The MSI GE65 is a gaming laptop that’s offering impressive levels of performance for the specs.
In this detailed review I’ll show you both the good and the bad sides of the GE65 to
help you decide if it’s a laptop that you should consider.
I’ve got the 9SE version of the GE65, so there’s an Intel i7-9750H CPU, Nvidia RTX
2060 graphics, 32gb of memory in dual channel, a 15.6” 1080p 144Hz screen, and 256gb NVMe
M.2 SSD with 1TB hard drive.
For network connectivity it’s got gigabit ethernet, WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5. The GE65
is also available with different specs, including i9 CPU, GTX 1660 Ti, RTX 2070 or 240Hz screen,
you can find other configurations and updated pricing linked in the description.
The lid is a matte black aluminium, and the interior is the same. I’d say the build
quality was a little above average, there were no sharp corners or edges anywhere, and
I was pleased to see that they’ve reduced the red accenting over previous models.
The weight is listed at 2.27kg and mine was around 60g above this. With the 180 watt power
brick and cables for charging the total weight rises to just over 3kg.
The dimensions in terms of width and depth are similar to many other modern 15” laptops,
however it’s a little thicker at 2.7cm and we’ll see if this extra space helps improve
thermals later.
This thinner footprint gives it 8mm thin screen bezels on the sides.
The 15.6” 1080p 144Hz IPS-Level screen has a matte finish, viewing angles looked fine,
and there’s no G-Sync. It’s also available with a 240Hz option as well, so expect different
results compared to what I’m about to go through with that.
I’ve tested the screen with the Spyder 5, and got 96% of sRGB, 66% of NTSC, and 71%
of AdobeRGB. At 100% brightness I measured the panel at 340 nits in the center with a
700:1 contrast ratio. The contrast was a little lower compared to others, but otherwise brightness
was a little above average with fair colour gamut for a gaming laptop.
Backlight bleed was extremely minimal, I had no problems at all when viewing darker content,
but this will vary between laptop and panel.
Despite the metal lid there was some screen flex as it’s on the thinner side, however
the screen felt quite sturdy with the hinges being out towards the far corners.
It was possible to open up with one finger, which aside from just being easier to open
also helps demonstrate that the weight is more evenly distributed, so no issues using
it on my lap.
Despite the thinner bezels, the 720p camera is found above the display in the center,
no Windows Hello support though.
This is what the camera and microphone look and sound like on the MSI GE65. Here’s what
typing sounds like, and this is what it sounds like with the fan on max speed, so you can
still hear me over the fan.
The Steelseries keyboard has per key RGB backlighting, and in my opinion it looks better than most
other RGB keyboards as the sides are clear to allow light to shine through. There are
plenty of effects and changes that can be made through the software, and the product
page on the MSI website gives some examples of what it can do. The brightness can be adjusted
between 4 levels by holding the function key and pressing the plus or minus keys on the
numpad, or turned off completely if you prefer.
I liked typing with the keyboard, here’s how it sounds to give you an idea of what
to expect.
There are some extra buttons above the keyboard next to the power button, these let you enable
cooler boost for max fan speed, or cycle through keyboard lighting effects.
There was only a little keyboard flex when pushing down hard, overall the body felt quite
solid and I found the letter keys needed 61 grams of force to actuate.
The precision touchpad doesn’t actually click down when pressed as it’s instead
got physical left and right click buttons which make fairly loud audible presses. I
thought the size was fine and didn’t have any problems using it.
Fingerprints and dirt show up on the matte black interior, however as a smooth surface
it’s easy enough to clean.
On the left from the back there’s a Kensington lock, air exhaust vent, gigabit ethernet port,
HDMI 2.0 and mini DisplayPort outputs, both of which are wired directly to the Nvidia
graphics, USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A port, USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C port, no Thunderbolt here though,
and 3.5mm headphone and mic jacks.
On the right there are two USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A ports right down the front, which are seriously
going to get in the way of your mouse hand if you’re right handed and plug anything
in with a cable, full size SD card slot, and the power input.
All three USB Type-A ports light up red when the laptop is powered on, however you can
either set these to half brightness or turn them off through the dragon center software.
The back just has air exhaust vents on the left and right corners with subtle raider
branding in the middle, meanwhile there’s nothing at all on the front.
The matte black metallic lid has two red accents with the MSI logo in the center towards the
top, and the logo gets lit up from the screen’s backlight so cannot be turned off.
Underneath has a large mesh area towards the back half for air intake. To get inside you
need to remove 12 Phillips head screws.
Once inside we’ve got the single 2.5” drive bay on the left, WiFi 6 card right next
to that, battery right up the back, two memory slots towards the right in the middle, with
the two M.2 slots underneath and to the right. Both M.2 slot support NVMe PCIe drives, however
only one of them supports SATA.
The two 2 watt speakers and two 3 watt subwoofers are found towards the front on the left and
right. There was a little bass and they sounded ok, but were a bit muffled sounding when on
a desk, they did get very loud with maximum volume though, and the latencymon results
were looking good.
The GE65 is powered by a 6 cell 51wh battery. I’ve tested it with the screen brightness
at 50%, background apps disabled, and keyboard lighting off. While just watching YouTube
videos it only lasted for 3 hours and 6 minutes, and this was with the Intel integrated graphics
and Nvidia Optimus.
While playing the Witcher 3 with medium settings and Nvidia’s battery boost set to 30 FPS
the battery lasted for 59 minutes, however it ran at a solid 30 FPS the entire time without
dipping. The result while gaming was similar to others, so no problem there, but outside
of gaming the battery life was definitely on the lower side.
The 180 watt power brick that’s included with the GE65 didn’t seem to be adequate
to deal with heavy loads, as my battery drained down to 85% while I was performing my thermal
testing. The RTX 2070 model is available with a larger 280 watt brick, so I’d think that
to be plenty for that one.
I’ll briefly cover thermal performance, but this is a shortened version. You can check
out the detailed thermal testing with the card in the top right if you want all the
details.
The MSI dragon center lets us swap between four performance modes, ECO, comfort, sport
and turbo, and turbo mode overclocks the graphics. We can also use the coolerboost fan mode to
set the fan to maximum speed.
When under combined CPU and GPU stress test with Aida64 and Unigine heaven, thermal throttling
on the CPU at 95 degrees Celsius was being hit, however simply setting the fans to max
speed reduced this, meanwhile gaming with Watch Dogs 2 wasn’t quite as hot. A cooling
pad helped lower temperatures quite a bit, thanks to the large mesh area on the bottom
of the laptop. The biggest improvement to performance was gained by undervolting the
CPU, which basically allowed us to hit the full 4GHz turbo boost speed of the 9750H.
The undervolt helped so much because PL1 is capped to 45 watts and I wasn’t able to
boost this, meanwhile the RTX 2060 was running at 90 watts outside of ECO mode.
CPU performance outside of combined CPU and GPU workloads was pretty good, with the undervolt
applied we’re getting around 3000 points in Cinebench which is a good result for the
i7.
The keyboard area was looking normal at idle, and with stress tests running it was only
a little warm, and this lowered a bit with the fan speed increased. Let’s have a listen
to the fans.
At idle the fan was only just audible. With the stress tests in ECO mode it’s still
on the quieter side, then comfort, sport and turbo modes were all the same, with coolerboost
mode increasing further.
Unfortunately ECO mode wasn’t a good experience for gaming, so playing cooler and quieter
loses a lot of performance, however the other modes didn’t really see too much change.
Next let’s take a look at some gaming benchmarks to see what the GE65 can actually do in the
task it was designed for.
Battlefield 5 was tested in campaign mode, and I’ve got RTX on shown by the green bars,
and RTX off shown by the purple bars. With RTX on it was kind of playable at high but
for a first person shooter you’ll probably want medium settings or below, and in my opinion
RTX off with ultra both looks better than RTX on at lower settings and performs better
anyway.
Control was also tested with and without RTX on. I’ve used ray tracing with high settings
and it wasn’t really too playable, but with RTX off it was still possible to average 60
FPS even with the highest setting preset.
Apex Legends was tested with either all settings at maximum, or all settings on the lowest
possible values, as it doesn’t have predefined setting presets. With minimum settings it
was averaging on the 144 FPS frame cap, and even at max settings it was still playing
smoothly.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider was tested with the built in benchmark, and the results were
quite impressive, but we’ll take a look at how this laptop compares with some others
in this game shortly.
Fortnite was tested with the replay feature, and as a less demanding game even epic settings
was playing well with above 120 FPS averages, high settings averaged above the refresh rate
of the screen, and low settings was almost double this.
CS:GO was tested using the Ulletical FPS benchmark, and as a game that depends primarily on CPU
power the results aren’t really that much lower compared to other laptops I’ve tested
with the same i7 CPU but different graphics.
Dota 2 was tested playing in the middle lane, and as another primarily CPU driven game the
results at lower settings aren’t really that much different compared to other laptops
with the same CPU. Even at ultra settings it’s working extremely well.
PUBG was tested using the replay feature, and ultra settings was still able to run over
100 FPS, with around medium hitting close to the refresh rate of the laptop’s screen.
Rainbow Six Siege was tested with the built in benchmark. Even the maximum ultra setting
preset was able to average the refresh rate of the 144Hz screen that I’m using, and
that’s with a 100% render scale too.
If you’re after more gaming benchmarks check the card in the top right corner where I’ve
tested 21 games in total on the GE65.
Let’s also take a look at how this config of the MSI GE65 compares with other laptops,
use these results as a rough guide only as they were tested at different times with different
drivers.
In Battlefield 5 I’ve got the GE65 highlighted in red near similarly specced machines. This
is only the second time I’ve tested the RTX 2060 with a 9750H CPU, and it’s beating
the Clevo machine underneath it by a fair amount, despite that one being undervolted
out of the box. The results are actually ahead of most of the 2070 Max-Q machines too, both
in terms of average FPS and 1% low, so great results from the GE65 here.
These are the results from Far Cry 5 with ultra settings in the built in benchmark.
Again the GE65 was a fair amount ahead of the competition, even scoring close to higher
specced machines like MSI’s own GP75 with RTX 2070 graphics.
These are the results from Shadow of the Tomb raider with the built in benchmark at highest
settings. Again the results are above average and in front of most of the RTX 2070 Max-Q
laptops above it, granted not by much, but it’s still winning with lower specs.
Overall we’re seeing excellent results from this level of hardware with the MSI GE65 gaming
laptop. It’s consistently outperforming other RTX 2060 laptops I’ve tested and even
most of the RTX 2070 Max-Q ones too, likely in part thanks to the GPU overclock in turbo
mode. Based on what I’m seeing here, I’d expect the 9SF version of the GE65 with RTX
2070 to be a beast.
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 storage, and the 256GB NVMe M.2 SSD was performing
great for the reads, but less than half as much for the writes. The spinning rust was
giving about what we’d expect from a 5,400 RPM drive, and the SD slot was below average,
but I’m just happy they included it at all.
For updated pricing check the links in the description, as prices will change over time.
At the time of recording, in the US I’ve had trouble finding the 2060 model, it seems
to go for $1800 USD, but that doesn’t make much sense given the 2070 model is on sale
for the same price. To be fair these are with the 240Hz screen, which should increase the
price over the 144Hz one I have. Otherwise there’s also the 1660 Ti model that goes
for $1200 USD.
It’s a similar weird deal here in Australia, the GE65 with 2060 is $3200 AUD, but the 2070
model is on sale for $3000, putting the 2060 in a strange overpriced position, so if that’s
the case it would make sense to just get the more powerful 2070.
With all of that in mind let’s conclude by looking at the good and bad aspects of
the MSI GE65 gaming laptop.
As a gaming laptop, the GE65 is doing what it’s designed to do - it’s playing games
very well and beating higher specced laptops. The new thin bezel design is appreciated over
say the older and thicker GE63 design, and the reduction of gamer red was also nice,
though there is still a little around but it’s somewhat more subtle compared to previous
MSI laptops. The build quality was also quite good, it felt solid and well made.
It’s great that the screen is available with 144Hz or 240Hz options, and the colour
gamut and brightness measured in my unit were great for a gaming laptop, however contrast
was a little below average, bleed was fine in my unit though. There’s a decent selection
of I/O on offer, however I found it a little strange that the two USB Type-A ports are
right down the front on the right. If you plug in pretty much anything it’ll be in
the way if you’re right-handed and using a mouse. It’s especially strange when the
back section appears free.
The Steelseries keyboard is one of the best looking in terms of per key RGB lighting that
I’ve tested, and it also offers a lot of customization. There’s plenty of storage
options available, with a 2.5 inch drive bay, space for two M.2 drives, and even SD card
slot. I know some people would have preferred to remove the 2.5 inch drive bay for a larger
battery, which sounds fair considering the poor battery life from the smaller 51wh battery.
Personally I think this compromise is fair. This is meant to be a gaming laptop, you’re
not really going to want to game on battery power as it cuts performance significantly.
Having a large hard drive will allow you to store plenty of games for less money compared
to M.2 SSDs, but yeah the trade off does mean lower battery life.
I thought the thermals were on the warmer side considering we’ve got 7 heatpipes inside,
it would be interesting to see how things would go with either an 8 core i9 9880H CPU
or RTX 2070, as I’d expect those to run hotter.
The only other strange thing was the price, both in the US and here in Australia for some
reason the RTX 2070 model is either about the same price or cheaper than the 2060 one,
so if that’s the case it probably makes sense to just go for the 2070 as that would
be better value.
All things considered, the GE65 is a powerful gaming laptop for the specs that it’s packing.
It’s punching above its weight and even beating higher specced 2070 Max-Q machines.
Let me know what you thought about the MSI GE65 gaming laptop down in the comments, and
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