MSI’s P65 is their laptop for content creators, but is there more to it than just being a
silver version of the GS65 gaming laptop?
Let’s find out in this detailed review and see if it’s a laptop you should consider.
I’ve got the 9SF model, so there’s an 8 core Intel i9-9880H CPU, Nvidia RTX 2070
Max-Q graphics, 32gb of memory in dual channel, a 15.6” 4K 60Hz screen, and a 1TB M.2 NVMe
SSD.
For network connectivity it’s got gigabit ethernet, WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5.
You can find updated prices for this and other configurations linked in the description.
The P65 is very similar to MSI’s GS65 gaming laptop, it’s basically using the same design
and chassis with a few differences.
The whole laptop has a matte space grey finish and is mostly made out of aluminium, or aluminum
for my US friends, and this includes the lid, interior and bottom panels, though the back
and hinges have a plastic exterior.
All corners and edges were smooth, and the build quality felt fair.
MSI list the weight at 1.9kg, however mine was around 100g above this.
The power brick MSI sent to me was only 90 watts, so this weight measurement isn’t
accurate, it’s meant to have a 230 watt power brick when you buy it.
I had another 230w brick from the Aero 17, so did all testing with that to avoid performance
loss, but you could definitely get a smaller charger like this for travel if you don’t
need max performance.
The P65 is on the thinner side when you consider the 8 core i9 processor inside with decent
GPU.
The smaller footprint gives us just 8mm thin screen bezels on the sides.
The 15.6” 4K 60Hz IPS-level screen has a matte finish, good viewing angles, and tilts
all the way back should you need that.
MSI note the 4K panel has 100% of AdobeRGB coverage on their website, however when I
tested with the Spyder 5 it reported 91% for that, 96% for sRGB, 87% of NTSC, and 81% of
DCI-P3 coverage, I’d expect lower with the 1080p option.
At 100% brightness I measured almost 350 nits with an 880:1 contrast ratio, so alright results.
The colours did seem noticeably better when compared to most 1080p laptops I’ve tested,
they may have similar sRGB results, but the AdobeRGB range is definitely much higher here.
When I reviewed the 8th gen version of the P65 last year they didn’t have a 4K screen
option, so at least they give you the choice here.
That said, it would be nice to see MSI move to offering OLED options like the Gigabyte
Aero 15 or Dell XPS 15.
Backlight bleed wasn’t great in my unit, I could occasionally notice it when viewing
darker content, but this will vary between laptops and panels.
Screen flex wasn’t too bad when intentionally trying to flex it due to the metal lid, however
it highlighted a different issue, the rubber feet underneath didn’t seem to do a great
job at reducing movement.
Opening with one finger was easy, it was a little back heavy but felt stable on my lap.
The 720p camera is up the top in the center despite the bezels being on the thinner side.
This is what the camera and microphone look and sound like on the P65.
Here’s what it sounds like when we type on the keyboard, and this is what it sounds
like if we set the fan to maximum speed, so you can still hear me ok over the fan noise.
The keyboard has no numpad and white backlighting which lights up all keys and even secondary
key functions.
The white lighting can be adjusted between three levels or turned off using the function
and page up or down keys.
The lighting looked much better compared to the white keys of the 8th gen model I previously
tested as the keys are black here.
The key presses were a little shallow feeling but had a sort of click to them, here’s
how typing sounds to give you an idea of what to expect.
There was minor keyboard flex when intentionally pushing down hard, no issues at all using
it normally though.
It seemed sturdy due to the feet on the bottom which help offer additional support.
There are air intake vents above the keyboard to aid with cooling, and the power button
is right up the back in the middle.
The precision touchpad was smooth to the touch and worked quite well.
Despite being on the larger side, my palms never touched it while typing, but even when
intentionally doing this the palm rejection was good.
It clicks down almost anywhere, just not the top left corner which is unusable as a touchpad
due to the fingerprint scanner.
I found the fingerprint scanner to work fast though.
Due to the silver finish fingerprints and dirt weren’t too viewable, though it has
a smooth finish and should be easy to clean with a microfiber cloth.
On the left from the back there’s a kensington lock, air exhaust vent, gigabit ethernet port,
and I prefer it being this way so you can unplug without lifting the machine, two USB
3.2 Gen1 Type-A ports, and 3.5mm headphone and mic jacks.
On the right from the front there’s a USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A port, USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C
port with both DisplayPort and Thunderbolt 3 support, mini DisplayPort and HDMI 2.0 output,
power input and another air exhaust vent.
The mini DisplayPort and HDMI ports were wired directly to the Nvidia GPU, however the Type-C
port went via the Intel iGPU first.
The back just has some air exhaust vents, while the front has a battery status LED towards
the right.
Underneath has the air intake vents towards the back.
The bottom panel was easy to remove once you take out the 15 Phillips head screws.
Like many other MSI laptops, the motherboard is upside down.
All we get access to here is the WiFi card and battery.
Access to the two memory slots and two M.2 storage slots requires removal of the motherboard,
which is an annoying process if needed.
The two speakers are found towards the front left and right corners, they sound alright,
a little above average for a laptop though minimal bass and the palm rest did vibrate
a little.
They get loud enough at maximum volume, and the Latencymon results weren’t ideal.
The P65 is powered by a 4 cell 82 watt hour battery.
I’ve tested it with the screen brightness at 50%, background apps disabled, and keyboard
lighting off.
While just watching YouTube videos it lasted for 5 hours and 27 minutes, a mid range result
for this test, and it was using the Intel integrated graphics due to Nvidia Optimus.
When playing the Witcher 3 with medium settings and Nvidia’s battery boost set to 30 FPS
the battery lasted for an hour and 6 minutes before the frame rate dipped to 12 FPS and
was no longer usable, however including this state it lasted for an hour and 37 minutes
total.
Given the P65 is targeted towards creators I’ve also tested Adobe Premiere video exporting.
This is the first time I’ve ever tested a 9880H laptop, and the results stacked up
quite well compared to most others, interestingly it was just slightly ahead of the newer 10th
gen 8 core and Super GPU in the Aero 17 just above it, which costs more money as well.
Let’s move onto the thermal testing.
It’s worth noting that we’ve got two extra heatpipes in this 9th gen model compared to
the older 8th gen, so that should help with thermals.
The MSI Creator Center software lets you manage the system.
We can swap between eco, comfort, and sport modes which control performance, change the
fan speed, or enable coolerboost mode which maxes it out.
Thermal testing was completed in an ambient room temperature of 21 degrees Celsius, so
expect different results in different environments.
It was actually quite cool at idle given the specs.
Worst case stress tests were done with the Aida64 CPU stress test with CPU only checked
and the Heaven benchmark at max settings at the same time, and gaming was tested with
Watch Dogs 2 as I find it to use a good combination of processor and graphics.
Straight away, I want to note that any time the CPU, shown by the blue bar, is at 95 degrees
Celsius, it’s thermal throttling, and we can see this was happening in a lot of the
tests.
The GPU was also throttling at 87 degrees, however that was only happening with the stress
tests in ECO mode, as that runs the fans quieter, as you’ll hear soon.
As we run with higher performance modes, max out the fans, undervolt and add a cooling
pad, thermals improve with the GPU, however we only see the CPU thermal throttle barely
remove with the cooling pad or undervolt.
It’s worth remembering we do have an 8 core i9 processor in a machine that’s under 1.8cm
thick, so this is kind of expected.
These are the average clock speeds for the same tests just shown.
The performance in Eco mode is low due to harsh power limit caps, otherwise the GPU
improves slightly as cooling gets better.
The CPU speeds see a larger improvement as cooling improves, as thermal throttling is
the primary limitation until we add in the cooling pad, or for the game, just the undervolt
was enough, however we’re still a little under the full 4.1GHz all core turbo boost
speed of the 9880H as power limit throttling is our next enemy.
These are the average TDP values reported by hardware info during these same tests.
Despite PL1 being set to 55 watts by default in software, while under combined CPU and
GPU workloads like these, the CPU doesn’t actually pass 45 watts.
This seems like a reasonable choice given how we were thermal throttling prior to undervolting
and using a cooling pad anyway, but it does mean I wasn’t able to change this to boost
performance further once we remove thermal throttling.
As for CPU only performance, here’s what we’re seeing with Cinebench.
By applying the same undervolt as before it was possible to achieve an 11% higher multicore
score in this test, as this helped reduce the thermal throttling that was still taking
place during the PL2 boost period.
Once PL2 ends though, thermal throttling goes away and we’re instead hitting the 55 watt
PL1 limit, so the undervolting helps there too.
Here’s how the Cinebench scores stack up against other 8 core laptops that I’ve tested
in the past, this is my first time with the 9880H, so not sure what’s best case for
it without thermal or power limits.
As for the external temperatures where you’ll actually be putting your hands, at idle it
was barely getting to 30 degrees, which is pretty standard with most laptops.
With the stress tests going in eco mode it does get quite warm in the center, the fans
are quieter in this mode and it’s thermal throttling.
Things cool down just slightly in sport and turbo mode, however as we saw performance
is much better now.
Finally with the fans maxed out it’s now a few degrees cooler, but at the expense of
higher fan noise, let’s have a listen.
The fan was just audible at idle with the lowest eco profile enabled.
With the stress tests going in the same eco mode it doesn’t get much louder.
Comfort and sport modes are about the same for fan noise, and at this point it’s a
little quieter when compared to most other laptops I’ve tested, however once we max
it out it does get quite loud.
Personally I see this as an advantage, as the user has control of the fan speed I think
it’s better to at least have the choice to run louder and cooler if you want.
Next let’s take a look at some gaming benchmarks.
While not explicitly advertised as a gaming laptop, given it’s got an i9 processor and
RTX 2070 Max-Q graphics it’s definitely going to be capable of playing modern games
if you want to, so let’s give it a go.
In Battlefield 5 I’ve got the P65 highlighted in red near similarly specced machines.
The average FPS is quite similar to other 2070 Max-Q laptops, however despite the i9-9880H
processor the 1% low results were lower than the others, perhaps the lower 80 watt GPU
power limit is the limitation there.
Here are the results from Far Cry 5 with ultra settings in the built in benchmark.
Again the average FPS is similar to the two machines below it with more powerful 90 watt
2070 Max-Q graphics, but the 1% low is better this time, likely as this test tends to favour
CPU power.
The 100 watt blade pro 17 just above it is a fair bit higher though, however that is
also undervolted and overclocked by default.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider was also tested with the games benchmark, and this time the
P65 was a little ahead of the two 90 watt machines underneath it, but again it can’t
keep up with the more powerful but also larger blade pro 17 with same GPU.
Realistically though we’re just a few FPS behind some of the 115 watt 2070 machines,
so we’re able to get some nice gaming performance from the P65.
I’ve also tested this game with the different performance modes just to show you what to
expect.
ECO mode wasn’t really offering a playable experience, so I wouldn’t expect to be able
to play much while running quieter and we could boost average FPS by around 7% with
the CPU undervolt and GPU overclocks.
Now for the benchmarking tools, I’ve tested Heaven, Valley, and Superposition from Unigine,
as well as Firestrike, Timespy and Port Royal from 3DMark, just pause the video if you want
a detailed look at these results.
I’ve used Crystal Disk Mark to test the 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD, and the speeds were quite
nice, but expect different results with different storage options.
For updated pricing check the links in the description, as prices will change over time.
At the time of recording, the configuration of the P65 Creator I’ve covered here goes
for $2700 USD, however there are much cheaper options if you don’t require the 8 core
i9 or a powerful GPU.
Here in Australia it looks like this configuration goes for $5200 AUD, however you can get the
i7 model with 2060 which will still be quite a powerful combination for half this amount.
Bit strange that a creator laptop has a 240Hz screen, but here we are.
With all of that in mind let’s conclude by looking at the good and bad aspects of
the 9th gen P65 laptop.
Overall it’s a decent laptop, but I’ve just got to say up front that a laptop for
content creators without any sort of SD card slot seems like a bit of an oversight in my
opinion.
You could of course use a USB dongle, but I’d prefer just having it built in like
others do.
That aside, the build quality was fair, though not as good as others like say the slightly
higher priced Aero 17.
The 4K screen does look nice, the colours just appear to pop instantly due to the higher
colour gamuts when compared to the 1080p gaming laptops I usually test, so it’s good that
this is an option with the 9th gen P65 for creators that want it, as it wasn’t available
last gen.
The performance under worst case stress tests was decent once you boost the fan speed, though
it was a fair bit louder in that state, and undervolting and using a cooling pad was able
to help out significantly as thermal throttling was the key limitation under worst case workloads.
This is expected in my opinion given this configuration has the 8 core i9 in a machine
less than 1.8cm thin, I’d expect cooler with the i7 or lower GPU.
That said, even without the cooling pad or undervolting, the Adobe Premiere result was
one of the best out of all laptops I’ve ever tested, so for the task it’s actually
designed for, content creation, it is performing nicely.
The 9880H gets beaten by the new Ryzen 9 4900HS in the smaller ASUS G14, but at the moment
there aren’t any higher end laptops for content creation with Ryzen processors, so
we’re stuck with Intel options for now.
It’s also worth noting MSI will have the new 10th gen creator 15 and 17 laptops coming
out soon, and I’ll be covering those on the channel too.
Let me know what you thought about MSI’s P65 Creator laptop down in the comments, if
you create content is this a machine you’d be interested in?
Why or why not?
Let me know, and if you’re new to the channel get subscribed for future laptop reviews and
tech videos like this one.