- When it comes to laptops,
you usually have two types, gaming and professional.
There's a lot of companies that are realizing,
why not do both?
The MSI PS 63 is a brand new professional laptop
that borrows some elements from its gaming line.
Today I'm gonna give you a full review
and tell you whether it's worth it or not, stay tuned.
(upbeat music)
All right, so MSI, it's one of those companies
where I normally don't cover,
because I normally don't like their stuff,
but that changed last year with the GS 65 Stealth,
which everybody raved about.
I picked one up and turns out, it's actually pretty awesome.
I'm happy to report that the PS 63 behind me
continues this trend.
MSI seems to be one of those companies in change right now
and what they're doing, I really, really like.
So this laptop is geared towards professionals,
but has a lot of stuff I think
a lot of regular laptop users may like
and a price point that's not super cheap,
but also not super expensive
and it brings some neat options to the table.
Let's take a closer look.
All right, let's start here with the outside
and you can see here the PS63 is,
well, it's designed for professionals
and I would say adults,
but that's a little (laughs) condescending, but it's okay.
It's a very clean design,
nice little logo, you can't really see it,
unless you're reflecting in the light, but it's very smooth,
it doesn't pickup fingerprints too bad,
well it does a little bit,
but overall just a really nice feel to it.
But what really makes this design I think really nice
is that little blue accent
going around the trim on the outside here,
it's blue, it's reflective,
it's part of the cut process that they did
and it just adds that little hint of elegance
that I think is needed on this laptop.
Coming around to the right-hand side,
you do get two USB 3.0 ports,
so pretty good for data transfer and a micro SD slot.
No full SD, which would have been nice,
but everybody's doing micro,
I guess that's the way it is today.
Turn to the left-hand side, you do get a barrel charger now,
this is a mandatory charger with this laptop, it's 90 watt.
It's actually a really nice size and designed,
but you do have to use it, I'll explain in a second why.
You get HDMI, USB Type-C, this is not Thunderbolt 3
and this is actually a very gimped Type-C port,
meaning you can't even charge the laptop
using that Type-C port,
that's why you have to use barrel charging.
Now you can charge your smartphone with it,
you can use it for display out
and you can use it for basic data,
but definitely not Thunderbolt 3 and you can't charge,
I think it's a huge letdown.
USB Type-A, your third one over here and a headphone jack,
along with a couple LED's here
to let you know it's powered on and charging.
Looking at the bottom here, you get a lot of support,
MSI is very big on putting a support structure
here in that sub (mumbles),
helps with the flacks, which is really nice.
Dual fans on the inside, one for the CPU, one for the GPU
and you can actually hear the difference.
When you're just using the laptop,
the CPU one might come on, if you start gaming,
you'll definitely hear the second one come on.
For the fan noise, it's been pretty good,
they will get quite loud, but you can control them
through some software if you want to.
Overall, really good design though.
You do, however, have speakers here on the bottom
and I do not like these speakers, these are not very good.
Yeah, they're about average, I would say, for a laptop,
but this is gonna be one of the biggest letdowns
of this laptop so far.
Looking at the display here, 15.6 inch,
it is Full HD, it is a matte display and non-touch as well.
Really nice display though,
I really like MSI's display technology for some reason.
Just the backlight is very even on it, it's nice to look at
and I like these bezels too, pretty thin,
you do get a web camera at top, pretty nice.
For display accuracy, you're talking around 96-97% SRGB,
which is pretty good and you also get around 74% Adobe RGB.
This is around 315 nits, so anything above 300
is gonna be really nice, it's not super bright,
but it's definitely good enough.
Looking at the keyboard deck,
you do get a power button here in the center,
which is a little strange, but it's okay.
You get this nice little keyboard,
I actually really like MSI's keyboards,
they do weird things with the fonts and everything,
to travel, that was really nice.
I just really like typing on this,
I don't know what else to say, they do a great job,
it's very even too, every key feels very consistent to me,
I think that's super important.
You also get full arrow keys,
well, that's a big deal for a lot of people.
Now, I should mention, the function key
is over here on the right side,
which is a little bit different
for those of you who expect that on the left.
So when you do things like brightness and volume,
you have to do it with your right hand.
Now taking a look at this track pad,
again, this is usually a weak spot of MSI,
this is a really, really good track pad though,
I'm really impressed with their technology
and it's not just the fact
that they're using precision drivers,
which is always a nice thing to have,
but the design is cool, it's super long.
It's gonna be a little weird to do that right-click,
you just have to retrain yourself
to make sure where that zone is,
but you get used to it pretty quickly,
but I love the size of it.
The feel of it though, is really, really nice,
it's a textured glass and it has a really nice,
satisfying click to it, so excellent design there.
You also get a fingerprint reader built-in,
which is pretty solid.
All right, let's continue the internal specifications
for this device, 'cause they're really kind of interesting.
Now you're going to get a Core i7, that's a quad-core,
eighth generation Whiskey Lake 8565.
It's a U processor, so that's 15 watts,
which is what you expect in an Ultrabook, no big deal,
we get a ton of those these days,
but what's really interesting here is the GPU.
A lot of times, you would expect like an MX150
or something like that, but instead,
MSI is using a GTX 1050, that's a MaxQ design,
but still, it's a GTX 1050 GPU in this
and it's actually really nice.
We rarely get to see a full GTX GPU
paired with a 15 watt processor,
in fact, only in the Surface Book 2,
it comes to mind as another example of that.
Usually though, you're using 45 watt chips,
like the Dell XPS15,
so this is not as powerful as a Dell XPS15,
but there's some benefits here to this design.
Additional features include 16 gigs of ram
and 512 gigs of storage, that SSD is really nice,
PCIE, NVME, so they're using a Samsung chip in here
and you're getting well over 3,000 mb per second
for reads and really good write speeds,
so excellent design here, bluetooth 5.0 as well.
So overall, the specifications on this are really nice.
Now what's so good about having that 15 watt CPU
paired with a nice GPU, well it does allow you to game,
don't forget, most games these days are GPU-intensive,
so that CPU doesn't really matter too much,
in fact, it's only 15 watt,
but also because of this design,
you will get very good battery life.
So for a battery, you are going to get
an 82 watt on our size one,
which is really kind of huge for this laptop.
Don't forget, this one weighs three and a half pounds
or 1.6 kilograms, now it's actually pretty light
but when you combine it with a 15-watt processor,
you're easily getting over 10 hours
of battery life on this, closer probably to 12,
now it's still below the 16 hours that they quote you at,
but 12 hours of battery life in a laptop this size,
with a Core i7 and the GTX 1050,
that's a really solid combination
as pretty where on the market,
it's usually a trade-off, you get a nice GPU,
but you only like get 6-7 hours of battery life.
So this is really meant for professionals out there
who need something a little bit more powerful
on the GPU side, but still also can get by
with a 15-watt processor.
All right, so talk about what I like about this laptop.
So the size and build quality and just excellent,
it's three and a half pounds, which is not super light,
but it's actually pretty light
for this kind of class of device.
The build quality is also exceptional,
I think MSI is doing a really good thing here,
I don't know what they're doing internally for changes,
but just keep it up guys,
you guys are doing really, really well.
The keyboard on here is also very good,
as well as the track pad.
The display being Full HD, it's okay,
it's a very good display and I like using it.
I think I would prefer to see a 2K display,
especially for the demographic of professionals using this,
but still, you can plug in
an external 4K if you want to use it.
Now I don't like so much, well I wish it had Thunderbolt 3,
I think it's sort of a missed opportunity here,
I think a lot of people may want to plug this
into an external GPU and unfortunately you can't do it.
Moreover, I can't even recharge the laptop with that Type-C,
which for me is a big letdown.
I kind of get it, you need at least,
probably a 90-watt charger, because of that GPU,
if you're gonna use it, so maybe that's why,
but still, kind of a letdown.
Also, audio, audio is just terrible on this thing,
now I know MSI could do a lot better.
There's two issues here.
One, I think they should have speakers on the top deck,
I think everybody should be doing that.
The speaker quality is just not up there yet,
that's one area where MSI still needs to figure out,
still, you'll probably wanna use headphones with this
if you're gonna be using it for gaming
or any kind of audio creativity.
All right, so who should buy this laptop?
Well it's $1,500, so it's definitely affordable I think
for some students, it's not super cheap,
but it's in that realm of, I can kind of get this
and do a lot more with it, including gaming,
so I think it's actually a pretty good value.
No one else is quite doing this,
MSI is clearly gearing this towards professionals
and people who need processing on the go
and want a little bit of a gaming aesthetic, just a tad,
but still wants to get a little bit professional-looking,
I think they mostly succeed here.
Overall, the PS 63, I think is an excellent laptop.
It has a few downsides, but overall,
these are a really solid design.
I'm more happy about seeing what MSI is doing these days.
This company is definitely on a roll
and I can't wait to see what they do next,
even if this laptop is not for you,
I think you should start paying attention to MSI.
(upbeat music) So because of this design,
you will get very good battery life.
My god, my mouth is like foamy.
Now in...
Now on board, you'll get an 80--