Latest from PC Gamer UK in Gaming-laptops

Name: Synthetic gaming performance
Creator: PC Gamer

Microsoft seems very excited about its new magnetic USB Type-C charger for the Surface Laptop Ultra, but it don't impress me much

Jess Kinghorn — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 15:13:03 +0000

Microsoft has just unveiled what it's calling the "most powerful Surface devices ever." Both powered by Nvidia's RTX Spark SOC, the Surface Laptop Ultra and Surface RTX Spark Dev Box are both available to pre-order now. Both Surface devices are slated for an October 16 release, the same day as a suite of other RTX Spark laptops.

Like the rest of the fleet, these will cost a pretty penny too, with the Surface Laptop Ultra starting at $2,599 and the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box going for $5,999. However, the Surface Laptop Ultra comes with something the rest doesn't: 'Magnetic Connect,' a new magnetic USB Type-C charger.

The Corporate Vice President of Surface, Brett Ostrum, wrote, "The included charging cable attaches magnetically to the right-side USB-C port and releases easily. The port remains fully functional for video, data, and other USB-C devices."

According to Microsoft, the Magnetic Connect is a world first. However, in principle, it's very similar to Apple's MagSafe connectors. My snarkiness aside, it's worth mentioning that MagSafe uses a proprietary cable, whereas the Magnetic Connect does not, and that fits it a bit more cleanly into the 'world first' claim.

Interesting to note, too, is that the design of the Magnetic Connect may have been influenced by recent changes to EU regulations. New rules seek to stem the tide of charging cable-related e-waste by requiring "all new devices sold in the EU must now support USB-C charging." This regulation was introduced in 2024, and originally only applied to portable devices. But as of April this year, the EU common charger rules have been rolled out to laptops as well.

Still, it's a weird thing to highlight in the announcement for a very powerful, very expensive laptop—excuse me if I struggle to muster up a sufficient level of excitement for a charger that magnetically snaps to the side of my Surface device.

Obviously, as a PC gamer, I'm most interested in the apparently RTX 5070-like gaming performance of an RTX Spark machine. But gaming isn't the sole focus of this machine; for that money, it really needs to be all singing, all dancing, so Microsoft also highlights that the Surface Laptop Ultra can "run AI models exceeding 120B parameters locally, with up to 1 petaflop of AI performance."

At $2,599, it's a pricey bit of kit for sure and touting "the world’s first built-in magnetic USB-C charging on a laptop" does little to dull the sting of that price tag. Worse still, with 128 GB of unified memory inside this bad boy, there's no ignoring that the AI industry and the resulting memory crisis are perhaps one reason this Surface is as expensive as it is.

Now we know the prices of the new RTX Spark laptops and they're as expensive as I'm sure you feared

dave.james@futurenet.com (Dave James) — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 02:42:32 +0000

RTX Spark laptops will range from $2,600 all the way up to $7,000.
Pre-orders open now.
Release date is October 16, 2026.

It is the best of times, it is the worst of times to unveil a whole new line of agentic and local AI-focused laptops. The new RTX Spark laptop hardware is going into a slew of big name, big brand notebooks, with pre-orders opening up now and, with the level of unified memory necessarily inside them, the pricing is getting on for prohibitive.

But it was always going to be that way. These are laptops built for AI processing and they need a ton of memory, and AI is the big thing right now so we need laptops that are designed from the ground up to run the best local models beautifully. But we're also at a point where AI is the big thing right now and that has sucked up all the available memory manufacturing making producing new PC hardware uncomfortably expensive.

There's a certain ouroboros-like feeling around these new machines, where they're designed for a world that is specifically making systems like them harder to make and sell to normal humans without seven figure incomes.

The new machines come with two flavours of Nvidia N1X processor; either the 20-core, 6144 CUDA core'd design, or the 18-core, 5120 CUDA core version. And with those Arm-based SoCs, sporting Nvidia GPU components, you're getting varying levels of un-upgradeable, soldered-on unified memory, from 24 GB all the way up to 128 GB.

(Image credit: Microsoft)

And, if we take the entry-level version of the new Microsoft Surface Ultra laptop as an example, that 24 GB config, with the 18-core N1X will run you about $2,600. With a 512 GB SSD inside it. That is a lot of money for an Arm-based laptop relying heavily on emulation—at least right now—with not a lot of internal hardware, especially when the noise around RTX Spark is about its utility as a local AI beast.

24 GB of unified memory, shared therefore between CPU and GPU, doesn't feel like it's going to be able to get you access to the best local models, and that 512 GB SSD isn't going to be able to house too many of them, either. This is a slightly apples vs oranges comparison, I'll grant you, but a laptop with an RTX 5070 Ti and 16 GB of RAM is going to have a greater pool of memory to draw from, and you can pick one of those up for around $1,000 less than the cost of the cheapest Surface Ultra today.

To be honest, I would find it really hard to make a case for the lowest-spec Sparks right now, even though I know local models are getting ever more efficient and capable within memory-restricted environments. But if I'm dropping serious money right now specifically on a laptop that's positioning itself as being designed for local AI compute, I want to know I've got a pool of memory that's going to be solid for its lifetime. And it needs to be because there is no upgrading that memory once you've configured your purchase.

Those models might be getting more efficient, but I'm still going to want to be running as close to a frontier model as I can get on my local hardware, and that is always going to need a big pool of the memory good-stuff.

(Image credit: Asus)

But that's not to say I would necessarily find it impossible to be positive about the pricier models. And they do get expensive. The fully kitted out Asus ProArt P16, with 128 GB unified memory and a 2 TB SSD will run you $7,000 😱 But the 64 GB version is a more reasonable $4,500 and you could have a whole lot of local AI-based fun with that bad boy. And the ProArt P16 is rather gorgeous, looking for all the world like a very serious Zephyrus G16. If you wanted the 64 GB Surface Ultra that comes in at $4,300, for comparison, too.

That starts to feel a lot more reasonable—obviously within the context of this whole f'd up world of AI-generated PC hardware pricing—when you think about the fact a Blade 16 with an RTX 5080 and 64 GB RAM will set you back $4,700. Premium hardware is painfully expensive across the board.

I will admit, though, I'm really excited about getting my hands on an RTX Spark laptop and giving it a run around the block. I know gaming is not the main focus, more a pleasing byproduct and definite boon for the AI builders to kick back with when they've hung up their agentic hat for the day. But we're expecting RTX 5070-level gaming performance out of these machines (they have more cores, but lower power budgets and more limited memory bandwidth owing to the unified LPDDR5x memory) with the expectation that will be the same case whether or not they're plugged into the wall for power.

I've played games on them at shows, but I will be fascinated to see how things look when we throw the full PC Gamer benchmarking suite at one.

(Image credit: Future)

That's intriguing all by itself, but I've also spent a lot of time over the past year messing around with local AI models and I'm really looking forward to seeing what happens when I jam ComfyUI and Unsloth desktop on there, too.

But pricing is obviously a pain point, as it is for any system right now, whether high-end or no, and these first-gen devices are going to be a tough sell to a wider audience rather than the already-invested AI builder crew. But this has the potential to be a big turning point for the industry.

Not only do we have Microsoft entirely dropping the 'On Arm' suffix for its Arm-focused OS, and not only do we have a mainstream Arm SoC, but it's one that's also tied to a meaningfully powerful, effectively discrete GPU component.

And not only that but Windows' new Hybrid Intelligence toggle has the potential to bring a whole lot of AI processing that was once shunted into the cloud—taking up datacenter capacity unnecessarily for drawing a flyer for your band or a kid's birthday party—and making it local without the end-user having to really think about it.

That has the potential to ease the datacenter burden and maybe, just maybe ease some parts of the memory crisis itself. So, if you were trying to be positive, maybe this ouroboros could be about to spit out its own tail.

Asus TUF Gaming A16 gaming laptop review

Zak Storey — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 15:21:13 +0000

The ask this month was a simple one. Take a trio of mid-range(ish) laptops, the Asus TUF Gaming A16, the Lenovo Legion 5, and the MSI Katana 15 HX. Benchmark the crap out of them, run them as a daily driver for a spell, research the bejesus out of them, and then see which one croaks under the pressure. A, dare I say, qualitative and quantitative group test of sorts, split across three separate reviews. Akin to the old printed tech mag days of yore.

It's been fun, inciteful, and frustrating at times, and as this is the last review of the bunch, let me tell you, if this was Maximum PC or PC Format, it's here that I'd be waxing lyrical about how the winner of this month's arduous journey, is, without even a modicum of doubt, the Asus TUF Gaming A16.

Truly, its implementation is a thing of beauty. It's an expertly balanced laptop that satisfies not only the needs of the professional, but that of the gamer as well. Its blend of hardware, style and pricing has put the TUF on the right path to claim its very own slot in our best gaming laptops buying guide, and with good reason.

That's not to say it's perfect, I have my quibbles with it, don't get me wrong, but what Asus has managed to achieve here, on a budget is nigh impressive. The form factor, the design, the performance, the screen, the ports, all of it hits the marks that matter, and smooth over the wrinkles that the others introduce.

It's a thing of beauty, again all for a price that slides under what you'd expect Asus would charge for something like this. If you're after a new laptop and find this thing on sale during Black Friday and the next few months, and it sits in your price bracket, I'd highly recommend it.

Buy if...

✅ You want a well rounded gaming laptop: Everything on the TUF A16 is remarkably well balanced, the hardware spec blended with that 1920x1200 screen is an absolute treat. If you want to game, or work on it, present or stream, you can do it all without fear.

Do not buy if...

❌ You're looking at a futureproof purchase: Although it's good today, 16 GB of DDR5 and an RTX 5050 err on the conservative side. If you're looking to keep this running long into the future, frame rates may begin to stutter as you approach the three to four year mark.

Asus TUF Gaming A16 - Features

(Image credit: Future)

Processor	AMD Ryzen 7 260 PNG
Cores	8
Threads	16
Boost clock speed	5.1 GHz
Graphics	Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050 8 GB
RAM	16GB (2x8GB) DDR5-5600 MT/s
Storage	1 TB Sandisk WD PC SN5000S SDEQNSJ-1T00-1002 - PCIe 4.0
Display	16.1-inch IPS level
Resolution	1920 x 1200
Refresh	165 Hz
Battery	90 Whr
Power brick	240 W
Weight	2.2 kg
Dimensions	354.0 x 269.0 x 25.7 mm
Price	£1,260 / $1,550 (US model features 512GB SSD, higher res)

Asus TUF Gaming A16 - Value

Future

The top line specs here don't exactly shout "premium" from the rooftops, I get that. RTX 5050 and an AMD Ryzen 7 260 are hardly ground breaking, but it's how Asus has integrated the cooling and power delivery into this mixture that really breathes life into the thing. So many manufacturers skimp out on that latter part, and leave consumers with RTX 5070 and 5080s choked on low TGPs and it severely impacts market credibility. Asus has done the opposite here, and allowing that RTX 5050 to run at full tilt under a 115 W TGP delivers some exceptional performance without necessarily breaking the bank.

The CPU ain't half bad either. Although like most of the laptops we have under review currently, it's a little long in the tooth, AMD's Ryzen 7 260, is an eight-core, 16-thread beastie, that produces some respectable numbers under load, all while keeping the heat down in the process.

It also comes with 16 GB (2x 8GB) of DDR5 at a comfortable 5,600 MT/s. Although it's not exactly insanely high-end by modern standards it does mean you can swap that out at a later date with a higher capacity kit without much worry. And, for once, we're not looking at a single-channel memory setup that some manufacturers (ahem… Lenovo…) like to proclaim as "consumer friendly".

(Image credit: Future)

The rest of the spec list equally fails to disappoint. That RTX 5050's been matched with a 1920x1200 "IPS-level" 16-inch display fluttering along at a smooth 165 Hz, and it's a beaut too. Brightness is great, the colours really pop, and there's minimal ghosting or latency issues here as well. Is it as vibrant or as high refresh as an OLED model? Well, no, but for those after a versatile screen that gets the job done well, it's more than good enough. Pixel density too, isn't half bad either, just a fraction above that of a 32-inch 4K desktop panel, and the reduced pixel count significantly helps that RTX 5050 hold its own at native.

On the connectivity front, aside from WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.4, the TUF also comes 3x USB Type-A, 2x USB Type-C, a 3.5mm audio jack, HDMI out, and full ethernet as well, along with a dedicated power port too. Oh and there's a 1080p webcam, but that's fairly standard affair at this point.

The keyboard's not exactly anything to write home about, it's just a standard chiclet RGB affair, but it'll do, and the sizable trackpad lends itself well to light desktop work (I did once know a guy who used to raid in WoW Cataclysm with a trackpad, and it still makes me shudder to this day).

All told, it's a reasonable spec. But in all honesty, while it is a well put together system, that $1,500 price tag is too much, and it's going to need some hefty discounting to make it a genuinely budget-friendly machine.

Asus TUF Gaming A16 - Sound

(Image credit: Future)

Let's talk audio quick before we get onto the good stuff (performance), because for once, I'm actually excited to talk about laptop speakers. Because these things absolutely slap.

At max volume there's minimal distortion, and a healthy chunking of bass reverberating along underneath. Watching Sung Jin-woo slap the metaphorical crud out of Beru in Solo Levelling, as Howl plays in the background is as epic as it can ever be. Treble's smooth, mids are there too in abundance, and honestly I was genuinely impressed. In heavier bass moments in certain music genres there's fractional disturbance and vibration, but the moments are fleeting.

Fan noise on the other hand is chonky. Not quite as potent as the Lenovo Legion 5, but notably sitting in between it and the MSI Katana (which is arguably too quiet, and hamstringing its own cooling as a result).

Asus TUF Gaming A16 - Performance

(Image credit: Future)

Okay, on to the good stuff, and there's an interesting tale here with performance. I've already alluded to it heavily with the MSI Katana 15 HX review, but its a tale of the plucky little RTX 5050 that could, that's what I'll say.

1 / 4

1080p gaming performance

Running games at a normalised resolution to compare frame rates at the same level

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

Cyberpunk 2077 (1080p RT Ultra) Data
Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	31 Avg FPS, 21 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	29 Avg FPS, 15 1% Low FPS
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	32 Avg FPS, 21 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

Baldur's Gate 3 (1080p Ultra) Data
Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	63 Avg FPS, 31 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	63 Avg FPS, 36 1% Low FPS
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	50 Avg FPS, 27 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

Black Myth: Wukong benchmarking tool (1080p High) Data
Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	48 Avg FPS, 40 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	49 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	46 Avg FPS, 39 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

F1 24 (1080p Ultra High) Data
Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	54 Avg FPS, 43 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	58 Avg FPS, 47 1% Low FPS
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	60 Avg FPS, 46 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (1080p Ultra) Data
Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	59 Avg FPS, 24 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	72 Avg FPS, 26 1% Low FPS
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	65 Avg FPS, 22 1% Low FPS

Let's just compare the top-line real quick. Because between this and the MSI, it's a real showcase as to what good cooling in laptops can do. So, Asus: RTX 5050, 115 W TGP. MSI: RTX 5060, 115 W TGP. Average GPU temp for Asus: 60; average GPU temp for MSI: 77. Average clock speed for Asus: 2,680 MHz at 75 W; MSI: 2,305 MHz at 68W.

The reason that matters is that in every single benchmark I ran these two laptops at, both running at 1080p on Ultra, the Asus was either close, or significantly beat its red dragon shaped counterpart. It lost out in Metro Exodus by 6 fps, F1 by 6 fps, Cyberpunk by 1 fps, but beat it in Baldur's Gate 3 by 13 fps, and Black Myth Wukong by 2 fps.

Creator and system performance

Testing the non-gaming performance of the laptops.

Compressing (GIPS)

Decompressing (GIPS)

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

82.31

119.91

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

66.83

113

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

100.46

105.57

7zip 24.07 Data
Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	82.31 Compressing (GIPS), 119.91 Decompressing (GIPS)
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	66.83 Compressing (GIPS), 113 Decompressing (GIPS)
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	100.46 Compressing (GIPS), 105.57 Decompressing (GIPS)

Multi-core index score

Single-core index score

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

920

102

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

956

105

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

832

112

Cinebench 2024 Data
Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	920 Multi-core index score, 102 Single-core index score
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	956 Multi-core index score, 105 Single-core index score
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	832 Multi-core index score, 112 Single-core index score

CPU (samples/min)

GPU (samples/min)

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

79.28

930.53

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

89.16

1085.56

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

77.88

1044.62

Blender 4.2.0 (junkshop) Data
Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	79.28 CPU (samples/min), 930.53 GPU (samples/min)
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	89.16 CPU (samples/min), 1085.56 GPU (samples/min)
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	77.88 CPU (samples/min), 1044.62 GPU (samples/min)

Overall index score

Duration (Sec)

Sec/image

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

1285

77.79

4.862

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

1412

70.81

4.425

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

1349

74.11

4.632

Procyon Data
Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	1285 Overall index score, 77.79 Duration (Sec), 4.862 Sec/image
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	1412 Overall index score, 70.81 Duration (Sec), 4.425 Sec/image
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	1349 Overall index score, 74.11 Duration (Sec), 4.632 Sec/image

CPU performance too demolished the Katana in multi-threaded Cinebench scoring 920 versus 832, and only coming second due to the Lenovo Legion 5's impressive 956 figure on that front. That further tells us that whatever MSI's doing in its cooling profile, it's not enough and its causing both its CPU and GPU to throttle. Just goes to show folks, you can have a shiny chip on paper that's theoretically better than the competition, but if it ain't cooled right, it's just a name.

Overall, in isolation, the TUF does well across the board. Particularly when taking advantage of DLSS and frame-gen. 82 fps in Cyberpunk at Native, 66 fps in BG3, 68 in Black Myth Wukong, 116 in F1. All comfortable numbers and then some. Dial the settings in a bit more and you'll likely hit that sweet 165 fps spot too with a bit of effort.

System performance

Testing power and thermal performance of the laptops.

Avg CPU (°C)

Max CPU (°C)

Avg GPU (°C)

Max GPU (°C)

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

Gaming temperatures Data
Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	71 Avg CPU (°C), 87 Max CPU (°C), 60 Avg GPU (°C), 85 Max GPU (°C)
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	76 Avg CPU (°C), 91 Max CPU (°C), 81 Avg GPU (°C), 85 Max GPU (°C)
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	77 Avg CPU (°C), 95 Max CPU (°C), 77 Avg GPU (°C), 82 Max GPU (°C)

Avg GPU freq. (MHz)

Avg GPU power (W)

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

2680

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

2678

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

2305

GPU stats Data
Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	2680 Avg GPU freq. (MHz), 75 Avg GPU power (W)
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	2678 Avg GPU freq. (MHz), 85 Avg GPU power (W)
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	2305 Avg GPU freq. (MHz), 68 Avg GPU power (W)

Max CPU temp (°C)

Max GPU temp (°C)

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

System temperatures Data
Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	95 Max CPU temp (°C), 68 Max GPU temp (°C)
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	99 Max CPU temp (°C), 74 Max GPU temp (°C)
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	96 Max CPU temp (°C), 75 Max GPU temp (°C)

Asus TUF Gaming A16 - Aesthetics

Future

From a visual perspective, the TUF A16 is positively dull. But it's a good thing. It's crisp, clean, squared off. There are no odd shapes, or weird bevels, or obscene logos and RGB littering everything. It's subdued, understated, a true sleeper machine. The only inkling it might even be slightly "gamery" comes in the form of the TUF logo and shield etched into the lid, and even then you can't really see it unless the light hits it just right.

The bezels are thin, and it just looks and feels great, with a soft-touch satin finish. Like all of these laptops I've tested recently, it's a bit of a fingerprint magnet, but aside from that, there's little to complain about. Perhaps the keyboard could be a bit more mature, but it's nowhere near the Katana's level of "trust me bro, I'm a gamer".

Asus TUF Gaming A16 - Software

(Image credit: Future)

Armoury crate… eugh… I still don't like it. It's there, you can use it. It has profiles, for extra performance, or battery saving (all our results are based on the high-performance mode, which does add a significant performance boost to the overall figures), but it's clunky to install, and load, and about the only downside to this beautiful machine.

As with all of these three laptops, there's pre-installed Mal… I mean aftermarket antivirus. Highly recommend you uninstall that pronto, and dodge the free trial expiry that comes along with it. Windows Defender will comfortably handle all of your AV needs.

Asus TUF Gaming A16 - Battery life

(Image credit: Future)

As for the battery life it's one of the best I've seen at this price. 112 minutes puts the other two to shame, nearly doubling what the Lenovo Legion 5 managed. But then that's to be expected really, particularly given it's got a 90 WHr battery under the hood, and it charges rapidly too, with an included 240 W battery bank.

Battery life

Testing the long term gaming life of the laptops using the industry standard PCMark 10 gaming test.

PCMark 10 Gaming test

Asus TUF Gaming A16

112

Lenovo Legion 5

MSI Katana 15 HX

MSI Katana 15 HX B14W gaming laptop review

Zak Storey — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 15:21:11 +0000

"A union divided cannot stand," reads a famous quote from a famous man. But only now can we finally know why Abraham Lincoln said what he said. There's no shadow of a doubt in my mind he was (in this journalist's opinion), predicting the rise and fall of MSI's Katana 15 HX B14W 2026 edition. Clearly irate with the apparent division it has between its US and UK pricing. This thing is, no word of a lie, $500 more expensive in the US, and that's even before we add sales tax into the equation. Best gaming laptop? Not in the land of the free, that's for damn sure.

In ol' blighty, in the realm of the surprisingly good cooking and cheap dental care, it's a whole other story. What you get for a meagre £1,300 first looks quite solid. And although, yes, that's probably three days of heating this coming winter, if you forgo the soothing warmth of your radiators for a bit you can net yourself an RTX 5060, Core i7 14650HX, and 16 GB of (gloriously dual-channel) 5,600 MT/s DDR5 RAM, all paired nicely with a crisp 2560x1440 "IPS-level" display flickering along 165 times every single second.

For that outlay, I wouldn't blame you in thinking that this is a surprisingly tempting proposition, especially as Black Friday is right around the corner. But it's not without fault, and there's some curious side-effects as a result of the cooling design, that you need to be aware of before you pull the trigger and tell grandma to grab another coat to keep warm.

Buy if...

✅ You're after a cheap UK deal for a versatile laptop: It's not the ultimate gaming machine, no, but MSI's packed a lot of solid quality hardware in here, and for just shy of £1,300 it does beat out the competition spec for spec.

✅ You're a big fan of DLSS: That RTX 5060 does lead the field when it comes to ray tracing performance compared to its competition at a similar price point.

Do not buy if...

❌ You're not a fan of the "gamer" aesthetic: It's big bold and ostentatious, with a hexagonal screen bezel, and overall body design. Everywhere you look, it clearly states itself as "for the gamer", so if you're taking this into a business meeting, look away.

❌ You want a CPU and GPU combo that's fully unlocked: The Katana 15 HX technically has a 115 W TGP, but it often taps out at half that, with flailing clock-speeds as a result, we suspect due to CPU bottlenecking.

MSI Katana 15 HX - Features

Future

Processor	Intel Core i7 14650HX PNG
Cores	8 Performance, 8 Efficient
Threads	24
Boost clock speed	5.2 GHz
Graphics	Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 8 GB
RAM	16 GB (2x8GB) DDR5-5600 MT/s
Storage	1 TB Samsung MZVL81T0HFLB-00BTW PCIe 4.0
Display	15.6-inch "IPS-Level"
Resolution	2560 x 1440
Refresh	165 Hz
Battery	75 Whr
Power brick	240 W
Weight	2.4 kg
Dimensions	359 x 262 x 25.5 mm
Price	£1,299 / $1,799

So, we've covered the basics already, chunky GPU that kinda pairs nicely with the 2560 x 1440 "IPS-level" display, 115 W TGP which should give the card a bit of leg room to clock-up nice and high. Should. You get WiFi 6E, and Bluetooth as standard. As well as three USB Type-A ports, a USB-C, Ethernet, 3.5 mm audio, and HDMI out too. That's not a huge amount of connectivity; you may need a USB hub or dongle if you're going to spin this up as your main rig with a few extra periphs, but it's a comfortable enough experience if you're on the move, and I've seen worse recently. Razer's Blade 16, doesn't even come with ethernet and that thing costs a staggering five grand or thereabouts (although to be fair it is very good).

The SSD is a bit underwhelming mind you. It's one of Samsung's… well, I'm not going to reel off the serial code because it's one of those cryptic OEM-only designations that makes no sense to any human that reads it, but in short its an OEM PM9C1b, PCIe 4.0 SSD, that should top out at 7 GB/s on the read and 5.7 GB/s on the writes. It's based on Samsung's in-house Piccolo controller, and taps into 236-layer TLC V-NAND, it's not too dissimilar to the 990 Evo Samsung launched a couple of years back at this point. So y'know, eh…

As for the chip, that's Intel's Raptor Lake Core i7 14650HX. Again a little dated, but you do get eight performance cores and eight efficient cores for fully 24 threads, and a max turbo clock speed of 5.2 GHz at full tilt. But it's hot, real hot, and that is I think the biggest issue that the B14W currently has. Certainly if we compare it to something like Asus' TUF Gaming A16.

MSI Katana 15 HX - Value

(Image credit: Future)

Alright, yep let's talk value. Ahem... It's a bit of a double-edged sword. Something that ironically a traditional Katana isn't, and it's mostly dependent on which part of the globe you sit. If you're in the US $1,800 for this kit-out is absurd. Particularly when you have laptops like the Lenovo Legion 5 available for a near identical spec, but with a far better OLED screen for less than that.

And it's that screen that really lets down the whole affair. MSI has it listed as "IPS-level", and to be frank, it doesn't look anything like an IPS. I've got it sat next to two separate IPS monitors right now, and the brightness is dull, the contrast underwhelming, and the color difference between the three genuinely astounding. If you'd have told me this was a TN panel, I'd believe you, and even then go "man, it's a bit rough by modern TN standards, aint it?" Like yes, it's great it's got that 165 Hz refresh rate, and a 16:10 aspect ratio, and a pixel density that puts 4K 32-inch monitors to shame, but it just absolutely pulls you out of the immersion when you see just how dull it looks by comparison to most modern offerings.

That's almost excusable at the £1200 - £1300 mark, and unconscionable at $1,800 (I have seen this cheaper during my time testing, but let's not assume it's always on offer). Even so, it just leaves a bit of a sour taste in your mouth, particularly when compared to that A16, or the Lenovo Legion 5.

MSI Katana 15 HX - Sound

(Image credit: Future)

I'll talk more about this momentarily, but the fans are not particularly that noisy under load. They are spinning and going at what I assume is full-tilt, but compared to the likes of the Lenovo, it's a whole other ball game. Dare I say, you don't need a set of noise cancelling headphones to drown out the sound of this thing.

As for the speakers, they're ok. Bass is a bit muted, there's not a lot of breadth to the soundscape (perhaps unsurprising given the form factor), but clarity is up there, and there's no tinniness in the upper trebles. If you're listening to Blood in the Bayou by River Lume and Spearfisher, you can hear every single note of the banjo as clear as day. Yes it does lack the warmth and thrum you'd expect from a full setup, but again, it's two tiny tweeters.

MSI Katana 15 HX - Performance

(Image credit: Future)

Things don't fair particularly better in the performance department either. Although yes it does have a dual-channel RAM setup (thank god, because I don't think I could cope if it didn't), CPU performance is woefully under par compared to even the Core i7 13650HX in the Legion 5, and in-game things get considerably less impressive, even though it has that 115W TGP.

1 / 4

1080p gaming performance

Running games at a normalised resolution to compare frame rates at the same level

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

Cyberpunk 2077 (1080p RT Ultra) Data
Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	32 Avg FPS, 21 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	29 Avg FPS, 15 1% Low FPS
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	31 Avg FPS, 21 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

Baldur's Gate 3 (1080p Ultra) Data
Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	50 Avg FPS, 27 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	63 Avg FPS, 36 1% Low FPS
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	63 Avg FPS, 31 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

Black Myth: Wukong benchmarking tool (1080p High) Data
Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	46 Avg FPS, 39 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	49 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	48 Avg FPS, 40 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

F1 24 (1080p Ultra High) Data
Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	60 Avg FPS, 46 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	58 Avg FPS, 47 1% Low FPS
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	54 Avg FPS, 43 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (1080p Ultra) Data
Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	65 Avg FPS, 22 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	72 Avg FPS, 26 1% Low FPS
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	59 Avg FPS, 24 1% Low FPS

Take it into Cyberpunk 2077, at 1080p with ray tracing dialed up to Ultra, and it runs only a single frame per second faster than the TUF Gaming A16. Which would be fine, if it wasn't for the fact that laptop's running an RTX 5050, not the more powerful RTX 5060. In fact the Katana behaves almost as badly as Lenovo's memory starved RTX 5060 does.

Things do improve when you turn the DLSS fun times on of course, and at the screen's native res. we saw exactly that, with the frame rate shooting up from 20 fps to 64 fps. But then logically that makes sense as we're shifting more of the load away from the CPU and onto the GPU with those interpolated frames.

And it's definitely the CPU that's the crux of the issue here too. Jump into Baldur's Gate 3, and there's an even larger discrepancy between it and the TUF. At 1080p again, the MSI managed just 50 fps, versus that plucky little RTX 5050's 63 fps. In fact you can go down the entire list of benchmarks, and at every single 1080p level, the Asus TUF Gaming A16 is either close, or beating it. For a lower model GPU, and a card that scores lower in every synthetic test we can run. It's astounding.

Creator and system performance

Testing the non-gaming performance of the laptops.

Compressing (GIPS)

Decompressing (GIPS)

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

100.46

105.57

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

66.83

113

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

82.31

119.91

7zip 24.07 Data
Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	100.46 Compressing (GIPS), 105.57 Decompressing (GIPS)
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	66.83 Compressing (GIPS), 113 Decompressing (GIPS)
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	82.31 Compressing (GIPS), 119.91 Decompressing (GIPS)

Multi-core index score

Single-core index score

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

832

112

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

956

105

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

920

102

Cinebench 2024 Data
Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	832 Multi-core index score, 112 Single-core index score
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	956 Multi-core index score, 105 Single-core index score
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	920 Multi-core index score, 102 Single-core index score

CPU (samples/min)

GPU (samples/min)

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

77.88

1044.62

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

89.16

1085.56

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

79.28

930.53

Blender 4.2.0 (junkshop) Data
Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	77.88 CPU (samples/min), 1044.62 GPU (samples/min)
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	89.16 CPU (samples/min), 1085.56 GPU (samples/min)
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	79.28 CPU (samples/min), 930.53 GPU (samples/min)

Overall index score

Duration (Sec)

Sec/image

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

1349

74.11

4.632

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

1412

70.81

4.425

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

1285

77.79

4.862

Procyon Data
Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	1349 Overall index score, 74.11 Duration (Sec), 4.632 Sec/image
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	1412 Overall index score, 70.81 Duration (Sec), 4.425 Sec/image
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	1285 Overall index score, 77.79 Duration (Sec), 4.862 Sec/image

That hypothesis on the chip is drawn entirely from observing both the temperature testing, and the GPU clock-speeds. Of the three budget laptops I've tested here, the CPU ran the hottest both on max and on average, and the GPU clocked in the lowest at 2,305 MHz, only drawing on 68 W of total graphical power. Telling.

System performance

Testing power and thermal performance of the laptops.

Avg CPU (°C)

Max CPU (°C)

Avg GPU (°C)

Max GPU (°C)

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

Gaming temperatures Data
Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	77 Avg CPU (°C), 95 Max CPU (°C), 77 Avg GPU (°C), 82 Max GPU (°C)
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	76 Avg CPU (°C), 91 Max CPU (°C), 81 Avg GPU (°C), 85 Max GPU (°C)
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	71 Avg CPU (°C), 87 Max CPU (°C), 60 Avg GPU (°C), 85 Max GPU (°C)

Avg GPU freq. (MHz)

Avg GPU power (W)

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

2305

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

2678

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

2680

GPU stats Data
Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	2305 Avg GPU freq. (MHz), 68 Avg GPU power (W)
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	2678 Avg GPU freq. (MHz), 85 Avg GPU power (W)
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	2680 Avg GPU freq. (MHz), 75 Avg GPU power (W)

Max CPU temp (°C)

Max GPU temp (°C)

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

System temperatures Data
Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	96 Max CPU temp (°C), 75 Max GPU temp (°C)
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	99 Max CPU temp (°C), 74 Max GPU temp (°C)
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	95 Max CPU temp (°C), 68 Max GPU temp (°C)

MSI Katana 15 HX - Aesthetics

Future

From a visual standpoint, this is very much a gaming laptop. It's not bad, but if you're a grown professional that blends a bit of work in the day, and gaming in the evening (or on your lunchbreak, who am I to judge on whether or not you fancy some midday WoW Forever dopamine), it might not be the best fit. You've got that hexagonal shaped bezel lining the display, housing the integrated webcam. The same design language along the base near the trackpad. Bold ostentatious keycaps, some of those semi-transparent—for the WASD, and power keys, along with some gaudy arrow keys as well—and it does all feel a bit plasticky too.

It's a shame because, there's no need for it in the modern era, not really, when the humble square and rectangle exist. It's not particularly abrasive, but if you're in the middle of a presentation and the new hire zones out staring at the RGB rainbow gliding across your keys, you can blame it on that, and not your 23 slides on the implementation of the new agentic optimised structured data markdown system you're rolling out for site content in Q3 2027.

MSI Katana 15 HX - Software

(Image credit: Future)

Perhaps suprisingly, MSI's software suite is genuinely impressive. It's one of the better ones out there once you get past the myriad terms and conditions, scroll boxes, and update windows. There's multi-profile setups, mystic light control, hardware monitoring, GPU switches, recovery modes, all in a singular centralised hub, that doesn't feel that intrusive. You can live without it of course (the profiles don't seem to do that much from my own testing), but it's there for those that really want to tinker and dive into the software settings.

As always these things come with pre-installed after market antivirus (that yet again stopped me from installing the pre-requisite benchmarks and games I needed), and as always I recommend uninstalling that pronto to free up system resources. Windows Defender is still one of the best native antivirus platforms out there, and as long as you're clued up and internet savvy, you shouldn't have any major issues relying on just that.

MSI Katana 15 HX - Battery life

(Image credit: Future)

As for the battery, in an amazing twist of fate, that slightly dull screen doesn't exactly help on the battery front. In PC Mark's gaming benchmark—at 50% brightness, with WiFi disabled—the Katana netted just 71 minutes from 100% down to 3% charge. That's not a lot, and only slightly better than Lenovo's Legion 5 (which scored 64 minutes).

I've got beef with that, particularly because the TUF Gaming A16, has somehow crammed in a 90 WHr battery, in the same form factor, kept the entire device cooler, runs the GPU at higher frequency, performs better, and does it for a similar price (if not cheaper in the States). That's the problem. Is 71 minutes enough if you're stuck on a train without a socket? Maybe, but it could be better, and that's the theme for the entire review. It could be better. Should be better.

Battery life

Testing the long term gaming life of the laptops using the industry standard PCMark 10 gaming test.

PCMark 10 Gaming test

MSI Katana 15 HX

Lenovo Legion 5

Asus TUF Gaming A16

112

Lenovo Legion 5i Gen 10 gaming laptop review

Zak Storey — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 15:21:08 +0000

"I'm sure you'll enjoy reviewing this single-channel Lenovo laptop," Dave joked, as we ended a call discussing the new PC Gamer benchmark database. I laughed, as you do, because it's one of those things that I've written about extensively in recent months, (and moaned at PC Gamer, a lot more about besides), and one I hoped I wouldn't see here today. Because, you know, it's mildly insane. And yet… Here we are. Oh... oh boy.

I'm actually reviewing a slew of mid-range laptops currently. This, the MSI Katana 15 HX, and the Asus TUF Gaming A16. And you know what those other two plucky little lappies have? Well, you've probably already guessed, 2x 8 GB of DDR5, both running at 5,600 MT/s. Not so with Lenovo's Legion 5. This wee beauty comes in with just a single 16 GB stick running at a "rapid" (that's sarcasm) 4,800 MT/s. The gaming equivalent of buying a Porsche 911 GT3 RS, and fitting it with a diesel engine from a 1997 Peugeot 106 (an exaggeration, yes, but I'm just so passionate about RAM channels this feels like an almost personal betrayal to me).

Now the logical assumption here is that, for a gamer, this has minimal impact on the overall result, right? You're not going to see any issue at all, because most of your performance comes from the GPU, and its VRAM doing its job. The likelihood of CPU bottlenecks, particularly at 2560x1600, is fairly muted. In short, doing the tasks that this little laptop was designed to fulfill should be a doddle with or without the extra channel bandwidth. Heck, it might even make it into the best gaming laptop buying guide, Lenovo probably said, (11 years of journalism folks).

And, that's kinda true, but the problem is, that in those moments that the RAM bandwidth bottleneck suddenly becomes a thing. It's a problem. A big bloody problem. And not of the same caliber as your GPU getting a little too hot and clock speed falling off by a couple 100 MHz. As soon as that channel saturates, that Peugeot 106 engine blows a head gasket.

Buy if...

✅ You want a beautiful crisp OLED display on the cheap: Gaming? Tick. An aesthetic delight? Tick. The most beautiful screen you've seen for sub 1.5K? Also tick.

Do not buy if...

❌ You're likely to play games at high frame rates, or do memory intensive tasks: The lack of a 2x8GB RAM setup is no bueno for anything even mildly bandwidth sensitive.

Lenovo Legion 5i - Features

Future

Processor	Intel Core i7 13650HX
Cores	6 Performance, 8 Efficient
Threads	20
Boost clock speed	4.9 GHz
Graphics	Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 8GB
RAM	16GB (1x16GB) DDR5-4800 MT/s
Storage	1 TB Kioxia LS KBG60ZNT1T02 PCIe 4.0
Display	15.1-inch OLED
Resolution	2560 x 1600
Refresh	165 Hz
Battery	80 Whr
Power brick	245 W
Weight	1.9 kg
Dimensions	344.9 x 255.35 x 19.95 to 21.54 mm
Price	£1,348 / $1,499 (US model features Core i7-14700HX)

RAM beef aside, the Lenovo Legion 5's notable feature list, outside of the usual bells and whistles, and AI strapped moniker, is fairly slim. The big selling point, without question, is the 15.1-inch OLED display. That beautiful piece of engineering, that graces the 5's sublimely slim form factor.

With some serious pixel density thanks to a 2560x1600 res. (sitting at a suave 199.93 PPI), it cranks out an impressive 165 Hz refresh rate. And the colors, oh my days, the colors on this thing are exemplary. It's one of the few laptops I keep coming back to, and keep gaming on time and time again, throughout the last month, because the display is just that gorgeous to look at.

In fact, every time I flick the lid up, or pop my finger on the power button, I'm genuinely amazed by how vibrant and smooth it looks. Power Wash Simulator 2 has never looked this good, and don't even get me started on Sort Them Ducks.

There's more to it than just a fancy screen though, as it comes with support for twin M.2 SSDs, and features WiFi 7 straight out of the gate. The port selection is fairly solid too, with wired ethernet running alongside dual USB C and twin USB 3.2 Type A as well, along with an HDMI out.

Lenovo Legion 5i - Value

(Image credit: Future)

Back to the screen for a second though, and why that impresses on me so much, is that the price is so damn tight. Particularly for the modern AI age. £1,348 in the UK. That nets you that 20 thread chip, a decent RTX 5060 (actually running at a reputable power wattage for once), a solid PCIe 4.0 SSD, and of course you get all of those bells and whistles I mentioned above, with arguably the best-looking screen I've seen in the past six months.

Unfortunately, the US market no longer sports the exact spec that I have here, but its closest kin, comes in at a still respectable $1,499 (when not on offer), and features the slightly more modern Core i7 14700HX as well, which nets you some additional cores for an extra eight threads overall.

Lenovo Legion 5i - Sound

(Image credit: Future)

I've been quietly surprised by just how good the speaker setup is on the Legion 5 too. There are two small tweeters situated within the bottom edge of the trackpad, on either side facing outwards, that give it a surprising amount of depth in the audio, and there's a comfortable amount of bass output as well here, somehow. Maybe Lenovo could lend its sound engineers out to MSI, for like a play date or something.

Is it tinny? Well, yeah, a little. It's not exactly going to hold up compared to your Audioengine A2+ wireless units or anything of the sort. But if you're strapped in a pinch, and feel like ditching those pesky headphones, it does a respectable job of handling itself in that situation.

System performance

Testing power and thermal performance of the laptops.

Avg CPU (°C)

Max CPU (°C)

Avg GPU (°C)

Max GPU (°C)

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

Gaming temperatures Data
Product	Value
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	76 Avg CPU (°C), 91 Max CPU (°C), 81 Avg GPU (°C), 85 Max GPU (°C)
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	77 Avg CPU (°C), 95 Max CPU (°C), 77 Avg GPU (°C), 82 Max GPU (°C)
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	71 Avg CPU (°C), 87 Max CPU (°C), 60 Avg GPU (°C), 85 Max GPU (°C)

Avg GPU freq. (MHz)

Avg GPU power (W)

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

2678

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

2305

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

2680

GPU stats Data
Product	Value
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	2678 Avg GPU freq. (MHz), 85 Avg GPU power (W)
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	2305 Avg GPU freq. (MHz), 68 Avg GPU power (W)
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	2680 Avg GPU freq. (MHz), 75 Avg GPU power (W)

Max CPU temp (°C)

Max GPU temp (°C)

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

System temperatures Data
Product	Value
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	99 Max CPU temp (°C), 74 Max GPU temp (°C)
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	96 Max CPU temp (°C), 75 Max GPU temp (°C)
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	95 Max CPU temp (°C), 68 Max GPU temp (°C)

As for the fan noise. Well, it's a slim-line gaming notebook with a 115 W RTX 5060 in it, and a hot as heck Core i7 13650HX at its heart. The max CPU temp under load was 99 degrees, and in gaming you're looking at temps of 81 C on the GPU and 76 on the CPU on average. That's a polite way of saying "she's a bit loud", but in a loving way.

Lenovo Legion 5i - Performance

(Image credit: Future)

Right then, performance. Let's talk about the obvious memory shaped elephant in the room first, shall we? Lenovo's single-channel RAM setup. The argument (as with all major manufacturers who take this route, and I can quote this verbatim at this point), is that it allows the end-user to increase the amount of RAM later, simply by adding another memory stick themselves. Yeah, I suppose, if you're willing to do that, can afford to, and can find one that comfortably matches for compatibility's sake. For everyone else, though, it has some particularly wanton side effects in specific applications that genuinely matter.

Creator and system performance

Testing the non-gaming performance of the laptops.

Compressing (GIPS)

Decompressing (GIPS)

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

66.83

113

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

100.46

105.57

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

82.31

119.91

7zip 24.07 Data
Product	Value
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	66.83 Compressing (GIPS), 113 Decompressing (GIPS)
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	100.46 Compressing (GIPS), 105.57 Decompressing (GIPS)
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	82.31 Compressing (GIPS), 119.91 Decompressing (GIPS)

Multi-core index score

Single-core index score

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

956

105

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

832

112

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

920

102

Cinebench 2024 Data
Product	Value
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	956 Multi-core index score, 105 Single-core index score
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	832 Multi-core index score, 112 Single-core index score
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	920 Multi-core index score, 102 Single-core index score

CPU (samples/min)

GPU (samples/min)

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

89.16

1085.56

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

77.88

1044.62

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

79.28

930.53

Blender 4.2.0 (junkshop) Data
Product	Value
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	89.16 CPU (samples/min), 1085.56 GPU (samples/min)
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	77.88 CPU (samples/min), 1044.62 GPU (samples/min)
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	79.28 CPU (samples/min), 930.53 GPU (samples/min)

Overall index score

Duration (Sec)

Sec/image

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

1412

70.81

4.425

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

1349

74.11

4.632

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

1285

77.79

4.862

Procyon Data
Product	Value
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	1412 Overall index score, 70.81 Duration (Sec), 4.425 Sec/image
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	1349 Overall index score, 74.11 Duration (Sec), 4.632 Sec/image
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	1285 Overall index score, 77.79 Duration (Sec), 4.862 Sec/image

File compression in particular suffers the most, scoring the lowest out of our three models here, with just 66.83 MB/s on compression, versus the 82.31 touted by Asus's TUF Gaming A16, or the 100.46 brought to bear by the Katana. That's a drop of 33.5% in performance alone there on the latter.

It's gaming, however, that's most fascinating. The two standouts being the 1440p Cyberpunk results. With Ray Tracing Ultra and no DLSS or Frame Gen, the numbers are telling. The Katana averaged 20 fps, with minimums clocking in at 15. The Legion, just a meager 11 fps on average, with 3 fps on the minimums. A staggering drop. That's further pressed home by the fact that Lenovo did that with significantly higher GPU usage too. Average power draw was 85 W with a clock speed of 2,678 MHz, versus the Katana's 2,305 MHz and 68 W draw. Ouch.

1 / 4

1080p gaming performance

Running games at a normalised resolution to compare frame rates at the same level

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

Cyberpunk 2077 (1080p RT Ultra) Data
Product	Value
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	29 Avg FPS, 15 1% Low FPS
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	32 Avg FPS, 21 1% Low FPS
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	31 Avg FPS, 21 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

Baldur's Gate 3 (1080p Ultra) Data
Product	Value
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	63 Avg FPS, 36 1% Low FPS
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	50 Avg FPS, 27 1% Low FPS
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	63 Avg FPS, 31 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

Black Myth: Wukong benchmarking tool (1080p High) Data
Product	Value
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	49 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	46 Avg FPS, 39 1% Low FPS
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	48 Avg FPS, 40 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

F1 24 (1080p Ultra High) Data
Product	Value
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	58 Avg FPS, 47 1% Low FPS
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	60 Avg FPS, 46 1% Low FPS
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	54 Avg FPS, 43 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (1080p Ultra) Data
Product	Value
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX	72 Avg FPS, 26 1% Low FPS
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX	65 Avg FPS, 22 1% Low FPS
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260	59 Avg FPS, 24 1% Low FPS

Now yes, two very specific niche cases, but the drop there is near enough 50% all because memory bandwidth gets chewed up by high textures, and no upscaling. If you're a fan of playing AAA games at native res on that beautiful OLED, even with the GPU rip roaring along far faster than the competition, you're still going to see an overall drop in performance. Particularly if RTX is involved and DLSS is off. The answer, of course, is to shift to DLSS where you can, and offset those texture sizes, but still, it's a decision that's taken out of your hands entirely.

It's a shame because otherwise by almost every other measure, it's a fine solid laptop, that delivers performance (particularly in older titles) that's genuinely decent. Just the decision to skimp out on dual-channel to save a few bucks, costs it, and when you hit that bottleneck you seriously know about it. I just can't understand what the logic is here either, particularly when competitors, such as Asus and MSI, aren't doing that even on their budget models.

If it's a cost thing, you're saving what $50 maybe at most as a manufacturer per unit, and if it's a "the user can upgrade later", then you're justifying worse performance, and forcing the consumer into unpaid finicky labor to get the performance that the Legion 5 actually should be delivering from the outset.

It's dumb. I don't like it.

Lenovo Legion 5i - Aesthetics

Future

Ignoring my vendetta against any manufacturer that ships single-channel systems, the good news is the Legion 5 is absolutely stunning. It's sleek, slim, all black, with a clean RGB keyboard. There's minimal "gamification" here, and it's elegantly designed across the board, with a clean hinge, and no maddening RGB logos, or silly mascots anywhere.

Compact, is the word I'd use, and although that does lead to some particularly noisy fans from time to time, and some toasty temps, none of it will affect your day to day.

The only downside (when you're not staring at that beautiful screen) is that it is a bit of a fingerprint magnet. If you've got even a smidge of grease on your fingertips, say, from an overly large bag of prawn cocktail crisps (US: chips), it can turn into a mess quite quickly.

Lenovo Legion 5i - Software

(Image credit: Future)

As with all Lenovo Legion laptops, do bear in mind you will need to set the Legion App to its gaming mode to get the best performance out of it when plugged in. It does boost frame-rates by around 10-15% across the board, and nets you that higher GPU power usage and clockspeeds listed here as a result. That does get disabled by default when you unplug the thing, at which point you sit in balanced mode for better battery life.

It also comes with McAfee as standard (or at least our UK edition did), so get to work uninstalling that pronto. It actively stopped a fair few of our game installs, and honestly in this journo's opinion, Windows Defender is more than well equipped to handle the dangers of the modern age.

Lenovo Legion 5i - Battery life

(Image credit: Future)

As for the battery life, yeah, not so good either. It's the second shortest span I've seen on PC Mark's gaming test, managing just 64 minutes, only "beaten" by Acer's Predator Helios NEO 16S AI, with its 53 minutes. So don't expect this to hang on for long once the charger's unplugged.

Lenovo did equip the Legion 5 with a respectable 80 WHr pack, but I suspect that the OLED panel, even at 50% brightness, is sucking up a lot of juice regardless.

Battery life

Testing the long term gaming life of the laptops using the industry standard PCMark 10 gaming test.

PCMark 10 Gaming test

Lenovo Legion 5

MSI Katana 15 HX

Asus TUF Gaming A16

112

PSA: Keep social media trends away from your laptops, unless you want broken hinges

Jacob Fox — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 09:58:34 +0000

Hinge broke after using laptop upside down
from r/Asustuf

Listen, I've not always been a paragon of common sense; I once managed to bend pins on not one but two CPUs when upgrading my then-partner's PC and my own—a two-for-one in sheer-faced idiocy, all within the space of an hour. So don't consider this me preaching from on high. But seriously, not everything you see on social media needs to be tried.

A case in point is something I had my attention reluctantly dragged towards by Wccftech: a Redditor who has broken their gaming laptop hinge by standing it upside down, per Instagram reel and video setups they'd seen. Whatever could go wrong?

Snapping, that's what. Laptops aren't usually designed to support resting on the top of the screen. "The other hinge," the Redditor says, "also broke but it snapped back in. This one does not."

Mind you, I'm not sure any of my pleas would have been listened to even if they were uttered beforehand. The Redditor explains:

"People on Reddit on my last post were saying that the hinges could break, but I didn’t really pay attention to that. Yeah it might be ggs and this laptop ain’t even mine."

The laptop is presumably an Asus TUF laptop of some kind, given it's on the Asus TUF subreddit. I use a TUF laptop every day, so seeing this gives me a particularly sharp pang of pain.

Anyways, I won't belabour the point given it's a simple one: try not to do things you're not supposed to with your expensive devices. And if you do, don't be surprised if it goes awry.

ASUS ROG gaming laptops show a computer is more than its components

Sponsored — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 18:14:46 +0000

If you're shopping around to get ready for the new school year and looking for a gaming laptop to cover a broad range of performance needs, you'll find plenty of hardware claiming it's for "gaming," but just what kind of gaming experience you'll get is still a huge question. Plenty of brands are happy to have you find out later that the type of gaming is limited to retro games or lightweight esports titles at low frame rates. ASUS’s ROG (Republic of Gamers) sub-brand knows better, delivering expertise in design and engineering for potent gaming. The ASUS ROG Strix SCAR 18 is the exemplar of the brand, showing what it looks like when a laptop is truly designed to give its all to gaming so that you can decide the kind of gaming you want to do.

From gaming after homework and running AI workloads to rendering creative projects and running engineering physics simulations, the ROG Strix SCAR 18 is the system that can check every box on your back-to-school laptop wishlist when your coursework calls for a laptop that goes beyond the ordinary.

ROG knows that a computer is more than the components you throw into a chassis. What matters just as much as the choice of components is how you treat them and how they relate to other components in the system.

The ROG Strix SCAR 18 combines components that work in harmony to maximize the gaming experience. It offers a GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU and Intel® Core™ Ultra 9 290HX Plus and makes sure you can pull every frame possible out of the pairing by letting them draw up to a combined 320 watts. That's a massive power budget that ensures neither part is starving for power even while both are operating under the heavy load of gaming, and the system can dynamically shift power to the component that needs it most, with up to 200 watts to the CPU or 175 watts to the GPU. When it’s crunch time and you need to power through some heavy work — be it 3D rendering, an engineering simulation, or editing together an entire movie — where other laptops might slow to a crawl, it’s that power that’s going to let the ROG Strix SCAR 18 keep up with you.

(Image credit: ASUS)

With great power comes great heat, and 320 watts absolutely qualifies as great power in the laptop realm. To wrangle all the heat generated by its components, the ROG Strix SCAR 18 incorporates ROG Intelligent Cooling, leveraging decades of R&D in thermal management. The cooling solution is specifically tailored to handle the 320 watts of the ROG Strix SCAR 18 with liquid metal on both the CPU and GPU to pass heat to a massive, full-width vapor chamber and triple-fan cooling system that can keep the system running at peak speeds for the long haul.

If you've ever seen two laptops with the same components somehow performing in entirely different leagues, it was most likely the power budget or cooling (or both) making that difference. With that kind of cooling, your gaming sessions and rendering sessions will stay fast and smooth no matter how long they last.

ASUS' CPU choice is also crucial, as it ensures the system can feed the GPU plenty of data so it can keep spitting out frames at a rapid rate. The GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU has 24 GB of GDDR7 VRAM—more than any other gaming laptop GPU—giving it a massive frame buffer to fill even after accounting for 4K textures and ray-tracing, so ASUS's choice of the Intel® Core™ Ultra 9 290HX Plus is natural.

ROG has effectively ensured the GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU gets to run at full tilt and even pump out extra frames through DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation without the CPU holding it back. Those frames all need somewhere to go, though, and the ROG Strix SCAR 18's Nebula display is a match made in heaven.

The ROG Strix SCAR 18 fits an 18-inch Mini LED display with a 4K resolution and 240 Hz refresh rate, ready to deliver fluid and dagger-sharp visuals at competitive-gaming speeds. With NVIDIA® Reflex ensuring ultra-low latency, that GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU needs a display that can keep up. The 240Hz refresh rate is a good start, but ROG has gone a step further with ROG Nebula ELMB, which uses 40-zone backlight strobing to enhance motion clarity by 16x for ultra-crisp detail even in fast action without sacrificing brightness or variable refresh rate support.

(Image credit: ASUS)

The Mini LED tech also works wonderfully in tandem with the GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU's RT cores. Mini LED is known for its brightness, and the ROG Nebula HDR Mini LED panel achieves Display HDR 1000 certification with up to 1,600 nits of brightness and over 2,000 dimming zones to deliver stunning highlights and inky blacks for superb contrast. That's just the kind of display that will make the realistic ray-traced lighting coming from the GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU's RT cores look all the more stunning and lifelike. Beyond gaming, the visual quality of the display is a great match for creative applications from design and 3D modeling to video editing and beyond.

All of this technology comes together in the ASUS ROG Strix SCAR 18, and it's ready to go in time for back-to-school season for the student who needs extreme computing performance. Naturally, it can handle all the typical coursework, letting you pull together research materials, chat with classmates about group projects using the FHD webcam, and draft up a paper in a flurry with its snappy keyboard. It goes much further with horsepower to train custom AI models, run engineering simulations, or render 4K video for school and game like a beast when schoolwork's done, making it an invaluable partner to students with heavy computing needs. With tool-less access to storage and memory, the ROG Strix SCAR 18 also provides an easy roadmap for upgrades down the line if your workloads need a bump in the future, so it’s a machine that can grow with your needs over the course of your education, not fall flat after a couple of semesters. While the top-of-the-line ROG Strix SCAR 18 is built to check all the boxes, it is far from the only tool in ASUS's arsenal and serves as a guide to the rest of the brand. The ROG Strix G16 and ROG Strix G18 borrow the same cohesive component integration while offering different configurations that may be better tailored to your specific needs.

You can find out more about the ASUS ROG Strix SCAR 18 here, if you dare.

Owner of nearly decade-old Dell laptop reportedly wore through the wrist rest and is 'being stabbed by carbon fibers'

James Bentley — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 19:28:36 +0000

Every time I use my laptop I get that pins and needles feeling in my hands. It’s like a cactus constantly pricking me. Turns out it’s this Dell XPS 9370 I’ve worn through the palm rests, and now I’m just being stabbed by carbon fibers. In hindsight, it is perhaps a bad… pic.twitter.com/cA30b2Tr1ASeptember 1, 2026

A user on X reported feeling pins and needles in their hands whenever they used their Dell XPS 9370 laptop. After investigation, it turns out, "I’ve worn through the palm rests, and now I’m just being stabbed by carbon fibers." Ouch.

That's according to user X user Parker Drouillard (via International Cyber Digest), who compares the feeling to being constantly hurt by a cactus. They tag Dell and say: "In hindsight, it is perhaps a bad design. How is this not a health hazard?"

Notably, the XSP 13 (from around 2018) black and white model appears to have a carbon fiber composite palm rest, which is the part that has been worn down from use. They have since put their finger under a microscope, showing off the flecks of what is reportedly carbon fiber embedded in their skin. The user also reports "severe issues" with their contact lenses and says it is "most probably irritation" from the carbon fiber. Again, ouch.

There is one peculiarity here, in that the video of the microscope has a 2019 time stamp on the bottom. Reverse image searching Drouillard's photos suggests they are original, so this might simply be a problem with the camera or microscope.

Carbon fiber is a dangerous material to work with when it splinters like this. It can further shatter or break when embedded in your skin, making it hard to remove; some types of carbon fiber have toxic coatings, and getting anything embedded in your skin makes you more susceptible to infections and rashes. And that's before mentioning the problems with ingesting carbon fiber, which you very easily could do if it sticks to your fingers.

This is how it looks under my microscope. pic.twitter.com/IaHnt5TlPrSeptember 2, 2026

For now, Drouillard has simply taped over the palm rests, though their comment section suggests using epoxy, urethane, or simply a "bunch of different stickers".

Carbon fiber is a fairly common building material for PC hardware. We've seen a Corsair mouse, a Keychron keyboard concept, an Asus mouse, and even an HP laptop made out of the stuff. This choice of material makes sense, so long as it is adequately treated; carbon fiber is very tough but also very light, which means an uber-lightweight mouse doesn't have to feel flimsy because of the material choice. There are measures that companies can, and likely do, take against traditional wear and tear when using a material like carbon fiber.

Dell has yet to respond to this complaint, and we don't know exactly how the laptop has been treated in the last decade, but it's definitely made me more cautious about the long-term effects of carbon fiber gear—especially if you like to hang onto your hardware for a long time.

MSI Crosshair 16 Max HX E2W review

Jacob Fox — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 09:50:22 +0000

The MSI Crosshair 16 Max HX E2W is in many ways the polar opposite of the other MSI laptop I recently tested, the Stealth 16 AI+ B3W. The latter is an ultra-expensive, sleek and subtle machine that limits its power for the sake of thermals, efficiency, and form factor. Not so with the Crosshair: it's a gaming laptop, and it knows it.

I could tell as much as soon as I unboxed it, thanks to its glossy—and I would later discover, RGB-lit—embossed MSI logo on the lid, plus the general thickness, key styling and so on. It's not particularly obnoxious and still has some subtlety to it, but it's not hiding the fact that it's a gaming laptop.

Nor does it hide this fact when it comes to performance, eking as much as it can out of the RTX 5070 GPU and Core Ultra 7 251HX processor, saying to hell with thermals and battery life. I can certainly respect that, but it has to deliver in other respects, too, including price. And in other respects this laptop is not quite so pretty.

Buy if...

✅ You want great all-round performance: MSI really has designed this thing to eke out as much performance as possible from the mid-range components.

✅ Punchy visuals are important to you: This laptop has a gorgeous OLED panel that does indeed make visuals pop.

Do not buy if...

❌ You want snappy audio: The audio from this laptop suffers from latency issues, and I couldn't seem to resolve them even after quite a bit of tinkering.

❌ You want to take this out and about: Not only does this laptop have poor battery life, it also doesn't look particularly appealing aesthetically for use in public.

MSI Crosshair 16 Max HX E2W features

MSI Crosshair 16 Max HX E2W specs
CPU	Intel Core Ultra 7 251HX
NPU	30 TOPS
Graphics	RTX 5070 mobile (115 W)
Memory	16 GB DDR5-6400
Storage	1 TB SSD
Screen size	16-inch
Screen type	OLED
Resolution	2560 x 1600
Refresh rate	165 Hz
Ports	1x RJ45, 1x Thunderbolt 4, 1x USB Type-C, 3x USB Type-A 3.2 Gen2, 1x HDMI 2.1
Wireless connectivity	Wi-Fi 6E
Battery	80 Whr (4-cell)
Dimensions	363 x 269.7 x 21.95–23.85 mm
Weight	2.2 kg
Price	$2,600 (32 GB ver., US only)

The particular Crosshair 16 Max HX E2W that I tested came with an Intel Core Ultra 7 251HX, RTX 5070, and 16 GB of DDR5 RAM, but there are different versions. The ones I can currently spot online have a more powerful Core Ultra 9 290HX with 32 GB of DDR5, or the same 251HX CPU but an RTX 5060 and 32 GB of DDR5. All of those come with 1 TB of storage.

In the case of the 16 GB of RAM in the version I have, it is at least 2x8 GB of fast 6,400 MT/s memory, rather than a single stick of slow RAM. This presumably helps a bunch with CPU-intensive tasks, as I found the laptop to perform even better than some others with 'better' CPUs.

A big draw here is also the OLED panel, which is gorgeous. I'm not used to seeing OLEDs on such gamer-y gaming laptops, as I've only really seen them on gaming laptops that are going for 'sleek and refined', so it's a nice surprise to see such a great panel here. It's only 165 Hz, but it's a perfect match for the RTX 5070 mobile GPU inside the Crosshair.

Future

At first I thought there weren't many ports on this laptop, but before long I found the rest hidden on the rear side and breathed a sigh of relief. I particularly like the inclusion of a Thunderbolt 4 port as well as a port for an Ethernet connection.

Getting to how it is to actually use the laptop, I don't have any real complaints but equally no specific praises. It's no behemoth, but it's hardly a slimline laptop, either, and its keys feel simply… fine. WASD keys are translucent and there is 24-zone RGB, again signalling to the world 'I am definitely a gaming laptop'. I do wish MSI had foregone the numpad to make things a little less cramped, though. The trackpad is quite small, but it is at least central, which is the correct choice (fight me).

The big downside is audio, just as was the case with the Stealth. However, in this case it's even worse. There's definite (but not catastrophically high) latency over the default audio device, but unlike with the Stealth I tested, this wasn't resolved by switching to a different USB-connected audio device.

(Image credit: Future)

As such, if you play games that really benefit from snappy and responsive audio such as shooters, and especially sensitive to a little audio delay, I'd steer clear unless and until MSI discovers what the problem is and how to fix it (the company is investigating). I tried disabling/uninstalling Nahimic as well as Norton antivirus to see if that helped, but doing the former proved difficult and the latter didn't resolve it.

The speakers themselves are nothing to write home about anyway. They're not the worst I've heard, but they've definitely got a little bit of that tinniness in them that you expect out of a lot of laptops or cheaper Bluetooth speakers.

MSI Crosshair 16 Max HX E2W performance

The Crosshair 16 Max HX E2W performs very well for an RTX 5070 laptop, often beating other similar lappies. MSI has clearly opted for a performance-oriented machine here, and it shows.

1080p gaming performance

This chart shows average and 1% low frame rate results in various tested games at 1080p resolution.

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 | Nvidia RTX 5060 (115 W)

MSI Stealth 16 AI+| RTX 5080 (125 W)

015304560

Cyberpunk 2077 (1080p RT Ultra) Data
Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) \| RTX 5070	46 Avg FPS, 33 1% Low FPS
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) \| RTX 5070 (115 W)	34 Avg FPS, 24 1% Low FPS
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot \| RTX 5070 (85 W)	32 Avg FPS, 20 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 \| RTX 5070	43 Avg FPS, 33 1% Low FPS
Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 \| Nvidia RTX 5060 (115 W)	36 Avg FPS, 24 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+\| RTX 5080 (125 W)	55 Avg FPS, 32 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 | Nvidia RTX 5060 (115 W)

MSI Stealth 16 AI+| RTX 5080 (125 W)

0255075100

Baldur's Gate 3 (1080p Ultra) Data
Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) \| RTX 5070	85 Avg FPS, 52 1% Low FPS
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) \| RTX 5070 (115 W)	74 Avg FPS, 43 1% Low FPS
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot \| RTX 5070 (85 W)	63 Avg FPS, 32 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 \| RTX 5070	69 Avg FPS, 41 1% Low FPS
Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 \| Nvidia RTX 5060 (115 W)	60 Avg FPS, 27 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+\| RTX 5080 (125 W)	68 Avg FPS, 39 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 | Nvidia RTX 5060 (115 W)

MSI Stealth 16 AI+| RTX 5080 (125 W)

020406080

Black Myth: Wukong benchmarking tool (1080p High) Data
Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) \| RTX 5070	68 Avg FPS, 59 1% Low FPS
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) \| RTX 5070 (115 W)	45 Avg FPS, 37 1% Low FPS
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot \| RTX 5070 (85 W)	53 Avg FPS, 30 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 \| RTX 5070	64 Avg FPS, 55 1% Low FPS
Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 \| Nvidia RTX 5060 (115 W)	57 Avg FPS, 39 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+\| RTX 5080 (125 W)	73 Avg FPS, 47 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 | Nvidia RTX 5060 (115 W)

MSI Stealth 16 AI+| RTX 5080 (125 W)

100

0255075100

F1 24 (1080p Ultra High) Data
Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) \| RTX 5070	83 Avg FPS, 57 1% Low FPS
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) \| RTX 5070 (115 W)	62 Avg FPS, 55 1% Low FPS
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot \| RTX 5070 (85 W)	60 Avg FPS, 34 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 \| RTX 5070	75 Avg FPS, 58 1% Low FPS
Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 \| Nvidia RTX 5060 (115 W)	65 Avg FPS, 34 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+\| RTX 5080 (125 W)	100 Avg FPS, 50 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 | Nvidia RTX 5060 (115 W)

MSI Stealth 16 AI+| RTX 5080 (125 W)

102

037.575112.5150

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (1080p Ultra) Data
Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) \| RTX 5070	87 Avg FPS, 54 1% Low FPS
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) \| RTX 5070 (115 W)	83 Avg FPS, 64 1% Low FPS
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot \| RTX 5070 (85 W)	66 Avg FPS, 20 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 \| RTX 5070	82 Avg FPS, 51 1% Low FPS
Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 \| Nvidia RTX 5060 (115 W)	63 Avg FPS, 46 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+\| RTX 5080 (125 W)	102 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS

The MSI Crosshair 16 Max performs incredibly well at 1080p, often beating other RTX 5070 laptops and almost keeping up with an (admittedly power-limited) RTX 5080 laptop.

1600p (native) gaming performance

This chart shows average and 1% low frame rate results in various tested games at 1600p (native) resolution

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)

010203040

Cyberpunk 2077 (Native res. RT Ultra) Data
Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) \| RTX 5070 (115 W)	26 Avg FPS, 19 1% Low FPS
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) \| RTX 5070 (115 W)	9 Avg FPS, 2 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 \| RTX 5070	18 Avg FPS, 8 1% Low FPS
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot \| RTX 5070 (85 W)	12 Avg FPS, 5 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ \| RTX 5080 (125 W)	34 Avg FPS, 22 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)

020406080

Baldur's Gate 3 (Native res. Ultra) Data
Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) \| RTX 5070 (115 W)	79 Avg FPS, 51 1% Low FPS
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) \| RTX 5070 (115 W)	65 Avg FPS, 39 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 \| RTX 5070	67 Avg FPS, 37 1% Low FPS
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot \| RTX 5070 (85 W)	54 Avg FPS, 33 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ \| RTX 5080 (125 W)	67 Avg FPS, 39 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)

0255075100

Black Myth: Wukong benchmarking tool (Native res. High) Data
Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) \| RTX 5070 (115 W)	66 Avg FPS, 57 1% Low FPS
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) \| RTX 5070 (115 W)	94 Avg FPS, 69 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 \| RTX 5070	72 Avg FPS, 62 1% Low FPS
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot \| RTX 5070 (85 W)	57 Avg FPS, 49 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ \| RTX 5080 (125 W)	57 Avg FPS, 49 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)

020406080

F1 24 (Native res. Ultra High) Data
Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) \| RTX 5070 (115 W)	47 Avg FPS, 37 1% Low FPS
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) \| RTX 5070 (115 W)	35 Avg FPS, 29 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 \| RTX 5070	41 Avg FPS, 32 1% Low FPS
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot \| RTX 5070 (85 W)	34 Avg FPS, 18 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ \| RTX 5080 (125 W)	62 Avg FPS, 43 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)

020406080

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (Native res. Ultra) Data
Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) \| RTX 5070 (115 W)	59 Avg FPS, 41 1% Low FPS
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) \| RTX 5070 (115 W)	53 Avg FPS, 31 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 \| RTX 5070	54 Avg FPS, 39 1% Low FPS
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot \| RTX 5070 (85 W)	45 Avg FPS, 17 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ \| RTX 5080 (125 W)	74 Avg FPS, 48 1% Low FPS

The Corsshair 16 Max does very well at native res, offering playable frame rates in almost all of these games. In most of them, it leads other RTX 5070 gaming laptops. (Note the MSI Stealth listed here has an RTX 5080 that is power-limited compared to some other RTX 5080 laptops.)

At both 1080p and 1600p (native), the MSI performs better than other RTX 5070 mobile laptops and even comes close to the (power-limited) Stealth with RTX 5080 mobile. This is more so the case at 1080p where things are less GPU-bound and the CPU can have more of an effect, but it's still great at native.

Real-world gaming performance

This chart shows average and 1% low frame rate results in various tested games at 1600p resolution with Quality upscaling enabled, and frame gen where applicable

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)

0255075100

Cyberpunk 2077 (Native res. RT Ultra + upscaling (quality), 2x FG) Data
Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) \| RTX 5070 (115 W)	80 Avg FPS, 51 1% Low FPS
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) \| RTX 5070 (115 W)	27 Avg FPS, 18 1% Low FPS
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot \| RTX 5070 (85 W)	58 Avg FPS, 35 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 \| RTX 5070	75 Avg FPS, 58 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ \| RTX 5080 (125 W)	97 Avg FPS, 53 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)

0255075100

Black Myth: Wukong benchmarking tool (Native res. High + upscaling (quality, 67%)) Data
Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) \| RTX 5070 (115 W)	75 Avg FPS, 64 1% Low FPS
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) \| RTX 5070 (115 W)	94 Avg FPS, 69 1% Low FPS
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot \| RTX 5070 (85 W)	57 Avg FPS, 49 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 \| RTX 5070	72 Avg FPS, 62 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ \| RTX 5080 (125 W)	87 Avg FPS, 74 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

118

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)

147

037.575112.5150

F1 24 (Native res. Ultra High + upscaling (quality), 2x FG) Data
Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) \| RTX 5070 (115 W)	118 Avg FPS, 82 1% Low FPS
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) \| RTX 5070 (115 W)	N/A
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot \| RTX 5070 (85 W)	52 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 \| RTX 5070	92 Avg FPS, 70 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ \| RTX 5080 (125 W)	147 Avg FPS, 56 1% Low FPS

Again, the MSI Crosshair 16 Max performs well. With upscaling and/or frame gen, expect smooth frame rates even in pretty demanding games at native resolution on max settings. (Note the MSI Stealth listed here has an RTX 5080 that is power-limited compared to some other RTX 5080 laptops.)

When upscaling and/or frame gen is enabled, even pretty demanding games become smoothly playable at native res on max settings. Saying this, you might still want to drop your settings a little just to reduce any latency incurred by frame gen, as higher starting frame rates improve this.

I'd say this laptop is ideal for gaming on high (but not max) settings at 1600p with upscaling and, in some games, frame gen. That will be how to make the best use of the 165 Hz refresh rate on offer here.

(Image credit: Future)

Interestingly, this one seems to perform even better in most games than the previous MSI Crosshair we tested, the Crosshair 16 HX AI (2025), which has the same GPU and a more powerful Core Ultra 9 275HX processor. That could be due to driver improvements over the past year plus the fact that this new one gets hotter, ie, allows for a bit of extra performance at the top.

System performance

The laptops are here tested against intensive benchmarks that mostly test the CPU, but also the GPU, for productivity tasks.

Decompressing (GIPS)

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | Core Ultra 7 251HX | RTX 5070 (115 W)

120.254

135.177

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | Core Ultra 9 275HX | RTX 5070 (115 W)

121.787

130.822

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | Ryzen AI 7 350 | RTX 5070 (85 W)

77.91

87.77

Framework 16 | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 | RTX 5070

108.822

128.355

Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 | Ryzen 7 250 | RTX 5060 (115 W)

65.22

105.78

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | Core Ultra 9 386H | RTX 5080 (125 W)

105.399

98.828

037.575112.5150

7zip 24.07 Data
Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) \| Core Ultra 7 251HX \| RTX 5070 (115 W)	120.254 Compressing (GIPS), 135.177 Decompressing (GIPS)
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) \| Core Ultra 9 275HX \| RTX 5070 (115 W)	121.787 Compressing (GIPS), 130.822 Decompressing (GIPS)
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot \| Ryzen AI 7 350 \| RTX 5070 (85 W)	77.91 Compressing (GIPS), 87.77 Decompressing (GIPS)
Framework 16 \| Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 \| RTX 5070	108.822 Compressing (GIPS), 128.355 Decompressing (GIPS)
Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 \| Ryzen 7 250 \| RTX 5060 (115 W)	65.22 Compressing (GIPS), 105.78 Decompressing (GIPS)
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ \| Core Ultra 9 386H \| RTX 5080 (125 W)	105.399 Compressing (GIPS), 98.828 Decompressing (GIPS)

Multi-core index score

Single-core index score

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | Core Ultra 7 251HX | RTX 5070 (115 W)

1638

129

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | Core Ultra 9 275HX | RTX 5070 (115 W)

1320

134

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | Ryzen AI 7 350 | RTX 5070 (85 W)

800

Framework 16 | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 | RTX 5070

1158

105

Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 | Ryzen 7 250 | RTX 5060 (115 W)

812

101

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | Core Ultra 9 386H | RTX 5080 (125 W)

1221

124

05001,0001,5002,000

Cinebench 2024 Data
Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) \| Core Ultra 7 251HX \| RTX 5070 (115 W)	1638 Multi-core index score, 129 Single-core index score
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) \| Core Ultra 9 275HX \| RTX 5070 (115 W)	1320 Multi-core index score, 134 Single-core index score
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot \| Ryzen AI 7 350 \| RTX 5070 (85 W)	800 Multi-core index score, 78 Single-core index score
Framework 16 \| Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 \| RTX 5070	1158 Multi-core index score, 105 Single-core index score
Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 \| Ryzen 7 250 \| RTX 5060 (115 W)	812 Multi-core index score, 101 Single-core index score
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ \| Core Ultra 9 386H \| RTX 5080 (125 W)	1221 Multi-core index score, 124 Single-core index score

CPU (samples/min)

GPU (samples/min)

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | Core Ultra 7 251HX | RTX 5070 (115 W)

112.66

1046.74

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | Core Ultra 9 275HX | RTX 5070 (115 W)

108.15

1028.98

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | Ryzen AI 7 350 | RTX 5070 (85 W)

65.55

1017.59

Framework 16 | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 | RTX 5070

93.15

1026.08

Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 | Ryzen 7 250 | RTX 5060 (115 W)

62.87

1014.05

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | Core Ultra 9 386H | RTX 5080 (125 W)

79.43

1691.37

05001,0001,5002,000

Blender 4.2.0 (junkshop) Data
Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) \| Core Ultra 7 251HX \| RTX 5070 (115 W)	112.66 CPU (samples/min), 1046.74 GPU (samples/min)
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) \| Core Ultra 9 275HX \| RTX 5070 (115 W)	108.15 CPU (samples/min), 1028.98 GPU (samples/min)
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot \| Ryzen AI 7 350 \| RTX 5070 (85 W)	65.55 CPU (samples/min), 1017.59 GPU (samples/min)
Framework 16 \| Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 \| RTX 5070	93.15 CPU (samples/min), 1026.08 GPU (samples/min)
Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 \| Ryzen 7 250 \| RTX 5060 (115 W)	62.87 CPU (samples/min), 1014.05 GPU (samples/min)
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ \| Core Ultra 9 386H \| RTX 5080 (125 W)	79.43 CPU (samples/min), 1691.37 GPU (samples/min)

Overall index score

Duration (Sec)

Sec/image

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | Core Ultra 7 251HX | RTX 5070 (115 W)

1750

57.12

3.57

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | Core Ultra 9 275HX | RTX 5070 (115 W)

1508

66.27

4.14

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | Ryzen AI 7 350 | RTX 5070 (85 W)

1418

70.52

4.41

Framework 16 | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 | RTX 5070

1789

55.9

3.49

Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 | Ryzen 7 250 | RTX 5060 (115 W)

1490

67.11

4.2

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | Core Ultra 9 386H | RTX 5080 (125 W)

2472

40.44

2.53

07501,5002,2503,000

Procyon Data
Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) \| Core Ultra 7 251HX \| RTX 5070 (115 W)	1750 Overall index score, 57.12 Duration (Sec), 3.57 Sec/image
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) \| Core Ultra 9 275HX \| RTX 5070 (115 W)	1508 Overall index score, 66.27 Duration (Sec), 4.14 Sec/image
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot \| Ryzen AI 7 350 \| RTX 5070 (85 W)	1418 Overall index score, 70.52 Duration (Sec), 4.41 Sec/image
Framework 16 \| Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 \| RTX 5070	1789 Overall index score, 55.9 Duration (Sec), 3.49 Sec/image
Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 \| Ryzen 7 250 \| RTX 5060 (115 W)	1490 Overall index score, 67.11 Duration (Sec), 4.2 Sec/image
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ \| Core Ultra 9 386H \| RTX 5080 (125 W)	2472 Overall index score, 40.44 Duration (Sec), 2.53 Sec/image

The Intel Core Ultra 7 251HX in the MSI Crosshair 16 Max is better for productivity tasks than a lot of other RTX 5070 laptops

Much as with this laptop's gaming performance, its productivity performance is impressive. When allowed to run so hot, the Intel chip here can plough through tasks such as decompression and other multi-core-heavy tasks.

MSI Crosshair 16 Max HX E2W thermals

Real-world gaming temperatures

Gaming temperature results recorded during multiple Metro Exodus EE runs

Gaming temperatures

Avg CPU (°C)

Max CPU (°C)

Avg GPU (°C)

Max GPU (°C)

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | Core Ultra 7 251HX | RTX 5070 (115 W)

104

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | Core Ultra 9 275HX | RTX 5070 (115 W)

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | Ryzen AI 7 350 | RTX 5070 (85 W)

Framework 16 | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 | RTX 5070

Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 | Ryzen 7 250 | RTX 5060 (115 W)

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | Core Ultra 9 386H | RTX 5080 (125 W)

100

037.575112.5150

Gaming temperatures Data
Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) \| Core Ultra 7 251HX \| RTX 5070 (115 W)	91 Avg CPU (°C), 104 Max CPU (°C), 81 Avg GPU (°C), 84 Max GPU (°C)
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) \| Core Ultra 9 275HX \| RTX 5070 (115 W)	55 Avg CPU (°C), 98 Max CPU (°C), 28 Avg GPU (°C), 69 Max GPU (°C)
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot \| Ryzen AI 7 350 \| RTX 5070 (85 W)	55 Avg CPU (°C), 87 Max CPU (°C), 57 Avg GPU (°C), 71 Max GPU (°C)
Framework 16 \| Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 \| RTX 5070	65 Avg CPU (°C), 73 Max CPU (°C), 68 Avg GPU (°C), 71 Max GPU (°C)
Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 \| Ryzen 7 250 \| RTX 5060 (115 W)	58 Avg CPU (°C), 71 Max CPU (°C), 59 Avg GPU (°C), 72 Max GPU (°C)
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ \| Core Ultra 9 386H \| RTX 5080 (125 W)	92 Avg CPU (°C), 100 Max CPU (°C), 81 Avg GPU (°C), 87 Max GPU (°C)

The MSI Crosshair 16 Max does run very hot on Extreme Performance mode (and, as an aside, still pretty damn hot in Balanced mode). That's especially the case for its Core Ultra 7 251HX CPU.

This laptop is indeed particularly toasty. This obviously helps in the performance department, but don't expect it to win any efficiency medals. 104 °C for the max CPU temp is hot, as is 84 °C for the GPU, though the new MSI Stealth runs a little hotter on that front.

That being said, during all my time gaming, I didn't notice my fingers getting too hot on WASD, and given the performance is so good, I doubt the high temps indicate too much throttling.

(Image credit: Future)

The Crosshair can get pretty loud in Extreme Performance mode, which these benchmarks were taken in. However, as with the new Stealth, this Crosshair's fans don't sound grating at all. You just get a pleasant, loud whoosh. Though it will make it difficult to hear your game through the speakers if you're opting for built-in audio.

MSI Crosshair 16 Max HX E2W aesthetics

I don't have a ton of praise for the way this laptop looks, unfortunately. It's not awful, just not my particular cup of tea. There's a splash of the old-fashioned, angular, gamer-y look to it, but it only leans kind of half-heartedly in that direction, which ultimately means it looks a little confused about what it wants to be overall.

(Image credit: Future)

You're getting some funky RGB lighting on the keys, including a translucent WASD if that's your jam, and you're also getting the logo on the lid which lights up and a particularly angular design on the underside, but the rest of the chassis is plain. To be honest, I'd rather it leaned in one direction or the other: gamer-y, or subtle. Still, it's far from an outrageous design and doesn't offend my aesthetic sensibilities too much.

MSI Crosshair 16 Max HX E2W software

The main bloatware on this laptop is Norton antivirus, which I'd personally promptly uninstall just because Microsoft Defender is fine and Norton, in my historical opinion, can be a bit of a pain.

(Image credit: MSI)

Apart from that, you get MSI Center to control all the settings such as lighting and performance modes. You can install a bunch more modules to fiddle with different settings if you wish, but I just stuck with those and the default system info and options pages. It runs well and isn't too difficult to navigate once you get used to it, but it definitely feels like a 'set it and leave it' kind of software that you don't need to load up very often.

MSI Crosshair 16 Max HX E2W battery life

Battery life

Testing how long the battery lasts in Balanced mode, medium brightness, Wi-Fi disconnected, in the PCMark 10 gaming battery life test.

PCMark 10

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W)

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI)

101

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot

109

Framework 16

131

Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10

MSI Stealth 16 AI+

104

037.575112.5150

The MSI Crosshair 16 Max perhaps unsurprisingly doesn't do very well when it comes to battery life. It seems oriented around eking out as much performance as possible from its CPU and GPU, without much care for efficiency.

You probably already expected this given the laptop ekes out as much performance as it can from its components, not to mention that it runs mighty hot, but battery life is not great. This isn't a laptop for those of you who primarily want to game while out and about using battery power, but for short sessions or light work it's fine unplugged.

The RTX 5080-boasting MSI Stealth laptop I tested has a 90 Wh battery and lasted for 104 minutes in a gaming battery life benchmark, whereas this one has an 80 Wh battery and lasted for just 72 minutes. That's 31% less time up and running, and less than a bunch of other RTX 5070 laptops we've tested.

MSI Crosshair 16 Max HX E2W Value

You're looking at about $2,600 for the 32 GB version of this—$2,000 on offer—and I can't see the 16 GB version that I tried for sale anywhere. Looking at some of the best deals on gaming laptops right now, that $2,600 is pretty expensive for an RTX 5070 machine.

On the one hand, this isn't a corner-cutting machine, as you're getting a lovely OLED panel and some very convincing performance that pushes the CPU and GPU as far as possible. But on the other hand, even $2,000 on sale is a lot for an RTX 5070 machine, even during a memory shortage. You can often pick similar but non-OLED gaming laptops up for well under $1,500 on sale.

Future

As such, unless and until there are bigger discounts on it, I don't think the price tag fits what's on offer. If the normal retail price were a couple hundred lower and the discount price was a couple hundred lower, too, I would consider it for the OLED panel and great performance.

But as it stands, it's a tough sell, especially if you want any kind of battery or thermal efficiency, or just a laptop that looks a little more dashing. Not to mention one that doesn't suffer from audio latency issues. Considering performance alone it's a great machine, but the price is not quite right.

'I'm done. I used up my luck for this timeline': Redditor accidentally saves $5,000 on RTX 5090 Razer Blade 18 thanks to labelling error

James Bentley — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 11:51:39 +0000

Blade 18 2026 - steal turns into steal of the century
from r/GamingLaptops

One Redditor has seemingly got the PC hardware deal of the year by paying €2,433 (around $2,800) for a Razer laptop that currently sells for €6,600 (just under $7,700). Gaming laptops may be pricey right now, thanks to the memory crisis, but that would be a steal even pre-memory crisis. All they had to do was get incredibly lucky.

As posted by iiT2 over on the GamingLaptops subreddit, a European buyer bought a Blade 18, with 32 GB of memory, a 1 TB SSD, an RTX 5080, and an Intel Ultra 9 290 HX Plus. A mighty machine, but modest in comparison to what they were accidentally sent: A Razer Blade 18 with an RTX 5090, the same Intel chip, a 2 TB SSD, and 64 GB of memory. I put this new configuration together on Razer's website and found out the memory upgrade alone costs an extra €900 (around $1,050) more than the price they actually paid.

The user says, "I‘m done. I used up my luck for this timeline," and given they could have almost purchased three of their original configs for the price of the new one, I'm inclined to agree.

The Razer label and invoice do seem to match with both the machine and the original receipt, so that implies whoever labelled this rig at the Razer factory simply labelled it wrong. That means, inevitably, this would likely have gotten into the hands of some buyer somewhere. Just don't count on it happening again. This is an exceedingly rare mistake on Razer's part.

And what a laptop it is. We at PC Gamer are big fans of what Razer is putting out right now in the gaming laptop space. The most recent Razer Blade 16 got an 86% in our review, with our Andy saying, "It's still one of the best gaming laptops money can buy, but the massive price tag throws me for a loop."

(Image credit: Future)

We also really liked last year's Razer Blade 14, with its upgraded chassis, gorgeous display, and solid battery life. Razer Blade laptops are pretty expensive, even considering the memory crisis, but their build quality and design are undeniably solid. Plus, they're gorgeous to behold.

We don't technically know if the Redditor will get to keep this laptop, but given it seems to have been sent due to a mislabelling by the vendor selling it, I certainly wouldn't want to give it back. We also don't know if the original vendor would be aware of their mistake, unless informed.

One look at our roundup of the best gaming laptop deals will show you that gaming laptops are in a pretty poor place right now. Around $2400 will get you an RTX 5080 and 16 GB of memory, on sale, and that's because memory, storage, and even GPUs are on the rise price-wise, and unlikely to fall for some time. Luckily, iiT2 now has enough gaming horsepower to wait until the whole thing blows over.

I got my greasy mitts on a host of RTX Spark laptops running, what else, games at Gamescom 2026—and there's a couple I really want to take home

Andy Edser — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 17:58:28 +0000

Hello from Gamescom 2026, where yours truly has been trying out some of the latest laptops at the Nvidia booth. The machines I was shown are made by various manufacturers, but all of them have the same core internal hardware, in the form of Nvidia's RTX Spark SOC.

Which means that, alongside 20 Grace CPU cores in the custom Arm-based chip, they've also got 6144 RTX Blackwell GPU cores to play with. And that means RTX 5070-like gaming performance, at least on paper.

And in practice, each was demonstrated to be capable of running modern games at high frame rates. Exactly how high was kept under wraps, unfortunately, although it was mentioned that frame generation was in use for each.

So, I wasn't able to do any benchmarking of my own, or dig into the settings menus to find out exactly what sort of DLSS/FG combination I was dealing with. Still, 007 First Light, Arc Raiders, Borderlands 4, and F1 25 were all running without a hitch, which is apparently indicative of the smooth sailing Nvidia has experienced with Microsoft's Prism translation layer.

I asked about any unforeseen emulation issues, but nope, apparently all is well in the land of Windows-on-Arm and Nvidia chips. As for the laptops themselves, I took a few notes based on my brief time playing with them at the booth.

Future

First off, lets talk about the one I really want to take home. The Asus ProArt P14 looks and feels, for all intents and purposes, like the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14—and that's a very good thing indeed. It's got a milled aluminium chassis that feels robust (yet slim in the hand), a crisp keyboard, and a beautifully vivid OLED panel.

I had a brief run around in Arc Raiders on this particular lappy, and immediately wanted to squirrel it back to my hotel room for a proper gaming session.

14-inch laptops are the perfect size for taking on the road, and the relative lack of weight compared to the beefier (and much older) Blade 15 Advanced in my backpack made me yearn for the little P14 instead.

Proper gaming performance, too? It appears so, although Arc Raiders is far from the most demanding of test games. Still, while I'm not so confident in my abilities as to guess exactly what frame rate or settings combo this machine was running at, I will say it felt like 100 fps+. Ah, go on then. Probably High to Ultra settings. If I was pushed. Maybe.

Special mention should also be given to the Dell XPS 16 Creator Edition. Yes, I associate Dell laptops with being dull as well, but this new XPS model feels excellent, and it's rather handsome, too. The keyboard is as tight as a drum, the OLED display looks great, and it wasn't making a whole lot of noise while I ripped and teared my way through Doom: The Dark Ages.

(Image credit: Future)

It feels like a civilised machine I'd be happy to sling in my bag, at least on this first impression. Both of these laptops look like the sort of thing you might expect to see in a business meeting, but the gaming ability of the RTX Spark SOC squeezed into their slim and light chassis designs is plain to see.

Every laptop showdown, even one as brief as this, is likely to come up with an also-ran that doesn't quite cut the mustard—and for me, this comes in the form of the new Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra. In a room full of sublime competition, the chassis looks and feels... tired, while the Mini LED screen wasn't particularly enticing to behold. It was trundling away in the corner of the room running World of Tanks, and didn't garner "oohs" and "ahhs" in the same way as the rest.

(Image credit: Future)

Despite the hardware inside, something about it says "old fashioned" to me. It's funny how we judge these things in an instant, but there we are. I'm prepared to change my mind if we get one in for review (I'm incredibly tired and cranky after a long day at the show, after all), but I get the feeling it's going to cost lots of money—without looking and feeling as good as its premium competition.

Ah, now I've gone and done it. I've mentioned the price. Or rather, prices. The Nvidia reps around me refused to be drawn in on exact figures for these Spark-infused machines, especially as some of the models on display had a loadout of 128 GB of RAM. Ludicrous amounts, I think you'll agree, which will almost certainly be sold for ludicrous amounts of cash. For all that local AI stuff you'll be doing, naturally.

Personally, the lesser-seen optimist living in the middle of my cold, brutal heart is still hoping for 16 GB or 32 GB variants of the Asus and Dell laptops for somewhat-reasonable figures—as more slim and light, gaming-capable machines to choose from is always a good thing.

Looking at the state of gaming laptop prices at the moment, though, I think said optimist will probably be let down once more. It was a nice day out, at least. Anyone fancy buying me a bratwurst?

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ B3W review

Jacob Fox — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 15:04:21 +0000

If there were ever a laptop design to be right "up my alley", as we brits like to say, it would be this one. That's because it makes its sacrifices in exactly the right places to deliver something genuinely portable, sleek, elegant, and satisfying to use both for gaming and work.

The MSI 'Stealth' laptop looks to have been reimagined along these MacBook or Razer Blade-esque lines—and successfully so—featuring a giant touchpad, thin aluminium form factor, subtle upward-facing speakers, and a spacious screen.

It's not just a looker, though, as MSI has crammed an RTX 5080 mobile GPU into it, making for genuine high-end performance. It has, however, had to be power-limited to play nicely with the slim chassis, meaning you're not getting quite the performance you could get out of a chunkier laptop for the same very expensive price or cheaper.

Buy if...

✅ You use your laptop in public: This thing definitely looks the part alongside MacBooks and other such suave devices, with its aluminium frame and giant trackpad.

✅ You use a USB headset: I didn't have any of the audio latency issues I noticed when using USB earphones/headset.

Do not buy if...

❌ You like to game using the laptop speakers: I noticed definite audio latency over the default audio device with this laptop, which can be annoying in shooters, for instance.

❌ You just want raw performance: This laptop looks gorgeous and is very portable for a 16-inch machine, but you can get more high-end horsepower for less if you don't mind something chunkier.

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ B3W Features

Stealth 16 AI+ B3W specs
CPU	Intel Core Ultra 9 386H
NPU	50 TOPS
Graphics	RTX 5080 mobile (125 W)
Memory	32 GB DDR5-5600
Storage	1 TB SSD
Screen size	16-inch
Screen type	OLED
Resolution	2560 x 1600
Refresh rate	240 Hz
Ports	1x 3.5 mm audio (combo), 2x USB-A 3.2 Gen2, 2x Thunderbolt 4, 1x HDMI 2.1, 2.5 Gb Ethernet
Wireless connectivity	Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6
Battery	90 Wh
Dimensions	354 x 246 x 16.65–19.99 mm
Weight	1.99 kg
Price	$3,999.99 / £3,350 (2 TB version)

After powering on the laptop for the first time, I was immediately impressed by how it feels to use. The trackpad doesn't require much force to press but just enough so you're not accidentally pressing it, and it has a very satisfying click. I didn't have many problems with accidentally moving the cursor while typing because of the size of the trackpad, but it did happen occasionally.

'Satisfying' is also the word I'd use to describe the pleasantly tactile chiclet keyboard. This keyboard has four-zone RGB that I set to solid white to match the classy look.

There's also a decent selection of ports on the Stealth, including two Thunderbolt 4, a HDMI, and even an Ethernet port. This, I found to be particularly impressive given the sleek form factor.

(Image credit: Future)

Sleek, that is, and very shiny thanks to its 240 Hz OLED. It's of the 16:10 variety, too, which is the best kind as it gives you plenty of space for browsing and so on. I'd say 16-inch with a 16:10 aspect ratio is pretty much ideal for a laptop, especially one like this that's also slim and portable. The OLED panel itself is fantastic, too, with plenty of contrast thanks to the true blacks and vibrant colours. And of course the smooth 240 Hz certainly doesn't hurt in those games that can push frame rates up that high.

Specs-wise, this particular version gives you only the choice of the Core Ultra 9 386H for the processor, but you can choose between an RTX 5070, 5070 Ti, or 5080 version. The latter two come with 32 GB of DDR5 RAM, but the RTX 5070 version comes with just 16 GB. All configs except for one 2 TB version comes with 1 TB of storage.

The version I tested has 1 TB of storage, 32 GB of DDR5-5600 memory, and an RTX 5080 mobile. The RTX 5080 here has a big asterisk: it's a nerfed—ie, power-limited—version of the GPU. With a max draw of just 125 W, that's 50 W less juice than you get with a full-fat RTX 5080 mobile like the one in the Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10, the current best high-performance gaming laptop. That's a sacrifice made to keep things so slim, as is the choice of CPU which sacrifices some top-end compute performance for efficiency.

(Image credit: Future)

So far so good, but there is one area that unfortunately rains all over the parade, and that's audio. The problem isn't the sound quality or volume, as things are great in both these respects—clear, punchy (though not as bassy as standalone speakers, of course), and plenty loud.

The problem is latency and glitching, though mainly the former. Initially the speakers would spit every now and then, but that seemed to clear up after using the laptop for a while. I'm not sure why that is, given I had Windows update paused, but whatever the reason, I was glad when it stopped.

The persistent problem was poor audio latency. There is a delay between my in-game action (such as shooting) and the sound coming through. It's about the same level of delay as I experience using Bluetooth earphones without any low-latency mode enabled. It only happens over the default audio device, not when I plug in a new USB device like my earphones with USB-C DAC.

(Image credit: Future)

That leads me to believe it might be a problem with the default audio device drivers, and after checking various (x) discussions (x) online it seems like the problem could be with Nahimic, however I cannot confirm this. I can say that I tried different methods to disable and uninstall the drivers, which didn't work, and I also uninstalled the Norton antivirus that comes bundled with the laptop just to see if that was the issue, but that didn't resolve it. MSI says it is looking into the issue, but so far I haven't heard any results of this investigation.

To be clear, using the speakers is fine for listening to music and for playing casual, non-shooter games, but for playing shooters the latency is definitely noticeable, meaning a separate USB audio device might be necessary. Though saying that, when testing a different MSI laptop, even switching to a different device didn't resolve the latency, though it strangely did with the Stealth.

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ B3W Performance

Given the high-end components sitting inside this MSI Stealth 16 AI+ B3W, it was never going to fail at churning out frames. You'd have to severely throttle an RTX 5080 laptop GPU for it to be unable to deliver playable performance. But for the Stealth's price tag we want more than just 'playable', so let's see how it does.

1080p gaming performance

This chart shows average and 1% low frame rate results in various tested games at 1080p resolution

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W)

Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 | RTX 5080 (175 W)

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

020406080

Cyberpunk 2077 (1080p RT Ultra) Data
Product	Value
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ \| RTX 5080 (125 W)	55 Avg FPS, 32 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) \| RTX 5080 (135 W)	52 Avg FPS, 39 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 \| RTX 5080 (175 W)	68 Avg FPS, 38 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 \| RTX 5070	43 Avg FPS, 33 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W)

Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 | RTX 5080 (175 W)

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

0255075100

Baldur's Gate 3 (1080p Ultra) Data
Product	Value
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ \| RTX 5080 (125 W)	68 Avg FPS, 39 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) \| RTX 5080 (135 W)	78 Avg FPS, 43 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 \| RTX 5080 (175 W)	96 Avg FPS, 55 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 \| RTX 5070	69 Avg FPS, 41 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W)

102

Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 | RTX 5080 (175 W)

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

037.575112.5150

Black Myth: Wukong benchmarking tool (1080p High) Data
Product	Value
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ \| RTX 5080 (125 W)	73 Avg FPS, 47 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) \| RTX 5080 (135 W)	102 Avg FPS, 83 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 \| RTX 5080 (175 W)	99 Avg FPS, 84 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 \| RTX 5070	64 Avg FPS, 55 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)

100

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W)

101

Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 | RTX 5080 (175 W)

126

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

037.575112.5150

F1 24 (1080p Ultra High) Data
Product	Value
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ \| RTX 5080 (125 W)	100 Avg FPS, 50 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) \| RTX 5080 (135 W)	101 Avg FPS, 76 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 \| RTX 5080 (175 W)	126 Avg FPS, 51 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 \| RTX 5070	75 Avg FPS, 58 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)

102

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W)

102

Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 | RTX 5080 (175 W)

140

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

037.575112.5150

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (1080p Ultra) Data
Product	Value
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ \| RTX 5080 (125 W)	102 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) \| RTX 5080 (135 W)	102 Avg FPS, 53 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 \| RTX 5080 (175 W)	140 Avg FPS, 72 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 \| RTX 5070	82 Avg FPS, 51 1% Low FPS

The MSI Stealth 16 AI+ sits between RTX 5070 and full-fat (175 W) RTX 5080 gaming laptops in 1080p performance.

1600p (native) gaming performance

This chart shows average and 1% low frame rate results in various tested games at 1600p (native) resolution

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W)

Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 | RTX 5080 (175 W)

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

010203040

Cyberpunk 2077 (Native res. RT Ultra) Data
Product	Value
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ \| RTX 5080 (125 W)	34 Avg FPS, 22 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) \| RTX 5080 (135 W)	31 Avg FPS, 24 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 \| RTX 5080 (175 W)	40 Avg FPS, 28 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 \| RTX 5070	18 Avg FPS, 8 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W)

Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 | RTX 5080 (175 W)

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

0255075100

Baldur's Gate 3 (Native res. Ultra) Data
Product	Value
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ \| RTX 5080 (125 W)	67 Avg FPS, 39 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) \| RTX 5080 (135 W)	80 Avg FPS, 46 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 \| RTX 5080 (175 W)	96 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 \| RTX 5070	67 Avg FPS, 37 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W)

Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 | RTX 5080 (175 W)

111

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

037.575112.5150

Black Myth: Wukong benchmarking tool (Native res. High) Data
Product	Value
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ \| RTX 5080 (125 W)	57 Avg FPS, 49 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) \| RTX 5080 (135 W)	75 Avg FPS, 66 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 \| RTX 5080 (175 W)	111 Avg FPS, 80 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 \| RTX 5070	72 Avg FPS, 62 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W)

Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 | RTX 5080 (175 W)

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

020406080

F1 24 (Native res. Ultra High) Data
Product	Value
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ \| RTX 5080 (125 W)	62 Avg FPS, 43 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) \| RTX 5080 (135 W)	63 Avg FPS, 53 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 \| RTX 5080 (175 W)	77 Avg FPS, 55 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 \| RTX 5070	41 Avg FPS, 32 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W)

Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 | RTX 5080 (175 W)

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

0255075100

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (Native res. Ultra) Data
Product	Value
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ \| RTX 5080 (125 W)	74 Avg FPS, 48 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) \| RTX 5080 (135 W)	68 Avg FPS, 46 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 \| RTX 5080 (175 W)	96 Avg FPS, 65 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 \| RTX 5070	54 Avg FPS, 39 1% Low FPS

As is the case at 1080p, at 1600p the MSI Stealth 16 AI+ sits between an RTX 5070 laptop and a full-fat (175 W) RTX 5080 laptop in its gaming performance.

At both 1080p and 1600p (native) resolution, the power-limited RTX 5080 in the Stealth 16 AI+ tends to churn out more frames than an RTX 5070 mobile but fewer frames than an unrestricted RTX 5080 mobile. There are exceptions in my testing, though these are most likely due to the CPUs in the different laptops I compared the Stealth to. If you play mainly CPU-intensive games, you might do better with a HX chip (and a thicker laptop) rather than an H one like this.

Real-world gaming performance

This chart shows average and 1% low frame rate results in various tested games at 1600p resolution with Quality upscaling enabled, and frame gen where applicable

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W)

Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 | RTX 5080 (175 W)

124

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

037.575112.5150

Cyberpunk 2077 (Native res. RT Ultra + upscaling (quality), 2x FG) Data
Product	Value
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ \| RTX 5080 (125 W)	97 Avg FPS, 53 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) \| RTX 5080 (135 W)	95 Avg FPS, 79 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 \| RTX 5080 (175 W)	124 Avg FPS, 83 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 \| RTX 5070	75 Avg FPS, 58 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W)

Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 | RTX 5080 (175 W)

111

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

037.575112.5150

Black Myth: Wukong benchmarking tool (Native res. High + upscaling (quality, 67%)) Data
Product	Value
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ \| RTX 5080 (125 W)	87 Avg FPS, 74 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) \| RTX 5080 (135 W)	84 Avg FPS, 72 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 \| RTX 5080 (175 W)	111 Avg FPS, 80 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 \| RTX 5070	72 Avg FPS, 62 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)

147

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W)

144

125

Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 | RTX 5080 (175 W)

184

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

050100150200

F1 24 (Native res. Ultra High + upscaling (quality), 2x FG) Data
Product	Value
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ \| RTX 5080 (125 W)	147 Avg FPS, 56 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) \| RTX 5080 (135 W)	144 Avg FPS, 125 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 \| RTX 5080 (175 W)	184 Avg FPS, 91 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 \| RTX 5070	92 Avg FPS, 70 1% Low FPS

Again, the MSI Stealth 16 AI+ sits somewhere between an RTX 5070 and full-fat RTX 5080 gaming laptop, although with upscaling and frame gen enabled, it seems to sit a little closer to the latter.

In terms of real-world gaming performance, ie, performance with upscaling and/or frame gen enabled, this laptop performs very well, running not too far behind a laptop with the full-fat RTX 5080 mobile. In terms of actual frame rates, in most games expect well above 60 fps on ultra settings, with ray tracing enabled, at native resolution.

And of course expect even better than this when you lower your game settings down below max, as this will net you frame rates high enough to make good use of that 240 Hz refresh rate. Not to mention lower latency, too, because frame gen does better in terms of latency when the starting frame rate is higher.

Extreme vs Balanced mode

Comparing gaming performance, frequency, and temps for Extreme Performance (+ Apex) mode vs Balanced mode.

Versus Comparison Data
Attribute	MSI Stealth 16 AI+	MSI Stealth 16 AI+ (Balanced mode)
3DMark Time Spy Extreme	8646	7238
Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (1080p Ultra)	102	89
Gaming temperatures	92	83
GPU stats	2079	1607

3DMark Time Spy Extreme (Overall index score)

+19%8,646

7,238

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (1080p Ultra) (Avg FPS)

+15%102

Gaming temperatures (Avg CPU (°C))

+11%92

GPU stats (Avg GPU freq. (MHz))

+29%2,079

1,607

Putting the laptop into Balanced mode cuts down the GPU frequency and CPU temps, but does cost 15–20% performance in-game.

While the above tests were done with the laptop in Extreme Performance mode, I also tried out the laptop in Balanced mode, which limits frequencies and temps a little and keeps the fans quieter. If you're playing graphically intensive games, I really wouldn't recommend this as the drop in performance is quite significant. It drops frame rates by about 15–20%, turning it more decidedly into something like an RTX 5070 machine, and the fan noise reduction isn't really worth that. But for less demanding games where you don't need that extra 15+%, it's a good shout.

I also tried disabling the 'Apex Mode' which pushes things to the max, even above the 'Extreme Performance' defaults, but I found there to be little in it, just a 1-3% decrease in performance and basically no change in max temps, just 1 °C lower for the GPU.

Overall, I'm pretty impressed with how this Stealth performs given its sleek form factor and pleasant-sounding fans (they do get loud, just not in an obnoxious way). You're getting better performance than an RTX 5070 laptop in a form factor that's usually reserved for more mid-range and less thermally expulsive internals. If you want the best performance possible from a high-end machine, this isn't it, but if you're willing to sacrifice a little for the sleek design, it's stellar.

System performance

The laptops are here tested against intensive benchmarks that mostly test the CPU, but also the GPU, for productivity tasks.

Compressing (GIPS)

Decompressing (GIPS)

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | Intel Core Ultra 9 386H | RTX 5080 (125 W)

105.399

98.828

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | Intel Core Ultra 9 386H | RTX 5080 (135 W)

117.88

100.88

Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 | Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX | RTX 5080 (175 W)

162.454

184.259

Framework 16 | AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 | RTX 5070

108.822

128.355

050100150200

7zip 24.07 Data
Product	Value
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ \| Intel Core Ultra 9 386H \| RTX 5080 (125 W)	105.399 Compressing (GIPS), 98.828 Decompressing (GIPS)
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) \| Intel Core Ultra 9 386H \| RTX 5080 (135 W)	117.88 Compressing (GIPS), 100.88 Decompressing (GIPS)
Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 \| Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX \| RTX 5080 (175 W)	162.454 Compressing (GIPS), 184.259 Decompressing (GIPS)
Framework 16 \| AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 \| RTX 5070	108.822 Compressing (GIPS), 128.355 Decompressing (GIPS)

Multi-core index score

Single-core index score

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | Intel Core Ultra 9 386H | RTX 5080 (125 W)

1221

124

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | Intel Core Ultra 9 386H | RTX 5080 (135 W)

1215

124

Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 | Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX | RTX 5080 (175 W)

2039

138

Framework 16 | AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 | RTX 5070

1158

105

07501,5002,2503,000

Cinebench 2024 Data
Product	Value
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ \| Intel Core Ultra 9 386H \| RTX 5080 (125 W)	1221 Multi-core index score, 124 Single-core index score
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) \| Intel Core Ultra 9 386H \| RTX 5080 (135 W)	1215 Multi-core index score, 124 Single-core index score
Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 \| Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX \| RTX 5080 (175 W)	2039 Multi-core index score, 138 Single-core index score
Framework 16 \| AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 \| RTX 5070	1158 Multi-core index score, 105 Single-core index score

CPU (samples/min)

GPU (samples/min)

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | Intel Core Ultra 9 386H | RTX 5080 (125 W)

79.43

1691.37

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | Intel Core Ultra 9 386H | RTX 5080 (135 W)

85.5

1642.33

Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 | Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX | RTX 5080 (175 W)

156.29

1883.93

Framework 16 | AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 | RTX 5070

93.15

1026.08

05001,0001,5002,000

Blender 4.2.0 (junkshop) Data
Product	Value
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ \| Intel Core Ultra 9 386H \| RTX 5080 (125 W)	79.43 CPU (samples/min), 1691.37 GPU (samples/min)
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) \| Intel Core Ultra 9 386H \| RTX 5080 (135 W)	85.5 CPU (samples/min), 1642.33 GPU (samples/min)
Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 \| Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX \| RTX 5080 (175 W)	156.29 CPU (samples/min), 1883.93 GPU (samples/min)
Framework 16 \| AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 \| RTX 5070	93.15 CPU (samples/min), 1026.08 GPU (samples/min)

Overall index score

Duration (Sec)

Sec/image

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | Intel Core Ultra 9 386H | RTX 5080 (125 W)

2472

40.44

2.53

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | Intel Core Ultra 9 386H | RTX 5080 (135 W)

2464

40.57

2.53

Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 | Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX | RTX 5080 (175 W)

2853

35.05

2.19

Framework 16 | AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 | RTX 5070

1789

55.9

3.49

07501,5002,2503,000

Procyon Data
Product	Value
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ \| Intel Core Ultra 9 386H \| RTX 5080 (125 W)	2472 Overall index score, 40.44 Duration (Sec), 2.53 Sec/image
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) \| Intel Core Ultra 9 386H \| RTX 5080 (135 W)	2464 Overall index score, 40.57 Duration (Sec), 2.53 Sec/image
Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 \| Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX \| RTX 5080 (175 W)	2853 Overall index score, 35.05 Duration (Sec), 2.19 Sec/image
Framework 16 \| AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 \| RTX 5070	1789 Overall index score, 55.9 Duration (Sec), 3.49 Sec/image

The MSI Stealth 16 AI+ keeps up with similar laptops for productivity, though struggles to match the chops of a 175 W RTX 5080 and more powerful Core Ultra 9 275HX.

Productivity-wise, the story is very much the same. It's a high-end laptop, but the CPU that MSI has opted for compromises in raw horsepower to keep things light and efficient enough for the slim design.

The Core Ultra 9 257HX in the Legion 7i Pro Gen10 runs rings around the Core Ultra 9 386H in this laptop in some benchmarks (Cinebench an 7Zip) and performs just moderately better in the rest. The Stealth's Intel chip does outperform the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 in the Framework 16, though. It's far from a bad chip, just know that you can get better if you're willing to opt for a chunkier and potentially louder laptop.

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ B3W Thermals

Real-world gaming temperatures

Gaming temperature results recorded during multiple Metro Exodus EE runs

Gaming temperatures

Avg CPU (°C)

Max CPU (°C)

Avg GPU (°C)

Max GPU (°C)

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | Intel Core Ultra 9 386H | RTX 5080 (125 W)

100

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | Intel Core Ultra 9 386H | RTX 5080 (135 W)

Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 | Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX | RTX 5080 (175 W)

105

Framework 16 | AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 | RTX 5070

037.575112.5150

Gaming temperatures Data
Product	Value
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ \| Intel Core Ultra 9 386H \| RTX 5080 (125 W)	92 Avg CPU (°C), 100 Max CPU (°C), 81 Avg GPU (°C), 87 Max GPU (°C)
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) \| Intel Core Ultra 9 386H \| RTX 5080 (135 W)	72 Avg CPU (°C), 98 Max CPU (°C), 69 Avg GPU (°C), 77 Max GPU (°C)
Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 \| Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX \| RTX 5080 (175 W)	94 Avg CPU (°C), 105 Max CPU (°C), 74 Avg GPU (°C), 79 Max GPU (°C)
Framework 16 \| AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 \| RTX 5070	65 Avg CPU (°C), 73 Max CPU (°C), 68 Avg GPU (°C), 71 Max GPU (°C)

The CPU in the MSI Stealth 16 AI+ runs pretty hot, but that's par for the course for an Intel chip. The GPU, however, runs notably hotter than other laptops we've tested. It stays well within safe limits, though.

Both the Intel processor and the Nvidia GPU in the Stealth 16 AI+ B3W can get pretty toasty, whether gaming or doing productivity tasks. That being said, I've definitely seen some Intel chips get hotter. The GPU, on the other hand, reaches higher max temps than others I've seen, but still stays under 90 °C and well within safe limits.

Importantly, the underside of the laptop doesn't get too hot other than right at the back near the screen, behind the stand-off ridge. If you position the laptop right, you can keep that part from touching your legs when you have it on your lap, but if you don't get it right, be prepared to feel the burn. Ditto touching above the Function keys, which gets very hot while the rest of the keyboard area stays just warm.

(Image credit: Future)

And when it comes to the fans, these are fantastic (ba dum tsh). They get loud when they're working hard, but no louder than other gaming PCs I've heard when pushing things to the max. The difference here is they have nary a semblance of whine to them, just a pleasant whoosh, like a desk fan on a warm summer's day.

Turning the performance profile down to Balanced, the same timbre is maintained but things obviously get a little quieter. It's not night-and-day, though, and as I said previously, I'd rather get the extra frames. Only if I'm trying to hear audio out of the speakers would I lower things down to Balanced—with headphones on that have a good seal around them, the fans on Extreme Performance mode aren't audible while gaming anyway.

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ B3W Aesthetics

I was immediately surprised by just how sleek and subtle the Stealth 16 AI+ B3W is. MSI's choice here makes for exactly my cup of tea because I like my laptops to be ones I'm not afraid to take out at a cafe or around less gamer-accepting folk (you know the ones).

The 'Stealth' in its name, then, for me means it can fly somewhat under the radar as a gaming machine when I'm out and about (assuming I have the RGB turned off), but reveal its true gaming power when I get home. And in this sense it definitely succeeds, even given the power limitation caveat mentioned in the section above.

(Image credit: Future)

It might seem a little greedy of me, given how well it delivers on the understated, professional look, but I think it could have potentially leaned even further in this direction. For instance, it could have got rid of the subtle embossed pattern on the lid entirely, like how Asus does with its TUF A14, another laptop I love.

That being said, the MSI is almost all the way there, and I really can't complain. Subtle metal styling and a giant trackpad just does it for me.

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ B3W Software

MSI's software is nothing to write home about, but it's fine. Just fine, nothing more, nothing less. I like that you get to choose which modules to install, so you can only keep what you need running. For me, that was just the RGB lighting control and performance mode selections. The interface is clean, if not very aesthetically pleasing. It's not the most intuitive to navigate given the different add-on module sections/names, but once you get used to it it's (you guessed it) fine.

MSI

Other than that, the laptop came with Norton installed, which is worth uninstalling, in my opinion. I don't see much need for anything other than Microsoft Defender these days, and if I were going to have another antivirus on there I'd go for ESET, but that's a personal choice. Norton let me uninstall it pretty easily, at any rate.

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ B3W Battery life

Battery life

Testing how long the battery lasts in Balanced mode, medium brightness, Wi-Fi disconnected, in the PCMark 10 gaming battery life test.

PCMark 10

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026)

117

Framework 16

131

Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10

MSI Stealth 16 AI+

104

037.575112.5150

Battery life (minutes)

The MSI Stealth 16 AI+ lasts a fair amount of time thanks to its efficient processor while in balanced mode and its RTX 5080's lower TDP. It doesn't quite keep up with some other laptops like the Framework 16, however.

Battery life is really helped out by the relatively efficient Panther Lake CPU here. I didn't run out of battery during a workday when in Balanced mode, and in the PCMark 10 battery life test, it fared a lot better than the Legion 7i Pro Gen10 when set to Balanced mode, showing the benefit of the power-limited GPU and more efficiency-focused CPU.

Saying that, it didn't last as long as the HX 370-touting Framework 16, though that is probably due to the GPU rather than the CPU. In all, though, almost two hours of gameplay is a good result, and shows another benefit of the thermal and efficiency focus here.

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ B3W Value

It's hard to know what exactly to compare this laptop with. On the one hand, it could be compared to chunky gaming powerhouses like the Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10. On the other hand, it could be compared to something like the similarly sleek and luxurious Razer Blade.

The best laptop for comparison right now, however, is probably the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026). Our Andy reviewed that laptop recently, and it shares the same CPU and GPU, although there's slightly less of a power nerf to the RTX 5080 in that laptop (it runs at up to 135 W unless fully manually unlocked to 160 W, compared to 125 W with the MSI).

Future

The configuration with 32 GB of RAM (not tested by us) can be found for $4,400 at Best Buy right now, which is $400 more expensive than the Stealth. But given the high price, that's just an extra 10%, making the two in roughly the same ballpark. And I have to agree with Andy's sentiment here that it's not straightforward to square such a whopper price tag against the likes of cheaper but more performant high-end laptops like the Legion Pro 7i. At the time of writing, you can pick up an RTX 5080 version of that laptop for just over $3,500.

It would be a close call but I might spend the extra $500 on the MSI for its slim chassis and premium, satisfying keyboard and trackpad, plus its fancy OLED. There is, however, a big 'but'. And that is the audio issue I mentioned earlier.

I pretty much only ever use a USB audio device, but if I wanted to play shooters on the laptop using the default audio device, I'd be hesitant to spend so much on this laptop without a fix for the audio latency from MSI. As such, I can't recommend it as clearly as I otherwise would. Certainly not for $4,000.

However, if you're like me and only ever use USB headphones/earphones when you load up shooters and other games that benefit from snappy audio, and if you're happy sacrificing a little performance for portability and a 'fine out in public' aesthetic, it's worth it. Well, for 2026 prices, at least.

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260 \| 1200p	27 Avg FPS, 19 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX \| 1440p	12 Avg FPS, 4 1% Low FPS
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX \| 1600p	20 Avg FPS, 15 1% Low FPS

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260 \| 1200p	66 Avg FPS, 35 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX \| 1440p	58 Avg FPS, 31 1% Low FPS
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX \| 1600p	47 Avg FPS, 20 1% Low FPS

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260 \| 1200p	47 Avg FPS, 30 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX \| 1440p	34 Avg FPS, 24 1% Low FPS
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX \| 1600p	31 Avg FPS, 20 1% Low FPS

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260 \| 1200p	51 Avg FPS, 41 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX \| 1440p	30 Avg FPS, 22 1% Low FPS
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX \| 1600p	37 Avg FPS, 31 1% Low FPS

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260 \| 1200p	56 Avg FPS, 23 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX \| 1440p	50 Avg FPS, 35 1% Low FPS
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX \| 1600p	49 Avg FPS, 33 1% Low FPS

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260 \| 1200p	68 Avg FPS, 58 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX \| 1440p	52 Avg FPS, 45 1% Low FPS
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX \| 1600p	50 Avg FPS, 43 1% Low FPS

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260 \| 1200p	116 Avg FPS, 99 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX \| 1440p	61 Avg FPS, 73 1% Low FPS
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX \| 1600p	84 Avg FPS, 72 1% Low FPS

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260 \| 1200p	4764 Overall index score, 4625 GPU index, 5751 CPU index
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX \| 1440p	5962 Overall index score, 5357 GPU index, 5776 CPU index
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX \| 1600p	5415 Overall index score, 5357 GPU index, 5776 CPU index

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260 \| 1200p	5508
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX \| 1440p	7059
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX \| 1600p	7059

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260 \| 1200p	1974 Overall index score, 338.34 Avg bandwidth (MB/s), 91 Access time (ųs)
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX \| 1440p	2243 Overall index score, 388.87 Avg bandwidth (MB/s), 81 Access time (ųs)
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX \| 1600p	2243 Overall index score, 388.87 Avg bandwidth (MB/s), 81 Access time (ųs)

Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 14650HX \| 1600p	64 Avg FPS, 35 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 \| RTX 5060 115 W \| i7 13650HX \| 1440p	64 Avg FPS, 32 1% Low FPS
Asus TUF Gaming A16 \| RTX 5050 115 W \| Ryzen 7 260 \| 1200p	82 Avg FPS, 51 1% Low FPS

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