MSI’s P65 is their laptop for content creators, but is there more to it than just being a
white version of the GS65 gaming laptop? Let’s find out in this detailed review and see if
it’s a laptop you should consider.
Starting with the specs I’ve got the 8RF model, so there’s an Intel i7-8750H CPU,
Nvidia GTX 1070 Max-Q graphics, 16gb of memory in single channel, 15.6” 1080p 144Hz screen,
and a 512gb M.2 NVMe SSD.
For network connectivity it’s got gigabit ethernet, 802.11ac WiFi and Bluetooth 5.
I’m covering the older 8th gen model here, however I’ll note the differences between
it and the newer 9th gen models as we go. The 8RF model I’ve got here is the limited
edition version which comes in white and in a wooden box, otherwise the 8RD and 8RE with
lower graphics come in silver, and you can find examples and updated prices 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.
On the matte white metal lid we’ve got the MSI logo in the center near the top, while
the inside is also a matte white metal. There were no sharp corners or edges anywhere and
the machine felt fairly well built.
MSI list the weight at 1.88kg, and mine was a little under this. Once we add the 180 watt
power brick and cables the total rises above 2.3kg, so quite lightweight for the specs.
The dimensions of the laptop are 35.7cm in width, 24.7cm in depth, and 1.8cm in height,
so on the smaller side for a 15” laptop. The smaller footprint gives us very thin bezels,
MSI list them at 4.9mm however from edge to the actual screen I measured them at 7mm.
The 15.6” 1080p 144Hz IPS-level screen has a matte finish and good viewing angles, and
it goes all the way back if that’s important to you.
MSI note the panel is “close to 100% sRGB”. I’ve measured the colour gamut with the
Spyder 5 Pro and got 97% of sRGB, 67% of NTSC, and 73% of AdobeRGB. At 100% brightness I
measured the panel at 297 nits in the center and with an 810 to 1 contrast ratio, so decent
results but pretty close to most other 144Hz gaming laptops I’ve tested.
Unfortunately there’s no 4K option with the 8th gen model, something I’d like to
see as an option for a creator laptop, however the newer 9th gen model does have that available,
though neither have the new OLED panel as an option.
Backlight bleed wasn’t too bad here, just some minor imperfections that I wasn’t actually
able to notice while viewing darker content, but this will vary between laptop and panel.
Screen flex was around average, the metal panel felt fairly solid, and the hinges being
out towards the far corners help with stability.
Absolutely no problems at all opening it up with one finger, it felt quite well balanced
and no problems using it on my lap. There were magnets on the sides that help keep the
lid closed as well, though they were hardly strong enough to notice this while opening.
Despite the screen bezels being on the thinner side MSI were still able to fit the 720p camera
up the top.
The webcam looks about average and it sounds ok. Here's what typing sounds like, so a little
clicky, and here's what it sounds like when we set the fan speed to maximum. So you can
hear it pretty easily but you can still also hear me over the fans as well.
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 four levels or turned off using the
function and page up or down keys. While the lighting looked fine in a dark room, in a
well lit room, it looked a bit uneven and just not very good, at least compared to the
GS65. Key presses were a little shallow feeling but have a sort of click to them, here’s
how typing sounds to give you an idea of what to expect.
There was some keyboard flex while pushing down hard, however it felt fine while actually
using it normally day to day.
The precision touchpad was smooth to the touch and worked quite well. 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 well though, it was fast enough.
Due to the white finish fingerprints weren’t really viewable, however as this isn’t a
new machine I can see dirt on it that’s built up over time and was harder to clean
off.
On the left from the back there’s a kensington lock, air exhaust vent, ethernet port, and
I prefer it being this way so you can unplug without lifting the machine, two USB 3.1 Gen1
Type-A ports, and 3.5mm headphone and mic jacks.
On the right from the front there’s a USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-A port, USB 3.1 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.
In total all of these display outputs allow you to run three external monitors at once.
It’s worth noting this is with the 8RF in white only, the silver 8RE and 8RD models
are limited to two external screens, as they do not have the Type-C port, so no additional
DisplayPort or Thunderbolt there. It’s a bit odd that it differs, however with the
newer 9th gen models all variants have the Thunderbolt port.
The back just has some air exhaust vents, while the front has a battery status LED towards
the right.
Underneath there are just air intake holes towards the back half of the machine. The
bottom panel can be removed by taking out 15 Phillips head screws, then once inside
we can see that the motherboard is upside down, just like the GS65. All we get access
to here is the WiFi card and battery. Access to the memory and two M.2 slots requires removal
of the motherboard, which is an annoying process and likely necessary for this machine given
it came with single channel memory, so ideally you’d want to upgrade that.
The two speakers are found towards the front left and right corners, they sound ok, a little
above average for a laptop though minimal bass and a bit tinny sounding. They get loud
enough at maximum volume, and the Latencymon results didn’t look great.
Powering the laptop is a 4 cell 82 watt hour battery. I’ve tested it with the screen
brightness at 50%, background apps disabled, and all lighting off. While just watching
YouTube videos it lasted for 5 hours and 40 minutes, a pretty good result for this test,
and it was using the Intel integrated graphics due to Nvidia Optimus.
While playing the Witcher 3 with medium settings and Nvidia’s battery boost set to 30 FPS
the battery lasted for a massive 2 hours and 12 minutes, however after the first hour and
30 minutes with 27% charge left the frame rate dipped down to 12 FPS, still 90 minutes
is a good result for this test.
Let’s move onto the thermal testing. MSI note that the 8th gen P65 uses 4 heatpipes
and 3 fans, though it’s worth noting the newer 9th gen model has an improved cooling
design with 6 heatpipes, so we can probably expect better temperatures from the newer
9th gen model, which is great considering that one also goes up to an 8 core i9 CPU.
Like MSI’s gaming laptops, the Dragon Center software suite is installed to allow you to
manage the system, however there are less options available here. For example while
we can set the fan speed to maximum at least, there’s no turbo mode like the gaming laptops
have to boost performance.
Thermal testing was completed in an ambient room temperature of 21 degrees Celsius, so
expect different results in different environments. At idle the temperatures were looking fine.
The rest of the results are from running combined CPU and GPU workloads at the same time for
extended periods of time and are meant to represent worst case results.
The gaming results towards the upper half of the graph were tested by playing Watch
Dogs 2, as I find it to use a good combination of processor and graphics. The stress test
results shown on the lower half of the graph are from running the Aida64 CPU stress test
with only the stress CPU option checked, and the Heaven GPU benchmark at max settings at
the same time to fully load the system.
Straight away, I want to note that any time the CPU, shown by the blue bar, is at 90 degrees
Celsius, it’s thermal throttling, and we can see this was happening in pretty much
all tests. This doesn’t change regardless of if we set the fans to maximum speed using
cooler boost mode, undervolt the CPU or use a cooling pad. While gaming the averages do
drop a tiny bit once undervolted, but it was still spiking into thermal throttling territory.
The GPU temperatures on the other hand drop quite a lot once we set the fan speed to maximum.
These are the average clock speeds for the same tests just shown. There’s no real difference
to the GPU clock speeds regardless of these changes, however we can see changes to the
CPU. As thermal throttling is always happening on the CPU, we are seeing an increase in performance
by setting the fan speed to maximum. By undervolting the CPU we’re able to gain additional performance,
and with the cooling pad while under stress test this helps out a little more, but it
made no difference while playing this particular game as the undervolt removed most of the
thermal throttling.
These are the average TDP values reported by hardware info during these same tests.
Basically we can see lower than expected CPU power limits being hit due to the thermal
throttling that prevents it raising higher.
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 a 14% higher multicore score in
this test, as this helped reduce the thermal throttling that was still taking place, even
under this CPU only workload.
As for the external temperatures where you’ll actually be putting your hands, at idle it
was in the low 30s in the center, about average. While gaming with the fan on auto it gets
to the low 40s in the center and mid 45s on the back side. While under stress test it’s
similar on the keyboard, but hotter on the back left side. With the fan at maximum it
does drop back a few degrees despite the CPU temperatures being unchanged.
As for the fan noise produced by the laptop, I’ll let you have a listen to some of these
tests.
At idle it was completely silent, then with the fan set to automatic it was on the quieter
side compared to most other machines I’ve tested, so you do have the option of limiting
how loud it gets, however as we saw thermal throttling was capping performance earlier
so lower levels of performance are expected like this. Maximum fan on the other hand is
significantly louder in comparison.
Overall the P65 was running hot, mainly on the CPU. It’s worth considering that this
is a thinner machine, so higher thermals under these worst case workloads are kind of expected,
and as mentioned the newer 9th gen version does appear to have improved cooling so I’d
be expecting higher clock speeds with that model as a result in these particular tests
where thermal throttling is the limit. Keep in mind these are worst case multicore CPU
and GPU tests, though a creator would expect similar results while say exporting a video
as that hits both CPU and GPU in Adobe Premiere.
Next let’s take a look at some gaming benchmarks. While not explicitly advertised as a gaming
laptop, given it’s got a standard i7 CPU and GTX 1070 Max-Q graphics it’s definitely
going to be capable of playing modern games if you want to, so let’s see what it’s
capable of.
Battlefield 5 was tested in campaign mode. Overall performance is down due to our single
channel configuration, and we’ll see this throughout all upcoming game tests, so keep
in mind that performance could be improved significantly with that upgrade. I’ve got
a video linked in the description showing how much of an improvement this can make.
Anyway in this configuration we’re still able to reach 60 FPS averages at ultra.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider was tested with the built in benchmark, again the results
are down significantly for this hardware configuration due to single channel memory, however 60 FPS
averages were still possible at max settings.
CS:GO was tested using the Ulletical FPS benchmark, and while we’re still seeing high frame
rates here, we’re around 100 FPS lower at max settings compared to most other dual channel
laptops.
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was tested with the built in benchmark, and from my experience
seems to be a fairly CPU heavy game. Once more the frame rates were down significantly
due to the single channel memory, though as a game that doesn’t need super high FPS
to play it should still work well enough.
The Witcher 3 tends to be more of a GPU heavy game, and in this title ultra settings still
played alright, with around 70 FPS average, but higher possible at lower settings.
Let’s also take a look at how this config of the MSI P65 compares with other laptops
to see how it stacks up, 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 P65 highlighted in red near similarly specced machines. It’s
coming in at last place out of the machines I’ve recently tested simply due to the memory
configuration, all others on this graph were tested with dual channel. It’s not actually
that far behind the Alienware m15 with same specs as that one thermal throttles, however
we see a larger difference in 1% low performance, which is exactly where we’re going to see
the biggest hit with single channel memory.
Here are the results from Far Cry 5 with ultra settings in the built in benchmark. As a CPU
heavy test the lack of dual channel memory is going to be an issue here in particular,
which is why it's so much behind all other machines as they were tested with dual channel
memory.
It’s a similar story in Shadow of the Tomb Raider at highest settings with the built
in benchmark, though still 60 FPS at max settings isn’t exactly terrible, just notably lower
compared to other machines.
While the P65 was playing games just fine, as we’ve seen it’s performing worse compared
to other lower specced machines simply because there’s only one stick of memory installed
which is why I haven’t bothered testing as many games as usual. You’d definitely
want to consider upgrading to two sticks for dual channel for significant performance improvements,
and that applies outside of gaming too.
Given the machine is targeted towards creators I’ve also tested Adobe Premiere video exporting.
While the P65 has the same CPU and GPU as my Aero 15x, we can see it’s taking a fair
bit longer to export the exact same video project, which seems to be a result of both
the CPU thermal throttling covered earlier but also due to my P65 having single channel
memory. Mostly the single channel memory would be my guess, given the Aero thermal throttles
too. If you’re able to buy it with two sticks in dual channel or otherwise upgrade it yourself,
keeping in mind that upside down motherboard, then I’d expect more comparable performance.
I’ve used Crystal Disk Mark to test the storage, and the 512gb NVMe M.2 SSD was performing
alright, alright read and write speeds.
For updated pricing check the links in the description, as prices will change over time.
At the time of recording in the US the MSI P65 Creator laptop with similar specs is going
for $2300 USD, though this one does have double the memory. Just for comparison, the GS65
gaming laptop with same specs is available for a fair bit less money. All you really
seem to be missing is the fingerprint scanner and limited edition white colour, while you’re
also getting the RGB keyboard with the GS65. I’m guessing the 8RF costs more as it’s
the limited edition model.
That said if you don’t need that much GPU power and are happy with the silver colour,
the lower priced 8RD and 8RC are options too.
Here in Australia I’ve only been able to find the P65 8RE with 1060, which is around
$2100 AUD, while the newer 9th gen models seem to start at $3000 AUD
With all of that in mind let’s conclude by looking at the good and bad aspects of
the P65.
Overall, I'll say that I did like the laptop, the build quality seemed fair for a thinner
machine and it’s on the smaller side for a 15 inch device and isn’t too heavy, something
I can definitely appreciate as someone that travels with a laptop and uses it for content
creation. The battery life was quite good, there’s a decent selection of I/O including
Thunderbolt 3 support, and the screen looked nice.
The main issue I have with the P65 Creator laptop is just that, for a machine that’s
got creator in the name it doesn’t really seem to differ too much from the GS65 gaming
laptop. When it comes down to it, we’ve got a white GS65. That’s not necessarily
a bad thing, I know a lot of people like having white options, but for a machine that’s
meant to be for creators, personally I was hoping for some extra features that weren’t
present in the GS65 including an SD card slot and better screen options.
I haven’t been able to find out if MSI will be adding the new 15” OLED screen to the
P65 lineup in future but that would make it stand out more by having that as an option.
The fingerprint scanner was a nice addition, and you do have the option of a higher quality
4K panel with 100% AdobeRGB coverage in the newer 9th gen model, something which would
probably be enough alone for me to look at the newer offerings compared to the 8th gen
model I’ve tested here.
That newer 9th gen model should in theory have better cooling too, and also the option
of more powerful graphics and 8 core CPUs as well, which depending on you’re doing
are things that will be useful for creator workloads such as video editing.
MSI also have the WS65, which is basically their workstation version of this machine,
so again very similar chassis but with Quadro graphics, so if you’re after the next level
in terms of specs that’s going to be it.
Back to the P65, while nothing groundbreaking, if nothing else it’s nice to have a white
model available without the flashing RGB lighting of the GS65 for those that want a more subtle
look.
In terms of performance despite both the CPU and GPU in my model now being last gen they
both still perform quite well. I actually use the exact same combination in my Aero
15x to edit 4K video while I’m travelling with Adobe Premiere and it works quite well.
The only issue with my specific configuration of P65 is that it came to me with single channel
memory, and while you can upgrade this yourself for improved performance, the process is made
more difficult due to the upside down motherboard.
Otherwise the only other thing I didn’t personally like was the patchy white backlighting
on the keyboard, overall it’s a decent machine, despite it missing some creator specific features
I’d personally be after.
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? Or would
you just get it as a replacement to the GS65 for the different colour options? Let me know,
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