MSI Vector GP66 Review | PCMag

It's bound to be topped before long, but at this writing the fastest gaming laptop in our benchmark database—holding the highest PCMark 10 productivity score and frame rate in two of our three real-world game tests—isn't an Alienware or Razer and doesn't cost $3,000 or more. It's the MSI Vector GP66, a 15.6-inch rig that's $2,399.99 at Best Buy. The Vector has blink-and-it's-over battery life and is a little rough around the edges—it lacks niceties like an Nvidia G-Sync screen or Thunderbolt port—so it falls short of Editors' Choice honors. But if you want ultra-high performance for medium-high money, it's a tempting scream machine.

A Screen With a Phenomenal 360Hz Refresh 

Our test unit (model 12UGS-267US) combines a 12th Generation Intel Core i9-12900H processor (six performance cores, eight efficiency cores, 20 threads) with Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti graphics and a full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) display. The screen boasts a phenomenal 360Hz refresh rate. The laptop has 32GB of DDR4 memory and a 1TB NVMe solid-state drive. Another config at the same price steps down to a Core i7-12700H CPU, but increases screen resolution to 1440p (with a 165Hz refresh rate).

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(Photo: Molly Flores)

It's not garish red and black like some gaming notebooks—just monochromatic black magnesium alloy—but the Vector GP66 looks the part, with bulging beveled hinges and numerous cooling vents. Decorated with MSI's dragon logo, the system feels solid, with no flex if you grasp the screen corners or mash the keyboard. It's noisy, though. Set to Performance mode for GPU-intensive gameplay, its fans roar loudly with a torrent of hot air blowing from its left side.

At 0.92 by 14.1 by 10.5 inches (HWD), the Vector is about the same size as the 16-inch Lenovo Legion 7 Gen 6, though a bit lighter at 5.25 pounds versus 5.5 pounds. Other 15.6-inch gamers like the XPG Xenia 15 KC (0.8 by 14 by 9.2 inches, 4.2 pounds) and Razer Blade 15 Advanced Model (0.67 by 14 by 9.3 inches, 4.4 pounds) are trimmer.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

The bezels on either side of the screen are thin, with thicker ones above and below. With neither a fingerprint reader nor face recognition webcam, there's no way to skip typing passwords with Windows Hello. You won't find an SD or microSD card reader or Thunderbolt 4 port, either. The ports comprise two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports on the right side, a third plus a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port and audio jack on the left, and power and 2.5Gbps Ethernet connectors joining HDMI and mini DisplayPort video outputs at the rear. Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth handle wireless connections.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

(Photo: Molly Flores)

It's dreadful in dim rooms, but given plenty of light the 720p webcam captures relatively bright and colorful images with some static; my face was clear enough, though background details were blurry. The top-row F4 key toggles the camera on and off. 

Bottom-mounted speakers produce medium-loud, pretty crisp sound. Bass is minimal but you can make out overlapping tracks. Nahimic software offers music, movie, gaming, and communication modes with bass, treble, and voice boosters, faux surround sound, and an equalizer; the Smart setting sounded better than most laptop audio utilities I've tried.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

The Fn key is half-sized and to the right, not left, of the space bar, so pairing it with the cursor arrow keys to adjust volume and screen brightness is awkward. Otherwise, the SteelSeries keyboard with RGB backlighting is attractive, with dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys. However, the board's typing feel is hollow and unresponsive rather than snappy. The buttonless touchpad glides and taps smoothly but clicks stiffly. 

One of the top-row settings keys has the SteelSeries logo, but didn't do anything on our test unit; nor did the SteelSeries GG utility in the Start menu launch properly. I downloaded and installed the latest SteelSeries GG from the keyboard maker and it worked fine (though the shortcut key never did), letting me tinker with color patterns. 

MSI Center software offers various system settings plus hardware monitoring; installable modules ranging from Wi-Fi optimization to AI noise cancellation and image tagging; and a choice of Performance, Balanced, and Quiet cooling modes. I used the Performance mode for our benchmark tests, except for Balanced mode for the battery rundown. It didn't help much, though—battery life is still woefully short, as I'll discuss below. The Windows 11 Home software preload also includes Music Maker Jam and a Norton Security trial.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

The 1080p non-touch display's main attraction is its blazing 360Hz refresh rate, but it's also quite colorful and vivid, with wide viewing angles and good contrast. White backgrounds are clean rather than dingy, and there's no pixelation around the edges of letters. I found myself tapping the brightness keys in hopes of wringing out a bit more brightness, but otherwise the screen is more than satisfactory.

Testing the Vector GP66: Playing King of the Hill 

For our benchmark charts, we matched the MSI against four other premium gaming laptops. The XPG Xenia 15 KC and the 17.3-inch Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 are roughly in the same price ballpark, while the AMD-powered Lenovo Legion 7 Gen 6 costs $250 more, and the Razer Blade 15 Advanced Model is the priciest at $2,999.99. The Lenovo and Asus are Editors' Choice award winners. You can see their basic specs below.

Productivity Tests 

The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage. 

Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). 

Our final productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

Not so long ago, few laptops scored 4,000 points in PCMark 10, and we set that number as a sign of excellent productivity for everyday apps like Microsoft Office. The MSI nearly doubled it and breezed through our other benchmarks, though it narrowly trailed the Asus with the same chip in the CPU tests. All these systems are overkill for routine work, and they rival mobile workstations for content creation prowess. 

Graphics and Gaming Tests 

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). 

We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better. 

Our next three tests involve real games—specifically, the built-in 1080p benchmarks from an AAA title (Assassin's Creed Valhalla), a fast-paced esports shooter (Rainbow Six Siege), and a sports racing sim (F1 2021). We run each benchmark twice, using different image quality presets for Valhalla and Rainbow and trying F1 with and without Nvidia's DLSS anti-aliasing technology.

Making the most of a 360Hz screen at Rainbow Six Siege's highest image quality? Yes, please! We've seen wide variations in GeForce RTX 30 series GPU performance at different wattages; MSI says the Vector's RTX 3070 Ti runs at 150 watts, which seems sufficient for awesome frame rates. If this rig won't give you bragging rights in every game, it'll come close to it. 

Battery and Display Tests 

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. 

We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

We don't expect gaming notebooks to last as long as ultraportables and convertibles, but the Vector GP66's battery life is simply woeful, an unwelcome flashback to the gaming rigs of a few years ago. Its display's color range is merely average, but it's brighter than some competitors (though, as I said, short of the 400-plus nits peak reading that I prefer).

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Screaming Speed, Not a Lot of Luxuries 

Twenty-four hundred bucks is far from cheap, but it's a fair price for performance as spectacular as the MSI Vector GP66's. This laptop is a no-frills gaming Gargantua, offering sizzling frame rates (with this GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, forget about ever needing an RTX 3080) and a screen refresh rate to match. The MSI isn't as slim or elegant as a Razer Blade 15, and its battery life is brutally short, but it's a great choice if you want to plug it in and let it rip.