to connect to the other heat pipes and ensure that basically heat is being transferred out through these other heat pipes right so it's kind of like a heat transfer heat pipe which is an interesting design we've got four shared heat pipes between the CPU and GPU I mean essentially this fifth heat pipe is like another shared heat pipe because it does affect the CPU vrms over here and essentially what that's going to do is as if you're doing a CPU only load you're going to have all four of these being shared and then this one would transfer heat from the vrms over to these other pipes as well it's an interesting thermal design we've got a little bit smaller fan on the this side over here and a bigger fan over here on the right side and notice that there is a dual exhaust over here on the right side and only a single fan exhaust on the left so that's going to kind of reduce the thermal capability of the machine not having four fan exhausts um and I gotta say the port selection on this laptop is also pretty minimal and I really wish there was a thunderbolt 4 port instead of USBC but I guess they wanted to save some money on that front um the other thing is I really wish there was a second m.2 slot because I know some people are going to really want to have uh the second slot to put another m.2 in anyway so that's the internals uh let's go ahead and quickly before we close this up I want to see what did the internals look like on the katana 15 and what are the key differences so uh let me pull that up all right so here is the katana 15 and you can see how similar our thermal design is as well as the motherboard design you can see that we have the m.2 slot like kind of semi-open over here it's not quite actually open there's no place to mount an m.2 inside of here um so it's the same situation but you get a smaller battery on the katana the thermal solution looks essentially identical almost identical not quite like I guess some of these pipes are shared a little bit differently between these um between here you can see there's like yeah the way that the way the pipes are laid out is a little bit different um and then the battery size on the pulse 15 is quite a bit bigger as well so there's there's quite a few differences between the katana and the pulse but you can tell it's like a slightly very uh slightly changed up version of it it's almost the same exact laptop um on the internals just a little bit different okay so uh let's go ahead and package this guy back up and let's get it started so we can get in some benchmarks and display testing and all of that so uh first up we're gonna pop the back row back together that's always the first step and then we're gonna go around the side interesting it's like the when I popped the back in it was like this side also just went ahead and popped right in I didn't have to work at that at all interesting there it goes yeah it's it's like it's it's pretty easy to get them to come together without actually popping together so and this is not actually popped together over here that's interesting I'm guessing it'll be fine if we just screw it in like this but it's it's it's never ideal because you if you don't get it if you don't get it to fully reseal like this um let me see if I can zoom in and show you um if you don't get it to fully reseal then what happens is sometimes you get creaks in the chassis like when you press your thumb or your wrist on the wrist rest and stuff um but I'm guessing with screws in here it's going to be fine but yeah it feels like the so the front feels like it got popped together I would just encourage MSI to redesign how this thing pops together and apart because you want it to feel like solid when you pop it in together and then when you take it apart it should be easy to pop apart and have good feedback it's like oh yeah the laptop's now apart you know see like that I'm getting it to come together but then it's not really coming together there we go so I'm having to push I'm having to push on the bottom kind of like to push it inside so it gets into the lip to for it to snap together properly yeah okay I think we got it together now it's not creaking anymore okay I feel much better about that but I just know that like like if these were the two bottoms you would need to push on the bottom of the panel itself to get its kind of snap in and go under um all right so we're gonna go ahead and do that time to screw this back together okay Mr Alexander says I'd prefer a high power 4060 over a low power 4070. it would just depend on how low power we're talking because these RTX 4000 cards are definitely pretty power efficient um and they don't get as money as many gains on the high end but like you'd at least want a medium power uh to get most of the way up there in terms of Maximum performance uh far Mania says I have a strix 4060 and it's 140 watt but it actually tends to knock over 120. in most benchmarks that I run yeah that's the thing I keep hearing and what I found also in the Nitro 5 uh it's supposed to be a 140 watt RTX 4050 but I was only seeing 105 Watts which is obviously a lot less right than what it's technically rated um I think we saw maybe 110 but we never saw even over 110 certainly never over 120 or 130 or ever got close to the 140 Mark in any way so I think these wattage ratings that these manufacturers are giving us now are just not very accurate and the only way to really tell what the wattage ratings are going to be is going to be actually running benchmarks and tests and seeing what you get in most of the in most of the gameplay right like a very CPU bound game you'll probably get a bit less on the GPU because you know needs the CPU system or the cooling system needs to like balance between CPU and GPU a little more so the GPU cannot boost as high but then once the once you're in a game that's very GPU bound you're hoping to get at least close to Peak wattage you know in a game like God of War or you know there's lots of titles out there that you should be able to theoretically play with no problem all right so let's go and turn the system on so you can see it flashed yellow and then the backlight comes on and that backlight looks pretty dang good I think the backlight looks better than most it's got a four Zone RGB backlight and by default it does this like rainbow wave pattern that I think looks pretty dang good let me go and turn my lights off so you can see the backlight a little better and we'll go over the keyboard functionality as well so so there's the keyboard um and I gotta say you know the keyboard does feel pretty good for a budgety keyboard um I think that the if you're let me go and switch this real quick put the there we go all right so um overall the keyboard has good functionality except the number pad I think is scrunched in a bit you know ideally you want the number pad to be more full size and to have the standard layout so you can inherently type automatically you'll have to relearn a little bit of your uh keyboard memory if you're used to a normal number pad but at least the the 789 these numbers are similarly spaced to how they normally are the enter key being so low may be very odd for some people though um the wasd keys so let's focus on the actual key functionalities here the wasd are they are clear translucent keys and they do light up to be much more colorful than the other Keys like the enf key if we look at the top uh you can see the extra functionality we have volume we have mute volume volume down up turn track pad off mic mute webcam enable disable backlight key button I'm not sure what the F7 does I think that's the MSI Center actually let me see F7 oh that's your fan profile button okay so um let me show you so if you press F7 if you do FN plus F7 then you can change between the different fan profiles without having to open MSI Center so you've got balance mode silent mode battery mode and then AI mode and then Extreme Performance mode so that's kind of cool I actually didn't know that that was the key for that so moving along the top here you've got your f8 key being your keyboard backlight brightness so you can change how bright the keyboard is and then you have your display brightness down and up and then you have your external monitor button all right and going over to the number pad area so we have our multiplication divide plus minus num lock button with an extra light up illumination we've got the numbers obviously the enter key being on the bottom right another entity key here so you can use either one and then our arrow keys have some special functionalities as well in addition to being their own unique design with more translucent up and down portions you can hold the FN pause play turn on Crosshair turn off Crosshair enable Max fan mode is the up arrow button and then disable display I believe or maybe log out yeah that's the I pressed it and the screen went black I pressed it again and nothing's coming back I don't know if that's what the device to sleep maybe that might also be device sleep button um okay so there's the display uh I'm guessing I don't know interesting all right so what we have all the lights turned off let's go ahead and do our screen backlight test and I'm gonna so there's the display and I I'm guessing you can tell already with the camera that it's a very colorful display all right so I have all the lights behind me turned off now except for a couple RGB lights but those are a little bit harder to turn off and on so we're gonna load up an all black image to look at our backlight bleed and there it is so let me zoom out just a little so you can see it all there we go all right so I have uh we definitely have some noticeable backlight bleed in the top left of my unit just about everywhere else though is just about perfect very minimal black light bleed in the left and right Corners just a little in the top right but mainly right here and right here we have a bit of backlight bleed that might be a little noticeable in certain situations of course backlight bleed is going to vary from unit to unit so it's going to can't really rely on it um so I'm gonna get the lights back on all right and we're gonna go ahead and load up our spider 5 Elite and we're gonna do our test I gotta go ahead and get the laptop plugged in beautiful I gotta get the uh I'm gonna type in the code here real quick all right checking King Dragon says uh have you heard about the Rog Ally it's gonna be 30 faster than the steam deck I have not heard about that yet certainly sounds intriguing um I think the I think the steam deck's really cool I think the nice thing about the steam deck really is the ergonomics and the in the steam integration functionality though so I think it's going to be hard to compete against the steam deck unless you're just much faster you know like like if it's only 30 faster that's really not gonna let you play games that much better you know um and realistically if it's so I I'd be interested to check it out but I'm sure it has potential you'd probably be play you can probably use steam just just like the steam deck but it's going to be not quite as integrated as seamlessly would be my guess all right there we go and now I'm typing it in I used the number pad just a little bit for funsies and it works fine okay uh what is the TDP on this 4060 it's supposed to be 140 watts and I can show you right here now just because it's supposed to be 140 Watts that to me that doesn't mean that it actually runs at 140 Watts what matters to me far more is that it actually can pull that wattage in a in a GPU bound game so inside of here you can see that uh it does indeed say maximum Graphics power is 140 Watts but like I said that doesn't necessarily matter if it's like it's it's really whatever the realistic wattage pull is in games so because if the thermal solution is not actually capable of keeping everything cool and powering it up to 140 Watts or maybe maybe it's a problem with Nvidia too maybe Nvidia claims 140 Watts but that's actually it actually never goes to that level of wattage and that's the problem with Nvidia and their designs in my opinion or they should in my opinion they should really should run a test similar to like time spy and whatever the maximum wattage it actually hits pretty consistently throughout the test that's what the wattage on the GPU should be that's the way I that's the way I evaluate it or something similar to that right if you were to try to do a wattage calculation then do it other ways you're going to end up with all kinds of mixed results um so okay so we're at 100 brightness and I want to see two all right here we go let's see what we get for our this is a color gamut test so it's going to flash all kinds of different colors okay so Sam says the temps on the G Series this year are so good they're they are pretty good yeah I talk about the zephyrus G Series or the strict G6 they're both G Series technically um Mr Alexander says I'm still looking for a good Arrow 16 review um I am talking to Orris and trying to get them to send me the aorus 15x and then the arrow uh 14 and 16. I do want to see I do want to I would totally review both of those so it's just going to be a matter of time you know I can only do so many laptops like one a day is my Max but realistically it's probably more like one every other day because there's so much prep that goes into each of these videos uh PC dude says they might have more sensitive components such as tensor cores where if you push the power you could fry the thing well the well if that's the case and it can't actually go to 140 Watts they should not advertise it as 140 Watts so you know what I mean so it's really it's really comes down to like it's more of an advertising issue rather than a functionality issue like if it only goes to 105 Watts then let's just mark it at 105. if it goes to 140 then yeah like we can it's fair to call it 140. um Brian says what would be better the Asus g16 with 4050 or with one terabyte or the 4060 version with only 512. dude I would buy the 4060 version for sure Brian because it comes with eight gigs of vram that's probably the biggest upgrade between the 40 50 and 4060 um plus it's a more powerful GPU but more importantly the 8 gigs of vram will let the GPU be more future proof um with the 4050 only having uh six gigs of vram you're going to run into vram limitations sooner even in certain titles like Hogwarts right now you're going to run into vram limitations that might prevent textures from loading into the game in certain games which is terrible on a brand new laptop but that's the reality for a lot of laptops nowadays if you bought an RTX 3060 3050 3050 TI all of those have six gigs of vram or less so you're going to have the same exact problem across the whole budget range of CPU gaming or you know laptop gaming so but that said most like 99 of the games are still going to work fine on six gigs of vrams so it's really going to be select titles but I think the likelihood of more and more games being vram um demanding is going to keep going up and up and up so all right so as always I'd give you the the caveat of um my spider 5 Elite that I have here is not as color um it usually underestimates the color gamut on laptop displays and I test them compared to what other testing tools from other you know other reviewers use and so know that this is probably an underestimation of the actual display quality all right so I'm not sure how does that look yeah okay you can read it so we got 100 of an srgb coverage phenomenal 91 of adobe RGB and 88 of the P3 color gamut that's excellent for a 1500 laptop that's pretty rare to see this level of color gamut uh usually you don't get that colorful of a display now going into the brightness we got 16.9 nits on the low end with 16 850 to 1 on the contrast ratio uh obviously the conscious ratio on the low end doesn't really matter that much what matters is the brightness as you go to the to the to the peak and we got 336.8 nits brightness so 337 with 790 to 1 contrast ratio now the contrast ratio could definitely be a bit better um at 790 to 1 I would think that we would actually get a little bit better um contrast ratio I would hope we would have better conscious ratio but we didn't anyway 790 is still okay-ish we've seen some laptops with lower 600s or 700s so this is still better than some but I prefer over a thousand um it gives the gives the image on the laptop a more Punchy feel and obviously the higher the contrast the better so you know many LEDs have like a million like a thousand a hundred thousand to one um okay so anyway overall the display quality phenomenal for a 1500 laptop this is great all right this is this is very very good um obviously it doesn't get much more colorful at 88 of the P3 91 of the Adobe RGB when factoring in my uh my testing tool this is close to 100 Adobe and P3 color gamut coverage that's phenomenal and then the brightness and contrast it's 337 nits that's beyond the 300 nit uh minimum that I or not minimum but ideal minimum 300 nits is kind of the entry level to where you're getting into the more premium displays and and to me like if you're in brighter environments you really want to get 300 nits so this being 337 nits is is great like it's not as good as the best displays the best displays this year are like a thousand nits in the mini LEDs but you're gonna have to go to like 3 000 bucks typically to get most mini LED laptops maybe even four or five thousand dollars for the more expensive ones so um this is very competitive with a lot of laptop displays in the 2000 to 3 000 range and even is more colorful than many laptops in the 3000 dollar range so that's phenomenal TS with the 10 uh 10 euro Super Chat thanks so much man I appreciate it he says hi I'm considering the scar 16 with mini LED do you know if the HDR black screen problem is gone and did you hear any screen noise so I I'm not sure about the HDR black screen problem being gone but I did talk to Asus about that and they said that they were uh the reason it happened is because I was not using their driver that they had made some slight modifications to um and that the new NVIDIA drivers should include the modifications to make the HDR work no problem so uh it should be just a driver issue that fixes that so you should be good to go on that in theory I haven't verified that but that's what they said uh also does the single zone multi-zone dimmiting toggle work well I didn't test that and in at length so I'm not entirely sure all right uh good diamond YouTube says Gizmo slip Tech are links allowed in chat no scam link just paying link to pay me please paying link to pay me because I'm not uh I believe there's no links allowed in chat uh Diamond like the chat usually literally like the chat just doesn't allow it filters it out um okay says should I get an I9 12900h with RTX 360 or a ryzen 95900 with a 3080. I would go with well the 12900h is going to be a lot faster CPU it really depends on what you need if you need GPU performance or CPU performance but the 3080 is a much better GPU and I would probably go with the ryzen with a 3080 if you're between those two laptops that's a better choice I think okay so awesome we are done with that test uh let's move on to our CPU testing and so to do our CPU test we're going to raise the back of the laptop up just a little bit and they put the spider 5 Elite Away and while we're doing our 10 minute test also I'll be able to read chat a lot so if you have a lot of questions please feel free to ask them coming up here in a minute so we're going to get processed lasso installed and Cinemax R23 let's go ahead and load that up and we're going to open HW info 64. all right and beautiful um would you suggest this laptop over the scar 15 30 80. um there's a lot of trade-offs between the scar 15 30 80. I did talk about some of them earlier but uh the big thing is this laptop has a better display than that scar 15 3080 because that's only a full HD display so if you want a higher resolution higher color gamut display this is going to be a better display but the scar 15 is a bit more premium in its RGB lighting the build quality is a bit better and so there's going to be a lot of trade-offs going back and forth between the scar 15 and this system and then obviously this is RTX 4000 series so the 4000 series is going to outperform the 3080 in-frame generation games so if you plan on playing mainly single player games and you want a higher quality display the pulse 15 is going to be the better option almost for sure uh at least in terms of future proofing for frame generation but not for vram because the scar 16 has more vram than this so it's going to vary a lot depending on which what your focus is um but if it was if it was my money I'd probably go scar 15 probably but I don't anticipate that scar 15 to be on sale permanently at that price point it's probably going to go away and then not be available for any more for 1500 like you know it's going to go up to like 17 1800 again so you'd only be able to snake if only if you can snake it at the price that I talked about okay so we're gonna do uh cooler boost enabled so there's the fan starting to go at maximum plus you know we haven't done all of our testing yet we haven't tested the speakers on this yet we obviously haven't tested our performance um but you know the ports the ports on that scar 15 are also a little bit better so all right so this is the MSI Center this lets you select your fan profile and this laptop does have a mux switch which means that you can bypass the integrated Graphics to get better GPU performance by running on discrete graphics mode only so we're going to be testing today in discrete graphics mode only and we're all going to be on Extreme Performance with cooler booster on which means we're gonna have maximum fans now inside of here you can also set your own custom fan profiles if you want to balance your fan noise with your performance you also have GPU overclocking baked into the MSI Center but it's not very detailed overclocking and it limits you on how far you can overclock so I would usually overclock with MSI afterburner either way so I'm going to open up afterburner as well because we're going to need that actually I can close that for now because we don't we're just doing CPU testing first and then we're going to do GPU testing so in Extreme Performance mode with maximum fans enabled is how we're going to test today uh if you go to features and general settings here is where you can turn on and off a number of extra things like you can disable the webcam if you don't want the webcam on um display overdrive which increases the response rate of the display you've got your GPU switch here but we can do that in the performance mode as well you also have the Crosshair you can turn off and on and you can also change the settings on the Crosshair if you want to move it a little bit left and right and also change the color of it so let's see if we can get the Crosshair to appear real quick I'm not seeing the Crosshair come up oh there it is okay so that's what the Crosshair looks like you can change the color to be different colors and um you can reset the location as well so we can turn it off and on with the hotkey the FN plus down arrow or um enable disable it basically so we can also enable or disable the Windows key and the FN you can switch the FN and Windows key to be in different spots if you're not used to that um or if you just want the FN to be on the left side you can make it make it do that and you can also change the functionality of the power button to make it go to sleep or hibernate when you press the power button and the USB Power share button here this allows you to keep the USB port activated when the display or sorry when your laptop is asleep so if you want to charge your phone and not have the laptop running like say you're at the airport and your phone's dying you could plug in your phone and keep your laptop asleep and not using as much juice you also have HDR mode here I don't think that is this I don't think this is an HDR display but let's see can we do HDR HDR video streaming is supported this display can play streaming HDR video when available let's go ahead and turn it on so now we have HDR streaming video streaming um enabled and I suppose we could test that real quick and just see how this display looks with the HDR video all right and this is the video I like to play we've got the display situated a little bit better cool so you can see this display is awesomely colorful and it looks it looks really good I mean it's hard to it would be hard to complain about the colors on this display it's just not going to be quite as bright or as contrasty as the more expensive laptop displays and yeah this is still going to be very very good uh Diamond it usually does not let you post in comments either for links that's just the way YouTube is these days it like the spam blockers do that uh let's hear okay can you deactivate the GPU and CPU wattage sharing thing so um we inside of here inside of user scenario you can deactivate the GPU we could do integrated Graphics mode uh but let me let me just do a quick test okay I want to test when we load the CPU what's our performance and also what's our wattage so let me go to a not 10 minute test all right and we could try the integrated mode all right so our wattage is 125 watts it was pulling 125 watts there now it's saying only 44 Watts but you got to keep in mind the HW info is lagging behind when we're running process lasso so it's not going to be as accurate of data it's the only downside about using process lasso for my testing but processed lasso basically makes the cinebench take the priority uh Diamond if you're wanting to email me uh or if you wanna if you want to send me a link the best way to do it is by emailing me I'm not sure what you're trying to send me though uh Kristen says when is the stealth stealth Studio new CPA GPU review coming out uh it's gonna be a while probably uh it's not a laptop that I highly recommend so it's not a one I'm gonna prioritize okay so we ended up getting 12 088. interesting um very interesting that basically it went to 125 watts and then it down clocked so right now it's starting at 4.7 on the P cores 3.6 on the e-course it's doing 75 Watts there and now it's dropping down to only 43 Watts look at our temperatures only 51 degrees on the course 53 on the package you know what I think we may need to update the BIOS given this performance level [Music] yeah so I'm going to go ahead and show you how to update the BIOS on this guy uh and it's going to be one of the things about this laptop that you're gonna have to deal with if you're getting an MSI laptop it's me Jay changed my YouTube channel name and it's not a scam by the way but the way it's like a step app looks okay uh sorry Diamond feel free to email me if you if you have like something you're interested in me sharing or something but uh yeah just know that I usually am pretty picky about the links that I share all right so MSI pulse 15 uh I believe it's B third team I don't know let's hear let's just go 40 16. and so we need to go to msi's website we're going to go to these the support page we're gonna see if there's a bios update available oh I did mean to upgrade this uh before we did this but [Music] um I just didn't have time and I figured it would also be a good thing for me to test but like live and I can show you the BIOS as well like if we if we download this and the BIOS is not uh does not need to be upgraded then it doesn't really matter right and we can just I can just show you the BIOS and we keep moving um but either way so what you do if you want to upgrade the MSI bios you go to their website you go to your you just search I usually search on Google the name of the web uh name of the laptop MSI support page I go to the page I go to I go to the driver section I go to drivers and downloads and I click the BIOS and then here's the BIOS you can see it was released on March 22nd so this may already have the latest bios because that's not very recent um and then I copy that onto a flash drive so I got a flash drive right here I went ahead and copied it onto it already so now that we've done that we can go ahead and shut down the laptop and also when we do this I'm gonna go ahead and switch us to integrated Graphics mode so for our CPU test what this does is it shuts down the discrete GPU and it that that in theory could allow the CPU to potentially boost to the mass uh uh to the could potentially make the CPU have a higher power limit sorry when you go into the integrated Graphics mode only that's what happened with the uh MSI gt77 Titan okay so uh I believe it's going to be F2 but we might have to restart a couple times as we try to figure out which button it is I'm going to try to get the exact button F2 I don't think it's gonna go it's probably something else it's probably the delete key yeah so it's not F2 we're gonna go and shut down the laptop again all right pressing the delete key there we go all right so we're into the BIOS now and if you're wanting to up update the BIOS usually it's on this section but it's not I don't think uh and I think we had bios 108 I think we're seeing 106. BIOS version is 106. from January 3rd so yeah we do need to update the BIOS and right here we're going to go down to UEFI bios update all right we're going to go ahead and select our I believe it's the top one here and then we're going to select the BIOS file 108.108 right here you got to make sure you select the right file here you press OK and then it says it's going to open the BIOS image and update confirm click yes I'm going to turn down the this display right now so you can read this text a little better hopefully um okay in BIOS updating system will power off then power on automatically we're gonna press OK and it's going to grab the BIOS file off of the flash drive so that we can update the the basically it's the firmware that runs the laptop that's what the BIOS is okay so we then click proceed with Flash update and MSI requires you to use a USB stick for this that's a downside um you know most most laptops uh these days are using like Windows update or some kind of software updating tool to to install updated bios is um and MSI is still using flash drives which there's advantages and disadvantages other companies are still using flash drives as well um some of them but most of them are still now moved to Windows update so it's one of the cons of this laptop and I guess in some ways it's also a pro in that like with Asus laptops maybe you didn't want the latest bios update to actually update uh and it went ahead and did it automatically with Windows update against your will you know in a sense you know um at least with MSI it's all manually done so you know for sure when it happens and and yeah uh Chris Christian Fernando says for the price this is okay um diamond YouTube it's on my about page but it's just gizmoslip gmail.com uh do you think the future bios updates will increase GPU wattages uh I don't think so but maybe it depends on the uh depends on the laptop but at least we're gonna have the latest bios for all of our benchmarks and testing today we have seen we have seen bios affect things so um Raul says are you gonna be reviewing the Asus strix g16 4060 uh for 13.99 yes I will be doing that one that's going to be one of my high priority laptops I'm gonna try to do that one by the end of this month uh Maddie says I have a question how was your crypto mining on the laptop did it die uh no I had I was able to crypto mine on a lot of the laptops no problem I just ended up selling my house and so I had to sell all those laptops that I was crypto mining with but I never had crypto mining as far as I know damage anything or cause any problems I ended up I don't know uh crypto mining a decent chunk and then I was able to sell those laptops and I told everyone that they had been crypto mine done before I sold them too so um but yeah I had to sell them a little bit under the price that I probably would have gotten otherwise anyway uh Frank says bios updates from gigabyte lowered GPU power on some laptops uh it might on some laptops okay I'm just gonna type that in uh typically speaking uh bios updates are used to fix problems and if if it if updating the BIOS ended up lowering the wattage on some GPU is probably because the manufacturer discovered that the GPU was or like the wattage was too high and it may have been damaging some of the laptops so anytime they change make an update like that it's usually for a very specific purpose and reason Okay so we are ready to launch our Cinemax R23 again now that we've updated the BIOS and now that we are in integrated GPU only mode let's see what we get so we're going to go to Extreme Performance uh well looks like the BIOS looks like the BIOS actually reset our system so that we didn't go to integrated GPU only mode so we're going to restart the system again skimboard any update on if you have FPS improved with graphic drivers for the scar 18 I have done a test on the scar 16 and the scar 16 is basically the same thing as the scarier team you should be able to get the exact same performance and we had some slight improvements on the scar 16 versus the scar 18 in some of the games but for the most part in the most of the games the tested almost exactly the same within one or two FPS or a handful of FPS for the most of them okay beautiful all right it's going to exit a couple of applications all right so we're ready to test our CPU once again we are in Extreme Performance mode all right with maximum fans enabled and we're in integrated Graphics only mode let's see what we get so right now we're doing 4.7 gigahertz on the pcores 3.6 on the e-course we're doing 92 118 124 Watts to the CPU that is really good wattage to the CPU let's see if it can maintain 120 something Watts that during this whole test we have reached thermal throttling at 97 degrees so it's it's pushing us all the way up to the maximum um performance that we can get at least with um the temperatures that we have in this chassis right and right now we're doing a 10 minute test so we're going to go right into the 10 minute test that's fine we can let it we can let it keep going and chat if you have any questions please let me know um I will try to check check uh check out chat here all right uh now jived asks hey hey what are their why are there no reviews on the MSI Prestige 16 with the I5 13500h 16 gigs of RAM one terabyte SSD RTX 4050 165 Hertz display it's out in Poland for over a week now um so there's a reason why I'm not doing the prestige because it's a Creator series laptop I believe let me double check but I believe it's a Creator series laptop and that's why I'm not doing it let me see here MSI prestige 15. so oh it's more of a premium style laptop oh right okay so 40 50. see if I can go to the right one here uh looks like PC mag did a review on it in the past but so yeah it's a very premium thin and light system basically I don't know I it's just it's a hard sale for me on these I just don't like I don't like the premise of them from a gaming laptop perspective yeah it looks like these have older this is the older generation version I'm not sure what the new one looks like does MSI have it yeah I mean from a gaming laptop perspective it's just not an ideal laptop you know um okay so taking a look at the the uh MSI pulse we are doing four point three 4.4 gigahertz on the P cores right now 3.2 gigahertz on the e-cores our performance is much better now than when before the BIOS update and when we were in dedicated GPU mode uh now we're doing 90 watts of power we're averaging 83 watts of power so far during this 10 minute test um so it looks like it like goes to about 130 Watts initially and now we're down clocking to 89 Watts for our long power limit and we're no longer being thermal throttled doing 89 85 degrees on the CPU package 79 on the cores and overall our performance is Pretty good overall like for a thin thinner lighter laptop that only weighs 5 pounds this is very good this is a little bit behind what the zephyrus g16 was doing though the g16 with the same CPU I believe was pulling 100 Watts or 99 watts of power so about eight to ten Watts more I guess 15 watts if you look at the averages but it this did pull the same Max wattage as the zephyrus g16 all right going back to chat let's see here uh Peterson R uh hey do you have any plan on doing response time testing with the Nvidia ldat it'd be useful for Esports Gamers to help us charge the quality of the screen much better I agree Peterson I would love to I have uh I'm trying to get one it's basically my response there I'm trying to get my hands on one they uh Nvidia kind of teased me by saying oh we'll send you one and I was like sweet that sounds awesome and then they they didn't so uh if you know a place where I can buy one please shoot me an email link because I would definitely buy one and test it uh Diamond says did you purchase a bunch of laptops on your videos uh uh do you ever do videos oh do you ever do giveaways I mean I have done some giveaways in the past but I don't really focus on giveaways anymore because I want my viewers focusing on the content uh Brian says is Newegg worth purchasing laptops from yeah I think Newegg is a good place to buy laptops it's not as good as like Best Buy in terms of its return policy like Best Buy lets me return after up to like 60 days out now I think or 45 days out it's a really long return policy if you're a total Tech member at Best Buy um if you are not a total Tech member I think it's 15 or 30 days depending on the item but return policy is usually never a problem with Best Buy but with Newegg uh the return policy is still pretty good but it's not as long of a of a return policy I think it's like 15 to 30 days for the return policy on NewEgg but Newegg stands by their product for the most part and it's not a problem um sniper Hawk says how's the laptop been so far I wasn't able to come to the stream earlier so uh so far when we unboxed it we found out that the upgrade ability was not as good um we only have one m.2 slot and we have upgradable Ram though that's good we have two two eight gig ddr5 5600 sticks in this laptop they are HK heinex and then we have a micron one terabyte SSD uh and a 90 watt hour battery which is a very large battery for this price range a lot of laptops in the under 1500 category have smaller batteries um we haven't tested the speakers yet we did a bios update we tested the display 338 nits and super colorful display so the display is awesome but when we get done testing the CPU we're going to do our speaker test and our webcam test so that's the plan right now when is the Acer Helio 16 review I'm not sure yet whenever it launches in the United States and I can buy one Jay says uh what would be the number one laptop you would buy for best bang for the buck looking to purchase one tonight okay best bang for the buck is probably like a for me like like what's your price range Jay you got to give me a little more detail do you what's your price range is your focus on GPU power a higher quality display and what's your price range because if it's like three thousand dollars that's a very different recommendation than if it's like a thousand dollars or 1500 you know so uh Nick white says this laptop looks to be only 12.99 at Micro Center not sure if it's the same at all micro centers are just my local one yeah I'm not sure nick uh it's gonna vary and sometimes there's going to be sales right on laptops so um okay so JJ says under two thousand dollars so for under two thousand dollars your options are going to be like an RTX 3080 a RTX 3070 TI RTX 4060 or RTX 4070. um maybe eventually we'll have some RTX 4080s for under 2000 um I believe there's a sale well are you factoring in tax into that if you're factoring tax into it you got to go like 1800 but um so for around the 1800 price point you got the omen 17. so if we were to do price range uh two thousand all right and then uh for under two thousand I would say the best bang for the buck tonight Jay is probably this Acer Nitro 5. it's probably the best bang for the buck but it's not a very premium laptop if you want something that's more premium I'll be able to help you here in a second but hold on we gotta we gotta switch over to the camera and evaluate our averages for the 10 minute test so right now we're doing 4.3 gigahertz for our 10 minute average 3.26 gigahertz for our e-core average um and then we got 79 degrees on the course 86 degrees on the package um our overall average for the entire 10-minute test has been 87 Watts but we've been hitting 90 Watts pretty consistently it's just there's a lot of lulls in cinebench so it goes down a little bit for our averages um overall this is very good CPU performance for the money and our overall score was 15 868. um let me just make sure you can see that okay let me up this how is that okay very nice so 15 668 uh that's a very good score that's about a thousand points to zephyrus g16 in the same price category though so just know that it's not the very best at this price range but it's very close to the best that you can get for the money at this price range um Jay says under 1.5 K is preferred okay gotcha okay so we found out the Center bench R23 score on this is very good um let me help Jay real quick try to give you a good recommendation for under 1800 or about 1800 retail total price be under 2 000 that way but um okay for 2000 you have the Lenovo Pro 7i that would that could be a good option you've got I would say for under 2 000 if you're gonna go with 4000 series you probably should go with a 40 70. you got this aorus 15x this one should be a very nice choice at 1849 uh it should have a good performance on the CPU and GPU with a nice build quality um I did get my hands on it at CES I haven't done a test on it or is going to send me one you have the Lenovo Pro 5i for 4060 uh with a QHD 240 hertz like I would say if you're if your budget is under 2 000 I would shoot for a QHD display an RTX 3070 TI or better or an RTX 4060 or better if you're going to get 4000 series um and ideally you want 100 P3 color gamut as well so this laptop definitely ticks a lot of those boxes this pulse 15 so right around the 1500 price point this is going to be very competitive um because it's a QHD display with a 4060 but you might be able if you're if you're willing to go a little bit more expensive then maybe I would say try to go for a 40 70 instead like the orus 15 you oh this one's a nice option the strix g16 with an I9 13980hx oh man that's a nice CPU with a 40 70 140 watt you only get a full HD 165hz display though that's a big downside there um if you're gonna go that expensive but you get an awesome CPU with that if you're after CPU performance that's an incredible CPU performance for the money um and then the 1700 price point there should be a scar 17. uh uh let's see here this one's not the the one I was thinking of I thought there was a little option so there's also a more expensive pulse 15. that's got the same display same Ram more RAM actually with 32 gigs a 40 70 140 Watt and an I9 3900h so this if you like this pulse 15 test that I do today you could consider getting the the upgraded version of the pulse 15. um anyway so the balds with the five dollar Super Chat he says help me understand the equivalent power of a 4090m with a 3900 HX to desktop systems um basically a high thank you for the Super Chat a good 49 is going to be equal to like a 4070 TI or an underclocked 4080 and then the the I9 3900hx in a high power system is going to be like uh slightly worse than an I9 13900k stock you know uh so Diamond says uh uh sorry Diamond it's hard to follow what you're saying um okay okay so let's go ahead and reboot into dedicated graphics mode and restart and let's get into some game testing oh wait uh we're gonna do our speaker test on webcam test then game testing so the speaker test and webcam test only take a minute though uh Jeff says in Asia Acer Helio 16 with I9 3900 HX and RTX 4070 is available for around 2149 USD nice um as long as it has the mini LED display then that's not necessarily such a bad price if it has a mini if it doesn't have the mini LED display then I wouldn't say that's great is the 13th gen i7 or 13th gen I9 better um it depends on the CPU but generally speaking the I9 should be a lot better um especially the HX versions of the I9 but if you get like an i7 HX it may be better than an i9h because the HX versions basically have extra e-course all right so um you have to be more specific about the each CPU this year it's kind of confusing from Intel um the way they did things okay so uh we're gonna do the webcam test let's go ahead and do that next okay so there's our webcam here we are we're talking on the webcam and it's a maximum uh good lighting for me but the image is pretty grainy and it's pretty noisy uh and it's not that higher resolution I believe it's only a 720p webcam so this webcam is going to be very Bare Bones uh uh so that's pretty much what we're expecting but you can tell the images there are not that great it'll work for a Skype call but not much else um zabals welcome to being a channel member thanks dude appreciate the support um will you make a video about the Asus tough F-15 with 4060 and set ryzen 7 7 35h uh probably we'll have to see I don't know if I'll end up doing that exact combo I've got a lot of I've got a lot of laptops I need to test so okay so we're gonna go ahead and turn our speakers up to the maximum we need to turn off our Max fans Max fans are just turned off now that display is so bright it's like overexposing my camera all right let's turn that down there we go all right beautiful okay so we have Peter Spacey Roar to start out with and I'm gonna hold the mic about 10 inches in front of the laptop [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right faded aeon half-life [Music] all right [Music] [Music] very nice uh Deuce Williams la la [Applause] la la la I love you I love you I love you I love you okay so um let me see if there's also any audio programs to do any changes to the audio I don't think MSI has much in the way of applications let's go to all apps and just see but uh overall there was a little bit of bass there could definitely be more Bass the mids and highs were there the overall volume was not that loud uh so there is not humic okay so we can adjust some settings and nahimik here all right so we could turn audio effects were on during that test we were on music with bass bass boost voice boost and treble boost enabled so I can try playing Peter Spacey and and activate deactivate that foreign [Music] [Applause] okay yeah so um you definitely want to have nahima gone and enabled because it sounded way better um that said the speakers overall are probably like a six and a half out of ten six out of ten not really that great kind of your average gaming laptop speakers uh they could definitely be louder they could definitely be more Punchy they could definitely have better mids and highs um all right so there's our webcam and speaker test it's time to get into some game testing I'm super excited um okay Christian Fernandez says I'm looking at Alienware M16 with 4080 but I want to make sure if it's a good purchase so I didn't really like the software on the Alienware M16 that was my issue with it if you're willing to deal with janky software it's not a terrible buy necessarily but um basically the software is the biggest issue okay so um we're gonna get into let's first start out with some side by side benchmarks with my projector and we're going to compare this against the katana in three side by side QHD tests okay um we're gonna do 16 by 10 aspect ratio for this test there we go so we're going to plug in my projector and what this is going to do is it's going to let us test at the matching resolution to the katana which we tested at 16 by 10 aspect ratio all right so uh we're not going to do all of our tests at the 16 by 10 aspect ratio but I want to get uh like a couple of tests out of the way so we have some good comparison benchmarks with the other laptops I've been testing because we have a 16 by nine aspect ratio on the laptop itself and the test that we're going to test uh the test we're going to do split screen benchmarks with will have a 16 by 10 aspect ratio instead but we are going to do some tests specifically to this laptop display resolution for most of them but we're going to get three or four of them out of the way here at the beginning zabald says uh what what would you say about the omen 17 CPU was a bit low do you think the 3900 HX will keep up with the 4090 in it 4890 was beast and stock yeah it should the 13900 HX should have a lot better CPU performance because it's a multi-core CPU and that's the thing about the uh the 3900 HX versus the i7 version it has eight additional e-cores and that really helps with your multi-core performance so depends uh vertex says Acer Predator Helios 300 or Lenovo Legion 5i i7 12th gen 3060 both are available at 11 49. um well I wouldn't recommend the 3060 version of 1149 vertex if you can save up and you are if you have a little bit of extra Capital it'd be really worth it to go to the 1349 version of the Acer uh Nitro laptop that I talked about earlier in the live stream it's uh this one this one comes with the ryzen 7 6800 3070 TI 150 watt 32 gigs of RAM one terabyte SSD QHD display for only 13.49 so that's obviously a lot better um now we're going to change our resolution so let's see here let's quit this game there we go display settings there we go so we need to ex uh uh we need to show only on two keep changes beautiful all right and we need to reduce our resolution we're right now at 4K so we're going to do uh 2560 by 1600 all right for these tests and let's go ahead and run Red Dead Redemption 2. all right and I need to go to my split screen view there we go and we're gonna do that we're gonna do that thank you beautiful cool beautiful all right and let's go ahead and get After Burner running so uh we're just gonna do these three benchmarks on the 16 by 10 aspect ratio then we'll switch back to the native display I don't I don't really want this refresh rate but um anyway we just got to turn off vsync that's fine all right and we gotta turn up the graphics to the max we'll apply all those changes beautiful so many different settings got to make sure they're right on this uh test all right sweet so I think we're ready to go ahead and do our test now let me get the camera positioned correctly foreign so on the on the left side of the screen we're going to have the katana 15 40 70. and on the right side of the screen we're gonna have the pulse 15. [Applause] yeah we get that muted here all right so uh hopefully we're getting pretty close to being matched up and let me see one set right press right click here to get our averages going um okay so looking at our temps our CPU temps are 76 86 69 73 so our attempts on the CPU are pretty good our GPU is doing 90 113 watts is the highest I saw there our GPU temps are really good at only 58.69 now 71 69 is obviously not a big load not extended load um but it's still something and we're able to see at least roughly what we're able to pull I saw 112 Watts on the GPU there for at least part of it um our GPU CPU temps are obviously very good overall let's see here I gotta pull that down looks like that's the best we got thank you there we go okay so now we're getting all the data on the split screen there that's better okay so our temperatures are better on the katana which is interesting our wattage pull is higher on the RTX 4060 on the pulse 15. that's an interesting thing to note um and it's obviously much better oh this is Red Dead Redemption 2 1080p we need to jump over to right here this is this is the correct lined up Benchmark okay so uh let me Zoom this in a little bit better because the katana was at the katana there was at 1080p resolution before now we're both at QHD plus 16 by 10 aspect ratio so you can see the katana's doing 59 FPS in the same scenario I had to turn down the Sono sound system there uh but yeah the katano is doing around 58 so far and I didn't have the average going for the pulse 15 during this test but we're seeing some about five to eight FPS more on the 4070 katana and notice our our GPU wattage Pole being only like 85 83 88 on the katana 40 70. we're definitely pulling the lawnmower wattage with the MSI pulse 15. that's very important to note um and it's the kind of thing that is a good sign for the pulse 15 but it's we're still nowhere near the ideal um the ideal length of time interesting that our uh our guy got stuck there for the the pulse 15. so we got 48.7 FPS with the RTX 4060 um and we were doing closer to like 105 Watts most of the time and we had 57 FPS with the katana 15. so um about about an 8.5 FPS gain for the 4070 in this test which is interesting um this time so I'm going to try to make this a little bit bigger and positioned a little bit better for this next test um but overall that was still a valid fairly valid test I wish the I wish the pulse 15 didn't stop like it stopped moving halfway through the test or we're not halfway through but like the last like 10 seconds it likes it like Stood Still um Katana displayed likes looks too bright compared to the MSI so uh it's just that's just a matter of camera exposure I underexposed a little better on the camera this time knowing that it kind of over exposed zabal says enjoy your stream I've gone back to work I'll finish watching later okay sweet um yeah the camera I had to I had to get it capturing better um in the middle I wish I'd been able to capture a little better earlier but still I think that's still a very valid test at least within a one or two FPS of the final number so um let's move on we're gonna keep moving on to more tests we've got uh next up we have the cyberpunk 2077 all right so beautiful all right and so I know the katana 15 is a little Overexposed right now but that looks pretty good all right so we're gonna go to Ulta for this all right and we're gonna go ahead and open cyberpunk 2077. so right now I'm playing these games on my projector and uh the thing is so the protectors are really high quality projector but in the last in the last uh live stream for the katana 15 one where we're doing these com these comparison tests where they're coming from uh the katana 15 live stream camera was just a little too Overexposed which is why it looks a little washed out compared to the one that I'm getting right now uh or the the ones I'm shooting on the right side which is active right now um it's the best we got as long as we can see the numbers that I'll be happy because it really all comes down to the Benchmark numbers themselves right now so just now these tests were not done on the laptop display so that way we can have the exact same uh resolution and frame rate so we're gonna do full screen we're doing a ray tracing on Ultra frame generation enabled all right dlss is on quality everything else is on Ultra let's go ahead and run this benchmark so there we go that's looking good um Okay so our current FPS right now wow the katana 15 is doing a lot higher FPS doing 68 versus 50 all right so big gains for the katana it makes me wonder if the settings were wrong or different somehow let's just focus on the CPU and GPU temperatures right now the katana 15 uh doing better CPU and GPU Temps but the the GPU is pulling about 20 more watts on the pulse 15 then the katana in this fairly CPU GPU heavy test and the CPU is also pulling more wattage on the pulse 15 or at least it was for parts of it it seems like it goes up and down a little bit between the two on the CPU but it seems like most of the time the pulse had slightly higher CPU wattage so let's just verify that our all of our settings were the same okay so the katana the katana 15 had the setting on auto for dlss that's why it was faster on the FPS so right here um I'm not sure if you can see it but the dlss is on quality setting yeah you can see that so it's on auto versus um we had quality set so unfortunately that was not ran at the same settings I wonder if I redo the test at all I don't think that I do I don't think I realized I did it on the wrong setting so let's roll that back and we'll change the uh we'll change the MSI pulse 15 setting to be correct and this is because cyberpunk 2077 um it's so annoying they the the cyberpunk 2077 has the settings revert back from quality to Auto which basically makes it like a balanced um dlss setting but I'm gonna just set it to audio auto on both and that way hopefully it'll test it exactly the same um if the game does it hopefully it'll down down and up clock it according to its needs all right so let's go ahead and run it Benchmark again we're gonna run it back we want to be as similar settings as possible I hate doing Auto because it's hard it's like kind of giving some control over just going to a computer to decide what the dlss quality level is but it's the best I can do I believe it's going to be equivalent to balanced mode all right so that should be very close all right so that should be the same settings now um we're getting a lot more comparable frame rates very interesting so uh 79 FPS versus 65 FPS that's much more realistic all right and our wattage pull on the GPU is still more though on the RTX 4060 and the pulse 15. 96 watts versus 85 Watts 100 and 100 Watts we're rarely going over 100 though in this fairly CPU GPU heavy test the CPU I did just see 91 degrees on the CPU on the pulse 15. which is interesting all right so our end result was 73 FPS for the katana 15. and 60 .55 so 61 FPS on the pulse 15. so you get 13 more FPS going with the katana 15. but you have the lower quality display right so there's your trade-off uh same resolutions same settings on those two tests um all right so moving on to God of War let's see what we get Peterson R says how is the GPU usage better on the katana with the CPU that is uh more worse more worst more worse than the pulse 15. um I'm not sure Peterson I I'd have to see exactly the situation you're talking about um but I I saw pretty high wattage at least being pulled on both and uh the GPU utilization may not always be perfectly accurate that also doesn't get updated perfectly real time so you might see it like slightly different timings between the two as the tests go on and uh in general I would say it usually shouldn't happen like what you just described but okay so you can see we're 2560 16 by 10 is what we should go for there we go 25 60 16 by 10. all right and then our Graphics we're on all Ultra excellent and uh we're also going to need to alt tab and go into afterburner here benchmark nine Mark zero all right Okay so let me reposition my chair a little bit here all right so here we are God of War we're almost ready to do this test all right so here we go 55 FPS versus 65 FPS our overall average being 66 33 versus 57 34. so you're definitely going to get higher FPS if you go with the katana 15 at this price point but not massively different FPS um very similar all around performance it's like a 9 FPS difference I guess that's that's 9 FPS what's that gonna be like a 17 performance gain that's not nothing that is that is a substantial performance gain I guess in my opinion um but not like night and day you know I wouldn't expect it to be night and day 470 to 40 60. um is going to be I don't know that's a tough one to decide whether that's worth it or not but okay LSP I'm just looking at I'm looking at uh some of chat here LSP says even though it's stated to consume 140 watt it's still limiting to 105 for the 4060. um yes I agree um a 4070 laptop and a thin laptop 105 is literally having the same performance um see the thing was the Acer Nitro 5 was supposed to be about 140 watt RTX 4050 and we never saw 140 Watts on it either um so I don't know it's super weird all right so let's see here I'm gonna do any other tests on this resolution no that's okay all right so um let's go ahead and move on to just testing on this display now so we're actually going to point the camera now at the pulse 15 display as we continue on with our tests and um this is going to give us uh 16 by 9 QHD display so let's go ahead and do uh cyberpunk 2077 this time being ran just on this display all right so checking chat again refreshing um Sakura says would you suggest this or the katana RTX 4070 so I still think this is the better buy at fifteen hundred dollars because of the better display unless your plan is to just use external monitor that's basically what I what I'm going to say uh because it's it's worth having the better display I think the pulse 15 is a better buy almost for sure um Ian Webster says sorry I missed the start of the Stream So apologies if this is already covered does even a Time spy Benchmark make these GPU draw the full wattage um we haven't seen what the wattage will be like yet in Times by we have not ran time spy but I don't think that even time spy is going to do it for us I think I think we're probably gonna never see the full wattage is my guess okay so we're on Ray tracing on Ultra all right Ray tracing on Ultra dlss to Quality I'm just going to make sure that this sets to Quality because sometimes it doesn't all right so uh full screen let's go ahead and run this benchmark what res was the katana we were both uh those side by side split screen tests were done at 2560 by 1600 both of them at that high resolution so now we're doing 2560 by 1440p which is a 16 by nine aspect ratio which is about 10 percent less FPS which should make it a little bit easier to run cyberpunk 2077. so looking at our wattage pull I just saw 122 Watts there for a moment uh 140. I saw it I saw 139 I saw 139.7 for a split screen uh for a split second we did 140 Watts okay so um we're hitting really high GPU utilization that's nice to see uh 42 watts to the GPU 45 Watts 130 again for a Split Second so weird that it it cannot pull the full wattage even though we're hitting really high GPU utilization we're just averaging a little bit over 100 Watts probably for our GPU pull between like 100 and 105 somewhere in that range um okay so what is our what is our average there it's hard to see I gotta move the um I gotta move this let's just go 650. I think it said 50 I think it says 58 or 68 but I can't tell until I move this 58.7 so 59 FPS on all ultra settings QHD all right that is very very good though notice that our vram is basically being maxed out let's try hopping into the game just a little bit um and we can run around and just see what kind of uh see if we run into any vram issues or stuttering in our gameplay uh uh think of buying the steam deck any thoughts uh I think it's cool um I have not used my steam deck though because if I have a nice gaming laptop why would I use something um you know why would I why would I play on something that's far inferior to a full-fledged gaming laptop um that's that's the only thing like if you're the only way the only time I'll think of using the steam deck is on an airplane like a bus ride or like um when I'm traveling and I don't have access to my laptop or the ability to set it up that's when I might use it if you have a lot of situations like that in your life on a daily basis then I think it could be a really good option uh Ian Webster uh says thanks for the reply I love the content keep it up thanks dude appreciate it uh Brian says hey I like your stuff is the 30 70 130 watt faster than a 4060 mobile um probably not but maybe it's going to be very competitive it's obviously going to be a little better than what we tested on uh the zephyrus so I just did a side-by-side test with uh I just did a side-by-side test with a 3070 and a 4060 both in the zephyrus g15 and g16 and the 4061 every test I did uh okay so popping in here we got some gameplay we're gonna shoot some bad guys up uh it's playing very smooth very very pretty good one percent lows at 35 FPS so it looks very smooth for this gameplay it's obviously not super high refresh rate gameplay but it's certainly playable and very easy to aim dude you're getting in the way so notice that our notice that our vram right now is at 7.99 we are hitting the max vram usage on this laptop uh but we're not stuttering in our one percent lows or anything so that's a good sign in a sense all right beautiful so we defeated them we averaged 55 FPS during that fire fight and our one percent lows really aren't too bad it looks and plays very smooth still this is of course on all ultra settings with everything maxed with Ray tracing if we were to instead do something like um set everything to low with dlss on quality now look at our FPS we're doing 125 FPS and obviously very good performance so you'll have options with this GPU even at QHD and this is QHD resolution right like it's uh it's not a low resolution to be hitting 125 FPS is awesome now if we turn off frame gen then we're gonna see what we get on the raw rasterization all low settings whoa It's still 120. what super weird frame gen not giving us hardly any extra FPS in this scenario which is super interesting only like 20 or 30 FPS um maybe it's just inherent to this area of the game or something but usually frame gen boosts are a lot more noticeable or maybe the frame gen is actually not turning off for some reason in the settings because it should go down a lot more my guess is frame Jam's not turning off that's weird all right let's move on to Dead Space we got to keep moving through these games but just know that that was a little janky right there with frame generation turning on and off I don't know what's going on there but that was weird um Diamond says I sent you a message to your Gmail I'll check it out dude thanks uh Jazz Pro X is the RTX 4060 equal to a 3060 desktop um I have not tested a 3060 desktop I'm not sure exactly but I would guess that a 4060 laptop let me just check I don't want to say what it is unless I'm actually checking it here so RTX 3060 desktop Times by so a 3060 desktop is checking checking uh so right now with this test at least got 8519 for time spy on a 360 desktop so this 40 a 40 60 laptop should beat a 3060 desktop in both raw rasterization and frame generation games when frame generation take into account it's obviously a huge win four frame for the RTX 4060 but it's gonna vary a little bit from RTX 4060 to 4060 because the MSI cyborg 15 at only 45 watts is not going to be the desktop 3060 in raw rasterization so it's gonna it's gonna vary but a good 4060 will beat a a good desktop 3060. um Ferry says I generally believe that a flow x13 with 4060 60 watt might just be a shy a couple frames of the 4060 105 watt I'm genuinely ecstatic to see that review because if you're going by pattern in the lower wattage something to be reckoned with in its own domain um yeah so uh you definitely do have good huge performance gaps I think between a 40 60 uh low watt only a 60 watt versus a like 100 watt or 120 watt it's definitely going to be a fairly large performance Gap but you're still going to get playable frames on only a 60 watt like it's still going to play games really well you know so you got to keep that in mind um that it's going to vary you gotta I guess you gotta keep in mind that the performance Gap will be big between a 40 60 60 watt and 120 Watt but both will still hit playable frame rates in the vast majority of games especially when factoring in dlss and frame generation games then it'll hit really really good frames [Music] um it should hit good frames without those though in basically every title all right so we are doing uh dlss on quality Ultra quality preset all right this is QHD plus oh sorry this is just regular QHD and we got to change our location of our text again to be 600 all right I think it's actually 500. cool all right so uh here we are we are in Dead Space right now this is going to be interesting because this is a very CPU heavy game and sometimes you don't get full GPU utilization in a game like this um it's interesting that we're only getting 65 FPS in this scenario oh it's because we're in QHD resolution I was going to say um I could do a five-way I could show you the five-way performance comparison um like I know the zephyrus g16 did about 84 FPS at 1080p but we'd have to switch our resolution down to 1080p which we could just do that real quick all right so the uh the zephyrus g16 in this scenario was doing about 85 86 FPS uh and so this is very similar performance this is actually just a little bit higher than the zephyrus g16 right now we're doing 91 FPS um so there's this is some great performance actually better than the zephyrus g16 which is kind of what you'd expect it's supposed to be a higher wattage and it does have faster Ram I'm guessing the faster Ram is the reason we're getting a performance boost in this scenario because the actual GPU boost is nothing so let's jump up to QHD resolution let's see how we do at the higher resolution it's going to help us not be as CPU bounds jumping up to QHD resolution I'm guessing we will be GPU Bound in this scenario all right so I just refreshed our FPS counter um and we're gonna just walk up this hallway here and then we'll walk down the hallway coming back the other way uh Brian says is a 40 90 worth uh is a 490 worth I think I mean if you've got the money for it I think it's pretty awesome but a 4080 is probably the better sweet spot for most laptop models if you're looking to get the most bang for the buck am I going to review the legion Pro 5i yes I will eventually uh whatever works says I currently run the gp66 3070 laptop I was thinking of selling that and getting an upgrade this one looks nice uh yeah I mean I think that um if you are going to upgrade your laptop from a 3070 or 3000 Series to a 4000 series if you upgraded at least make sure you're getting a good quality display now we're obviously not getting the full 140 watts to the GPU which is a little sad because I was hoping we would see that in this in this laptop but we're not all right so we're going to go ahead and refresh this and we're gonna walk the walk we have a new set of benchmarks there at the top you can see that we're doing very high GPU utilization we're not being CPU Bound in this scenario but we are utilizing a high CPU wattage so our FPS is going to be limited as a result because our GPU is being limited down to only 85 Watts approximately right now which does not let us boost to the full GPU potential but at least at QHD resolution we're still going to get well above playable frame rates in Dead Space on all ultra settings you know so that is very nice to see so we ended up with 70 FPS 31 for our QHD ultra settings dlss enabled on quality and looking at our temps our temps are also very good right now right they're not bad they are pretty dang good I'm just going to double check we are on Extreme Performance mode cooler boost is enabled okay just want to make sure we're good there and we are we've been on the right settings okay so uh overall you should be able to play dead space no problem let's move on to Dying Light 2. uh Diamond I don't see your message but I'm not gonna I'm not gonna respond to a a message like it sounds like a business proposal this is what you're wanting to send me and I'm not gonna respond to that live on air so I'd have to respond to that with email uh Mar says how's it going how's the lab is a laptop good so um the laptop's a little bit disappointing to me in the sense that our TDP wattage on the GPU has not been as high as I ideally want the display has been fantastic the display was everything that I hoped and dreamed it would be um so I like that I still think this is a laptop that I can recommend but I don't think it's going to be like my number one pick at 1500. because of the fact that the GPU does not boost as high as I really would want and it's also not a 16 by 10 aspect ratio display but I have I haven't tested anything better this is still going to be the best thing I've tested for under 1500 um in terms of display quality meaning graphical performance like this if you're after a better display like a QHD display with an RTX 4000 series this is the best thing I've tested so far right so um beautiful so we're at QHD 16x9 dlss on quality frame generation is enabled we're going to go ahead and run this benchmark uh okay so Mar says lower tier than GP Series so 16x9 would give it better fps that's true if you're just after FPS you're going to get better fps in a 16x9 aspect ratio laptop versus 16x10 because it's slightly less resolution but it's also less display usually with a bigger bezel right so you get a bigger a bigger bezel which means less display on the laptop for its size which I think is not ideal right that's not great um so baca says better TDP 4060 better than a lower tdp4070 um we don't know that yet bucket but maybe depending on how low the 40 70 TDP is like if it's a medium 4070 TDP it'll probably be equal to a high TDP 4060. um but it all depends on I'm not sure what TDP levels the 4060 passes the 40 70. it will pass it at a certain level like if it's a 45 watt or 60 watt 40 70 then this 100 105 watt 107 110 watt this might beat a 60 watt 40 70 or less but if it's if it's a at least 75 80 90 100 watt 40 70 it's probably still going to beat 140 watt 40 60 I think but we actually got to do the tests to find out like that's probably around the ballparks if I were to be guessing off the top um of my head uh uh Laro says Hey Gizmo for 1080p editing do you think there would be an improvement from a 4060 to a 4080 uh thanks in advance yes a 4080 is going to have a uh twice as many video encoder boosters chips in the GPU so you're gonna get more GP more video editing power out of the 4080 and a 40 90. there's basically like twice as many um so I would if you're going to do GPU editing then yeah I would definitely recommend it now I missed the actual very end of that Benchmark so I'm going to go ahead and just check the live stream so right now it looks like we did right at 49.50 FPS for QHD QHD gaming interesting and the the default Dying Light counter said 48. which is interesting I don't know if this counted correctly or not because usually usually yeah frame generation was off during that test I was going to say it should be higher than that frame generation was off I'm going to save this I'm going to click yes I'm going to just double check we'll try to Benchmark one more time if this doesn't work I'm going to restart the game with frame generation enabled and then hopefully it'll activate this may be the same thing as cyberpunk 2077 where frame generation doesn't want to turn off unless you restart the game or turn on if you unless you restart it So and I've had this bug happen in Dying Light 2 before so I think we should be able to get noticeably higher FPS than 54. so we're going to restart the game we might let's see what we get if we restart it this is this is why it's so important as a when you're following benchmarks of other people benchmarking things uh if they're not paying attention you may end up with very off benchmarks from a setting not being applied that's a crucial setting like this can an I9 13900 be undervolted if it's an HX processor it can be undervaulted Peter but not an H an H processor as far as I know cannot that's my current understanding AV mkr hold on I'll try to answer your question once we get started here um full screen frame generation said it was still off let's try restarting the game it doesn't want to turn on right now we'll try this I mean if it doesn't turn on this time and I don't know it's probably a driver issue or something um driver or game update issue mkr says I'm planning on getting a 4090 desktop for productivity workloads and games given that a 4090 does get into CPU bottlenecks in occasions do you recommend going with an I9 or save later save for later upgrade for CPU um well I mean obviously obviously I would say uh uh productivity workloads and games I mean then yeah I mean I would get an I9 3900k if you can frame generation is on now okay so now we can see the difference between frame generation being enabled and disabled we got 50 FPS last time hopefully this time it will render correctly and we can get our accurate FPS for frame generation being enabled Canon let's see here uh Brian says 13th gen I9 3980hx 40 50 or 40 60 I'm I'm confused about your question Brian I'm not sure what you're asking okay so we were doing around 50 FPS before now we're doing 75 FPS with frame generation finally turning on um so this is around a 50 bump to performance at least initially we'll see um as we continue through the test I'm guessing it's going to continue to go down a little bit so it might only be like a 40 bump or 35 bump to Performance but um frame generation is obviously going to help us uh boost our performance are in smoothness it's going to boost the smoothness of the gameplay pretty noticeably so Brian says i-9139 adhx 4050 or i7 13650 HX with a 4060. for gaming I would go with the 40 60 with because it the eight gigs of vram is going to make a bigger difference to me for games than the I9 versus i7 but I mean that's a huge difference in processor I would doubt I'm pretty sure the I-9 would cost a lot more if you're that's also that's a really weird pairing an I9 with a 4050 what laptop is that doesn't make any sense to me like why would you pair those two together um Raphael says who's taking off a jet engine sound yeah um actually the fan noise on this laptop is not as loud as the katana 15. I'm noticing that it's fairly a fair bit quieter I'm guessing this is around 56 decibels 55 56 decibels all right so we ended up with 73 FPS 36 for our one percent load the the the that one percent low doesn't really matter that much and notice now that our number is a lot different from the the number that afterburner counted was basically double that of what the um what the game counter counted but 73 FPS In Dying Light 2 at QHD resolution all ultra settings with Ray tracing enabled of course frame generation also being enabled um extremely playable smooth frame rate good experience all around let's check out God of War with QHD resolution instead of 16 by by nine wings of goats 3070 versus 4060 what is a better value I would definitely buy a 40 60 if everything else is the same I actually just tested this a couple days ago the 3070 was slower in raw rasterization performance by anywhere from like basically tied to ten percent slower when Ray tracing was enabled it was 20 percent slower and then when frame generation is being taken into account in those games you are looking at like a potential 100 boost to Performance or to FPS rate to smoothness to visible smoothness um in the gameplay it was a huge difference when you have frame generation in those games so just know that um if the if you're getting a 30 70 though if if you go with the 30 70 say a 30 70 TI or a 3080 or 3080 TI you want to make sure you're at least getting a better feature set for the same price like better keyboard ports CPU display all of that can also potentially be a big difference Factor when you're talking about RTX 3000 versus RTX 4000 gpus so don't just don't just look at the GPU alone you got to factor everything together all right sweet so let's go ahead and thank you so much for the Super Chat I appreciate it all right so let's go ahead and jump forward uh see this test at 16 by nine aspect ratio now instead of 16 by 10 I believe we saw what was it 55 FPS at 16 by 10. so jumping down to 16 by 9 now we're doing 59 so far in this little run-through test so 61 and 30 for our one percent lows this is obviously a very playable good gaming experience I like to see it uh let's hop into Hogwarts Legacy uh wings of God with the two dollar Super Chat thank you so much uh what 4060 laptop for 1100 so if you go with the 4060 laptop for 1100 if you if you literally if you have no more money to spend than 1100 then you're probably looking at the gigabyte G5 for a 4060 but if you have a little bit more to spend then you can get a display upgrade and more RAM bigger SSD if you go with the Acer Nitro 5 at least if you're buying it today this is the top deal right now under 1500. in my opinion because it gets you have 32 gigs of RAM one terabyte SSD and a QHD high quality display for 13.49 but that deal is not going to go for very long it's going to be sold out so for a more longevity deal you have the scar 15 the legion 5 Katana 15 zephyrus g16 I went over all these earlier the pulse 15 is definitely one to consider in this price range um and I don't think it's a bad buy by any means I'm just right now the only part I'm trying to get past is just the fact that this 4060 is not even close to the advertised uh 140 watts of power throughput right so here we are we're in Hogwarts we've got all ultra settings with textures on low because of vram limitations and we'll see I believe we're going to run out of vram at QHD resolution I don't know if we'll run into vram stuttering necessarily we definitely would if we had textures on Ultra but probably not on low we'll have to see um Peter says can you do at least one racing Sim test I don't have any racing Sims installed [Music] um I might consider adding one of those to my my testing suite at some point so here we are we're in hogsmead we are in one of the most demanding areas of the Hogwarts Legacy video game lots and lots of NPCs through here which cost us one percent low stutters and then a very complex texture set we're utilizing the maximum of vram right now in the GPU uh at I mean it says seven gigs but there's basically like a buffer wiggle room where it'll fill up before we actually use everything but notice that our one percent low is not too terrible 23 is not great but we're not stuttering all the time it looks pretty smooth from a gameplay perspective right now I'll let you know if I see any other big stutters visually speaking and you'll probably be able to see them as well but uh the key thing to know is that with an RTX 3000 Series even a 3080 is going to struggle here on these settings that we're currently on um so just know that let's go ahead and do a run through we're going to run through to the end of hogsmead and see what our average is for our official run through test here right now doing 64 FPS 31 for our one percent low so let's see what we get at the end again not running into any texturing issues or vram limitation issues as far as I can tell everything is looking good the quality of everything the textures on everything is is good for the low settings that we're at are actual wattage pull on the GPU CPU again very CPU heavy area of the game 52 Watts 45 to 50 something Watts 84 85 GPU Watts quick jump up to 115 82 85 so yeah we're not maxing out our GPU wattage we're not we're not even fully utilizing the GPU because we're very CPU Bound in this area of the game still um even at QHD resolution we're still CPU bound somewhat because of the complex nature of this area of the game so overall though this is going to be a very playable experience and an enjoyable experience at QHD resolution if you want a higher FPS experience you can always turn off Ray tracing and set settings to like a medium or low settings to boost your FPS up to the 100 FPS range so there's a lot of variability inside of Hogwarts Legacy that you can take advantage of let's pop into Last of Us and see how we do in Last of Us um is there a muck switch ZZ yes there's a muck switch and we are currently in dedicated GPU only mode so it's nice to see that there's a mux switch and the lower price range sometimes you don't get a muck switch right so let's go to our Graphics settings we are wanting to go on ultra settings notice that we cannot do vulture settings because our F our our vram is limited to only eight gigs right here it's wrong it's wanting 11 and a half gigs of vram so we're going to have to go down to textures here and drop everything down to medium all right and we're going to apply those changes so medium textures now it wants just a little bit more vram than what we have let's go ahead and do a let's go ahead and play the game and see if we run into any issues you could obviously drop it to low to drop the the vram requirements even lower but this is this is another example of a game where vram is going to limit you if you're on an RTX 4050 I'm not sure exactly how it would play uh yet but I I'm actually I don't want to test this game on the 4050. um I and I do plan to do that I'm downloading it on Nitro 5 I did last night so at some point I'm going to do a another I'm gonna do another test and we'll see what our FPS is and if we have any stuttering with only six gigs of vram in Last of Us I mean it literally May crash on us over and over again which would be the worst case scenario if it crashes I would love to see better V uh better texture optimization in the games to at least be compatible with six gig vram gpus because there's a lot of budget oriented laptops now that only have four or six gigs of vram and this year the budget RTX 4050 has six gigs of vram so that's really where I would say that new games need to Target at least being compatible with six gigs of vram uh Mars says problem here is that it can take hours to build the shaders yes we are currently building the shaders on the game it's not done yet so all these testing all these tests are going to be done with the shaders being built so just know that that these tests are done inside that context yeah so no yeah I know that the the the performance of the laptop may go up a little bit when the shaders are are fully rendered out uh gravitt says is there any 4060 that has eight gigs of vram yeah all the 40 60s have eight gigs of vram including this one but the 4050 has only six so um yeah the 40 60s all have eight gigs all right and notice that our regular Ram is being maxed at 15.5 our vram is pulling 6.9 so we're not we're not quite pulling the max but basically pulling the max our FPS averages are looking pretty good and the graphics here are phenomenal um but our we're right now we're at the bottom barrel of playability right like you could play the game as long as your one percent lows are at least 30 and your averages are in like the 45 range the game is going to look and play pretty good all right but right now we are also on ultra settings right and I mean this looks gorgeous like the the graphics look amazing in this game on ultra settings um and you could and you could definitely enjoy the gameplay of this game as long as you're at least hitting these Bare Bones the problem is the problem is okay if you're hitting this close to the playable barrier like dropping dropping below 30 is very likely in more demanding areas of the game it's much better to be well above 60. um you know it's much better to be hitting like oh 70s 80s 90s because that way when you get to the demanding Center sections of the game you're at least still getting like 60 plus um and then in the majority of the game you're obviously gonna be much higher than that so I'm not sure if it's gonna get better than what we're at or if that was just a very demanding section of the game right now our FPS average is 38 with our one percent low being 28. so I mean you know movies are typically 24 FPS so if you're if you're one percent low is higher than 24 at least it'll be as smooth as a movie for slower paced games it's all right it's not great for fast Twitchy type games that's for sure so and that was a cinematic right cinematics sometimes are higher FPS pulls than the actual gameplay so when you actually get to gameplay it might be better so let's see what we're like um now that we are uh in the actual gameplay because cinematics sometimes like they they turn up this the shaders and the shadows and raster post post settings to be even worse and then and then sometimes the game plays better but sometimes it's the opposite too sometimes it's even worse so right now I'm actually playing the game and we're going from 30 something up to 40 our one percent low is still saying 28 though um if we were to set everything to low what would our FPS be can we get to a really optimal frame rate that's like above 60 and what does it take to get there let's find out so if we set everything to low all right so if we're on everything's on low now and wow okay our FPS jumped up bigly our FPS went way up I hate the word bigly anyway so we're now we're in 80. so this is a lot better so at least at least you can know that with last of us if you turn it to low you can still get very playable frame rates um even on QHD resolution I like to see that we at least can hit playable so there's going to be some somewhere in those medium to high settings is probably where you would end up playing this game at um let's go ahead and just jump over to the default uh uh options display oh there is there is oh here we are let's try turning on dlss to Quality mode okay that helps now look at our FPS holy shmoly now I bet we can run on ultra settings let's see um let's go to graphics Ultra textures medium okay now we're hitting ultra settings with 64 FPS now we're in business all right you just gotta turn you just gotta turn the settings down let's try I'm gonna try loading to a further part in the game to where I'm actually at in the game Let's Hear uh this is where I'm at I've been playing I'm like two and a half hours into the last of a storyline I watched the whole TV show and now I really want to play the game because it's so good uh let me check uh let me check settings try medium try High mix the issue with this game is anything under high textures looks like garbage I don't think it looks like garbage it just doesn't look amazing you know like the graphics still look pretty dang good like a low is not good though it's like I would say medium is still good low is mediocre it's not like you can't enjoy the game though right you can still enjoy the game medium textures is okay-ish high are excellent Ultra is still better it's like Ultra textures are a noticeable Improvement I do agree I do agree that Ultra textures are noticeable Improvement the big thing though is smooth frame rates is more important and being able to just enjoy the game you know so like these are medium textures and they sound like it looks awful you know it still looks like pretty decent Graphics like better graphics than most games have okay on medium textures like that's my that's my take on okay so I just refreshed the FPS counter let's see what we have so we're running through this like downtown environment um I know you can't see them there's a bunch of buildings near me but there was a bunch of buildings uh at least when I walked into this area and I fight I fought and killed a bunch of zombies in here and at least in this area as well we're getting over 60 FPS like I yeah I would say I would say mediums at least okay it's but it's above average graphical quality compared to most games obviously high is better and Ultra is even better even really really good I mean when you look at these textures you can see the textures right here let me see if I can get the camera to expose correctly you can see the details on the textures they're still uh fairly well textured on medium right now um so so yeah last of us is going to be playable on this laptop at QHD resolution that was the key thing I wanted to find out right so let's go check out shadow of the Tomb Raider let's get through our last benchmarks so um we got shadow of the Tomb Raider Witcher 3 Apex Legends and then 3D mark so 165 Hertz QHD Ray tracing on Ultra highest possible settings let's hop into the game uh chicken says medium isn't too bad on a laptop probably a bit if you're on a monitor or TV I suppose that's true um but even still like medium is like I think it just looks worse in certain scenarios or when you compare very specific textures um but it's it's like low definitely is kind of noticeable that you're like oh wow that doesn't look as clear but you go from like low to medium oh that's a big jump in performance um or like the clarity of the textures and then you go if you go medium to ultra jump that's also I think going to be a noticeable jump um but the thing is does it really negatively in fact impact your ability to enjoy the game and I would say maybe a little bit but not so much that you can't enjoy the game at all right so here we are shadow of the Tomb Raider this is obviously a very demanding game we're at QHD resolution so our goal here is we want at least 60 plus FPS the ideal FPS range for this game is probably more like 90 because there is some action elements to this game where you're aiming bows and shooting guns and stuff so 90 to me would be the more ideal FPS range but of course we do have Ray tracing on we have we're a QHD resolution with dlss on quality so we'll have to see what we get you know some of the RTX 4090s in this game got like 150s 160 FPS range 170 I think was like the highest um and that really shows you the power difference between an RTX 4060 and a 4090 because right now a 40 90 is doing like a 100 FPS more it's like such a big difference it's not that this isn't playable this is going to be playable I think but still um okay Rawl says low looks bad medium high looks good it's very zoomed in have you tried Dying Light 21440p yeah we did that already wrong um and we gotta think 70 something 80 something uh for 1440p um okay uh Walid uh says 3070 TI two thousand dollars good price not really unless it's just an amazing laptop in every other way like super high-end premium but even uh even a blade Razer Blade laptop is like 1800 right now for a 30 80 so um chicken says actually currently testing out a legion 5 30 70 TI I grabbed it off eBay for 1200. that's pretty good deal I'm guessing it was used um since you got it off eBay um but yeah buying buying used like buying buying a lightly used laptop is probably the best way to get a bang for the buck but it comes with big risks in the sense that you don't have a warranty usually oftentimes there's no warranty and you don't know what you don't know what the user had done to it before that or maybe they're selling it because there's a specific problem with it so it's always risky when you buy used unless you really trust the person that you're buying it from looking at our our CPU attempts are great our GPU attempts are great we're getting good GPU utilization but again we're only pulling a hundred watts of power through the GPU during this test so I would not call this a 140 watt I would call this like a 105 watt or maybe a hundred watt system we ended up with 83 FPS which is pretty dang close to the ideal FPS range that I was talking about for this laptop for this game in terms of gameplay quality um very good let's move on to the Witcher 3 now unless he says that is the normal velocity I'm not sure what you mean I believe you mean fan noise right now we're on maximum fan noise so yeah maximum fan noise currently you're not sure if you're going to keep the oh yeah so just continue your comment not sure if I'll keep it because I misread it as a pro which has a better screen oh yeah yeah getting the going to the QHD display is a nice upgrade for sure and I think the biggest downside to the legion Series right now when you compare it to the competition is the fact that it's only 100 srgb on the display so it's not as vibrant of a laptop display and they don't even uh they don't even offer an option to get 100 of the P3 color gamut on any of the laptops even the most expensive ones which kind of sucks um overall in my opinion I kind of wish I wish they offered the 100 P3 color gamut with at least 500 nits like almost all the other top laptops this year so Graphics is going to be on Ray tracing Ultra dlss set to Quality Rd our game will be not unlimited with frame generation we're gonna turn that on so I'm playing the game how I believe someone would want to play it if they own this laptop and they wanted to get to the best quality settings with the smoothest gameplay I read some regions had a legion 7 with mini LED but doesn't seem like that's out yet or available in the states yeah I have not seen any uh indications or announcements of that but that may be true I think some of the Asian markets may have that option though I don't remember reading anything about that in the in the testing uh or in the announcements for the game okay so here we are um it says frame generation is already on but I'm gonna exit the game and just go back into it to make sure because we've had several games bug out on us and not activate frame generation when we turned it on I suppose I could always turn it off again and see if we have an FPS dip if we have a dip in fps then yeah it was on but I just want to make sure that our test is valid Okay so I turned off frame generation and yeah now we're dipping down to 33. so if you wanted to play this without frame gen it's not going to be a very good experience at only 33 with 25 for our one percent lows I mean you could play it but it doesn't look that smooth um if we pop on frame gen see now this feels so much smoother but it's still I would say I would still want a little more FPS ideally when playing Witcher 3. but we're going to still test it like we we have the settings set up right now obviously it'd be very easy to push the FPS in this just by turning off Ray tracing alone everything else could be the same all right so here we are with our test let's see what we get so right now we're averaging 56 with 33 FPS for a one percent lows uh this is obviously very smooth gameplay um it's not bad by any means but if I was playing The Witcher 3 I don't know this is a game where again I'd probably shoot for more like 90 FPS as my playable Target so if this was me I would probably go like boom so we ended up with 50 like 58 28 let's go to here let's just turn off Ray tracing so we just use the regular Shadows instead of so this is basically ultra settings all right um and it may not look quite as good anymore but look at our averages now we're shooting into the 85 simply by turning off Ray tracing and our one percent low is now 55 which is such a smoother gameplay experience uh this is so this is so much better so this is how I would play this game probably and that's just another example of how you can totally get incredible gameplay gains with the RTX 4000 series taking a game that wasn't playable and making it super playable um alessi says I was asking about the velocity of the path of the last game Tomb Raider I felt that the video was very slow um I'm not sure what you mean by velocity of the path uh chicken says I found my frame gen felt great going from 60 to 120 less so going from 30 to 50 to 60. um yeah well ideally you wouldn't really really want 50 to 60 anyway you really want to be shooting higher FPS than 50 60 so you have that wiggle room um but yeah frame generation in general feels really good if you're getting I don't know I feel like with frame gen you want to be getting ideally like 90 something um but it still it still helps it still takes a game that's basically unplayable around the 35 to 40 range and can boost you up to potentially um 60 to 70 range depending on the game and uh I found that to be really awesome you know it definitely it definitely can take a game and make it super playable and really a much better all-around experience so not necessarily perfect but I would say a perfect a perfect FPS is definitely closer to 90 not 50 to 60 with frame gen um all right so right now we are in QHD we're gonna turn off our Nvidia reflex and so we're set on very high settings right now all right uh we're gonna go ahead and just do our oh hold on I have my okay beautiful all right so I went ahead and refreshed the FPS counter at this point and I gotta say this feels really good but our FPS is not um not high enough to Max the screen refresh rate at these high settings so it doesn't feel as good as it would if we were at a higher frame rate so let's go ahead and set everything to low now all right so now it's going to Target the 165 FPS cap of our display um because we have we didn't we didn't take off our FPS cap and you can see right now we're getting 160 133 it's going down a little bit because we have this menu popping up I gotta we gotta turn off our FPS cap here all right so for for for low settings testing we gotta we gotta take up the FPS camp um saza says the CPU temperature is above 90 is that bad so it's not ideal in my opinion having the CPU temperature above 90. um because you can sometimes get stuttering when it gets to a hundred um but in general these CPUs are designed to go to 90 all the the CPUs are designed to go all the way to 100 degrees Celsius safely without taking any damage but uh when it hits 100 degrees Celsius the only downside is that it does not uh it does not let you go beyond 100 right so what it does is has to Thermal throttle your CPU and when it throttles your CPU sometimes that can cause a stutter to occur which can negatively impact your one percent lows and make your experience not as smooth so that's why in general I recommend keeping your temperature below 90 so you stay away from thermal throttling and what may ultimately cause a low one percent lows but depending on the laptop and the game that you're playing it might not do that um interesting let's see if I can change looks like the Apex Legend servers may be down right now um but as far as like the screen responsiveness right and Apex Legends the key thing I'm looking for is screen response rate and ghosting and I'm seeing no ghosting I'm seeing very fast response rate of very good all-around gaming experience with this QHD display okay so our low settings right now so looking at looking at our temperatures we're averaging around 70 to 80 degrees on the CPU 72 on the GPU um that's pretty good we're getting a 107 watts to the GPU 105 so around 105. let's go ahead and just do a little more of this I'm gonna go and reset my average so we can get an FPS average so basically right now with this with this GPU and CPU combo we're able to do QHD Apex Legends no problem hitting basically our Max FPS with our one percent lows also being 150 which is excellent okay so that is superb and makes this a very good Apex Legends gaming laptop experience excellent yeah I am able to aim no problem sweet so let's move on to 3dmark time spy and see what we get no problem Alessia it's all good um Leonardo says is the G18 Asus I9 13 gem with 4060 for 18.99 worth it uh I mean you're gonna be able to do QHD gaming on that uh you have to turn settings down sometimes because the vram limitations um but that's an excellent CPU you're going to get great CPU performance if you're looking for something that can do phenomenal CPU performance on the go that's one of the cheapest laptops with a with an I9 13980hx CPU so I would say in that sense it is super worth it so here we go we're gonna get our time spy score for this laptop okay so what are your predictions for the time spy on this I'm thinking it's going to be probably over ten thousand I'm thinking probably around 10 point three 10.4 maybe 10.6 we'll have to see so starting out we get 66 FPS 62 looking at our GPU wattage levels we're doing 103 105. once again we're not hitting the 140 140 GPU uh Max GPU claimant which is not great I I really wish we were our CPU is only pulling 125 watts of power which is you know not that much and yet we're still only getting 106 watts to the GPU I wonder if we went if we go to balanced mode if we could get higher GPU performance levels I'm not sure I think I'm gonna try testing balanced mode and seeing what happens I feel like I feel like there's a chance that if we go to balanced mode it'll maybe boost the GPU to a bit higher GPU TDP and limit the CPU down just a little bit more and that might actually change our benchmarks uh a fair bit for all of these other games that we were testing but we'll see um but that's only if that's the case so we'll find out here in a moment I'm gonna try a second run with balanced balance fan profile so our temperatures are really good 65 degrees on the CPU 66 on the GPU we've had very good temperatures in this laptop the whole time we've had tests there we're seeing 109 basically 109.7 Watts so 110 Watts pretty much um to the GPU that's one of the highest amounts we've seen in a more sustained manner um again about 110 Watts again there for a little bit a little bit sad that we're not there's 120 we saw 120 for a second 110. so 110 Watts it might be a fair description of this GPU if it can actually do that more consistently here in the CPU test doing 95 98 Watts for a second there 97 93 nice to see some really high CPU wattages for that cinebench or that that time spy CPU test um okay so we got all right so we got 10 396 with a CPU score of 12 622. so this is obviously a very good graphic score at 10 396. um it's not going to be it's not going to be killing like RTX 3070 TI's that are all on the high power limit side you got to remember the power limit on this laptop is only about 105 110. um so you got to compare you got to compare apples to Apple's performance and really be looking for comparing this laptop against other laptops that have around the 100 and 5 110 watt power limit for the 30 70 30 70 TI or 3060s right because you got to look to do apples to apples on the comparison so MSI Center is not interested in loading right now as far as uh that test is concerned it's a very good a very good amount of performance I I don't know why MSI Center doesn't want to load right now let me try ending the task on MSI Center okay it's re it's reopening now all right so we're gonna go to balanced mode all right we were in Extreme Performance let's try balanced mode if I do this okay so I have I have maximum fans on with balance mode enabled right now okay let's see what happens when we test it like this this will be a nice little experiment to see performance difference uh jariah says is this the fastest 4060 laptop that you've tested uh so the zephyrus g16 I think did 10 600 approximately um and with an overclock it did closer to 11 000 or just shy of eleven thousand so I think the zephyrus g16 might be just a little bit faster in terms of raw GPU performance uh but in terms of actual gameplay performance this did get a little bit higher FPS in the Dead Space Benchmark at least Diamond I did check my email I did not see any email from you I just checked it again um not sure if I wanted to spam or not far Mania says LOL watch it do better in Balance mode I mean that would kind of suck in a sense watch we see 140 Watts constantly um that would that would be very silly if that's the case but I don't think I don't think we'll see that nah okay so balanced mode we are still seeing only 103 Watts 102 Watts so good to know that balance Mode's not doing anything different let me try cycling into so I've turned I've turned off of the fans Max fans is turned off let's try um quiet mode Let's see what we get for our TDP I don't know if it's going to actually change our TDP mid render it's all good we're not I'm not going to worry about testing it um I think we got enough data on this to get a better idea of performance um and we're out of time for today's live stream so we're going to move into our summary wrap up of everything we found out about the laptop all right so let's go ahead and move to this camera let me go ahead and change add the light here for our background lighting and let's wrap up everything we found out about this laptop in a nice like 10 minute wrap up okay and I'll give you my final thoughts on it all right so here is the MSI pulse 15. this laptop has got a lot of potential to it and it's it's I don't think it's a bad choice I think it's a good laptop for the money at 14.99 I hope it does go on sale though because I think at around at around 1350 to 13.99 it becomes a very very good buy and around 1300 to 12.50 it would be excellent it'd be a phenomenal buy at that price range but at 15 at 1500 at 14.99 it's just a it's one of the few laptops with RTX 4000 series that has a high quality display at the 1500 price point the display hit 338 nits brightness and did close to 100 Adobe and P3 color gamut and 100 of srgb it was a phenomenal display it was great to game on it looks good it has a good amount of brightness and uh no ghosting in Apex Legends it was very responsive it's going to be great for Esports Gamers though not quite as good as a 240 hertz display now the QHD nature of it will allow you to see really good details now you're not going to really see that upgraded resolution in most games necessarily because uh full HD on a 15.6 inch display is not that different than QHD unless you have very good eyesight now on larger disk laptop displays going to QHD makes a bigger difference if you sit close to the laptop it also will make a big difference now in terms of CPU performance our Cinemax R23 did about 15.9 000 in centimeter R23 which is very good and we had good GPU CPU performance we got I think about 90 Watts uh pull on Cinemax R23 for our long power limit so we have a lot of power going to the CPU which I love to see that um now in our GPU we were only getting about 105 maybe 110 Watts as our highest sustained wattage that I saw for more than a few seconds we had occasional blips up to the 140 Watts on the the GPU but it was like like only for less than a second going up to 140 Watts so to me this laptop is only a 110 watt GPU it is not a 140 Watt and I don't think uh I don't think you're going to be able to compare performance of this 4060 versus other thicker 140 watt true 140 watt 40 60s like I think there will be true 140 watt 40 60s out there uh that we will see eventually I think as we do more testing we'll find out maybe all 40 60s don't go to 140 Watts I'm seeing some reports in chat saying that even the strix g16 maxes out at 120 watts so I don't know we'll have to find out now this thing clearly can play QHD games no problem except for games that are highly texture demanding we saw Hogwarts having to turn down our textures and in Last of Us Part One we also had to turn down our textures down to medium now uh the games still look and play pretty well but it is a visual difference especially if you're someone who wants to play at higher texture settings then you're gonna need to get a laptop with more vram and if for a 4000 series that means going all the way up to an RTX 4080 or 4090 or going with a higher vram RTX 3000 Series like the RTX 3080. so if you want something with higher vram right now the scar 15 has an RTX 3080 with 16 gigs of vram which is going to be more future proof for vram limitations and have more overall GPU power than this laptop for raw power but it doesn't have frame gen so that's like a trade-off you're having to make and it's also not as nice of a display on that scar 15 for 1500 now I talked about that scar 15 at the beginning when I was comparing this laptop versus the other laptops is this laptop the very best laptop under 1500 I don't think so I think it's a good choice at under 1500 and it's very competitive but I would actually probably be looking to pick this thing up when it goes on sale now if you're looking for if you're someone who just focuses mainly on display quality this is one of the best display qualities for under 1500 that you can buy so if if you're someone who's like very display quality like Center Centric uh then this is going to be a good buy not necessarily The Very Best Buy all around but for someone who's very display sensitive this is going to be a very good buy we didn't have necessarily the best contrast ratio that was the only weakest area of the display but this was still a very good display bright enough colorful enough to be very good for a video editor on a budget or or whatever and it's enough CPU power to do video editing on a budget as well the keyboard on this I thought was pretty dang good for the money not necessarily the best not necessarily the worst uh it's a nice Middle Ground where you're getting a decent keyboard with a good enough layout with a number pad if you want a number pad I like it overall it has a good feel and it has nice backlit backlighting everything is backlit including the secondary key functions uh and I was able to type on it no problem the touchpad on the other hand is a little bit smaller than I would ideally love if you're a big touchpad user use the touchpad a lot you might want to look at other laptops like the zephyrus g16 which I've also reviewed that has a much better touch pad than this laptop this is a plastic touchpad and it's also smaller in size the webcam is also not that high quality it's one of the lowest quality webcams that you can get in a gaming laptop like it's 720p grainy and not that high of uh color gamut and and colors and details it was not a very good webcam um in terms of ports the ports on this guy we've got three usbas but one of those usbas is a USB 2.0 which is going to be the kind of Port you'd plug a mouse or keyboard into um but that's a big downside in addition we don't have a thunderbolt 4 port on the USBC this is only a USBC 3.2 which is not going to be as good as a thunderbolt 4 so you wanted to use an external GPU with the laptop eventually you can't do that with this one you could do that with a laptop that supports Thunderbolt 4 like the Acer Nitro 5 that I recently reviewed now uh overall for ports is pretty mediocre but at least the HDMI is an HDMI 2.1 and the USBC does support DisplayPort 1.4 and its USBC so you do have some good display outs on this and you're going to be able to put most people will probably be okay with the ports on this but not for some people that need like a fast SD card reader or they want to use an external GPU or a thunderbolt 4 dock that's not going to work with this laptop um yeah so in terms of build quality this is definitely on the like more budgety build quality you've got a plastic chassis for the most part you do have a metal top lid um the rigidity feels pretty good though like it's not too wobbly like it's got some nice rigidity um I don't think I actually showed that so let me quickly um pop over to the side cam here and show you the rigidity um so let's go ahead and just do a rigidity test so starting in the right side very rigid basically no flex all the way through a little bit of bend over here no flex a bit of Bendy up at the top up here no flex a bit of Bendy over here going to the middle we got some Bend going through the keyboard of course we have some Bend but I would say this is um not as bendy as what some of the other laptops out there are um so overall I do like the feel of this laptop in your hand and it's only weighs uh five pounds and it's fairly thin so it's not too thick it's not too thin either it's not a super thin one it's like a medium size in terms of its overall thickness and and portability and battery life you're probably looking in the three to five hours range on this well actually probably a little more I think on battery life you're probably looking more in like the four to seven range because we do have a 90 watt hour battery and it's a more more power efficient overall system with the CPU having less cores and the display also not being as bright as some of the other ones so depending on how you optimize it I'm anticipating like like four to six for web browsing maybe seven if you really optimize it um and for your like office tasks you're probably looking more in like the six to eight range for your just doing well like Excel and typing in a Word document say if you're note taking in college or something um Okay so can I recommend this laptop at 14.99 yes but the primary person that wants to buy this is someone who really is focusing on the display quality over the raw performance okay there's gonna be thicker laptops that'll have better performance than this at the 14.99 price point and the like for example the katana 15 which we did some side-by-side benchmarks with today it was definitely faster than this like noticeably faster than this and at the same price point but it had a way worse display okay if you want a nice Middle Ground of display quality and uh performance then I recommend the zephyrus g16 that's a nice Middle Ground if you want something that's more focused on performance and and it's a bit thicker um and has a like a full HD display instead of QHD around 1500 you could go with something like the legion 5 Pro or something along those lines in the legion lineup there should be some stuff in that right around that price range and if you're willing to go with older gen tech there there was some deals I talked about earlier like the Acer Nitro that has a 3070 TI and has a QHD display and that's only 13.50 so that's a better bang for the buck in terms of display and price point and raw power but there's no frame gen so if you're willing to if you're if you're the kind of person who doesn't play single player games then going for that Nitro series over this one could be a better choice at least in the short term that's going to be a short-term deal right A lot of these deals are going to be very short term so um in terms of long-term pricing for the rest of 2023 at 1500 this is an okay deal I would recommend it to someone who's focused on the display at 1400 it's a good deal of a pretty good deal and at like 1300 or 1350 it's a very good excellent deal that's my that's my overall pricing evaluation of this laptop versus the competition we'll have to see what we end up getting for pricing and sales I don't anticipate this thing to go on sale during Black Friday or at different vendors within probably the next six to 12 months we'll definitely see some sales on it so if you're willing to wait and be patient you can definitely pick this thing up for a bit less than what we're paying for it right now okay I'm gonna go ahead and check chat look for any q and A's and we're gonna go and end this okay uh Jara says 14.99 Bill budgety build quality um yeah it's it's not the greatest build quality but at least it has some decent uh display and internal parts um farmandia says I would look at a 3080 before a 40 70 laptop there are some 3080s on sales right now uh for around the price of the 40 60s that's correct I went over one of those today the scar 15. um Diamond says because these are laptops are like 14 000 plus the LG monitors 1000 I'm not sure what you mean Diamond those numbers are not in USD at least LSP says I would rather go for a scar 16 with a 4080 oh sure if you can get a scar 16 for a 4080 and spend more money on it that that's a great option yeah you spend more money get a better product but at this price point you know you got to compare uh like for like so if you guys enjoyed this live stream please hit that like button and if you want to see more live streams in the future hit that subscribe button with the notification Bell so you can hop into the live uh and I'll see you guys in the next one Brandon outs thanks very much

Channel: GizmoSlipTech

Views: 353,808

Keywords: gaming laptop 2023, rtx 4000, 2023, gaming laptop, rtx 4090, unboxing, gizmosliptech, benchmarks, comparison, RTX 4060, game benchmarks, msi pulse 15, RTX 4070

Id: kby_Z7LAMlc

Length: 223min 17sec (13397 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 03 2023