I think I pulled a muscle around my neck it doesn't really feel a lot good but I
gotta make this video hey guys Eber here with Hardware Canucks and this is the msi PS63
I can't call it a gaming laptop although I don't know if I could call it a gaming
laptop or a content creator friendly laptop but we'll finalize on that in the
conclusion so this is an interesting notebook because MSI partnered up with
the Discovery Channel to come up with this guy and as you can see by the
design it it looks definitely a lot sleeker certainly looks not MSI
whatsoever because if you if you think about MSI you think gaming aggressive
designs but this is totally a complete refresh and I really like the way how it
looks so just to quickly go over the specs it has a whiskey lake core i7
processor 16 gigabytes of RAM 512 byte SSD nvme SSD but oddly enough my unit
was partitioned which was really weird and it also has a GTX 10/15 max-q GPU
and that is an interesting combination because typically you would pair or
you'd find gaming laptops with primarily mainstream Intel CPUs and a discreet
NVIDIA GPU but in this case it's different MSI decided go with a slightly
underpowered you series processor and pair it up with a 1050 max-q GPU and so
I just really wanted to test out the performance and what you can get with
something like this particularly interested by the battery life as well
and there are a lot of surprises and of course a few disappointments as well so
let's get into it but first a quick message from our sponsor damn what that
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we get into the aesthetics of this new book I do want to quickly discuss
pricing so you can pick it up for around 1,300 to 1,600 dollars depending on
again depending on retailers again they have a lot of these notebooks on sales
so that's kind of the price ranges you're looking at for the specs that I
just mentioned a minute ago with that out of the way let's talk about the
design and I really love what MSI has done here the partnership with the
Discovery Channel really shows when you take a closer look at the notebook so
the front panel feels like it's made out of polycarbonate materials that
sandblasted in this galaxy blue trim by the way this is an MSI term the interior
is full on aluminum and it comes in this nice carbon gray finish with a bit of
blue accents on the trackpad and I think that's a nice touch the keyboard layout
is pretty compact the key sizes are slightly bigger than usual and I like
that because I got used to it really fast they do have a shorter amount of
travel distance and I want to say that they're slightly better than my daily
driver the Razer Blade 15 so that's nice there is good feedback the arrow keys
are positioned appropriately nothing to complain here it's also backlit but it
does not feature RGB lining which i think is great because it wouldn't have
fit the design aesthetic so there's no book in the first place
however I do wish the brightness levels were a little bit you know higher or
brighter because they don't get as bright in darker conditions moving out
to the trackpad MSI one with a slightly different approach this time so they
made it wider to accommodate your fingers comfortably and I really enjoyed
my time using it it features Windows position drivers so it takes advantage
of all the gesture controls baked into Windows 10 and it also has a built-in
fingerprint reader which is a nice touch taking a look at the i/o on the left
side you have your power in HDMI that can only output 4k at 30 Hertz a USB 3.1
genuine type C port that also acts as a display port another USB 3.1 genuine
type a that supports quick charge 3.0 that's actually a really cool feature
because not a lot of laptops support that and the fact that you can simply
plug in your included USB cable to plug in your smart phone provided that
supports quick charge is great and I think this would come in super handy for
people who travel a lot and of course you do get a headphone /my jack
switching over to the right you get two more USB 3.1 ports one of them being Gen
1 and the other one being gen 2 and a micro SD card slot now a lot of gamers
won't care about this but for content creators it's a huge deal because this
notebook is geared for that and the fact that you know they're targeting this for
people who travel as well who create content does make any sense because you
know most people use cameras with full-size SD cards and I would have
preferred to have that on a notebook that's geared for content creation just
something's missing there on the positive side the display is really nice
to work with it's a 15.6 inch 1080p IPS screen that
exhibits great colors with good contrast ratio it's also a matte display and the
webcam is placed at the right location and I thoroughly enjoyed my time gaming
on this laptop as well because a display is just really good however I did wish
if the screen got a little bit more brighter because viewing content was a
bit challenging outdoors and this is something that I have encountered among
other gaming laptops in the past brands just tend to pack in good displays not
our grading colors but just not bright enough especially compared to what Apple
offers with their Microprose those queens get super bright but again like I
said if you're thinking about picking this up and if you're traveling a lot
you may find the brightness up put on this a little bit you know disappointing
now in terms of upgrades when you crack open this notebook the first red flag
that I caught was that the memory is running in single channel mode and so I
was certainly expecting that to affect performance which will definitely take a
look at later on you can't upgrade the memory up to 32 gigabytes switching over
to the storage configuration the main drive is sitting on a PCI gen3 slot
whereas the other one only supports SATA based drives so keep that in mind
as for battery the ps63138 ficient processor like the whiskey lake cpu and
we pair that up with a fairly respectable graphics
like the GTX 1050 I think you've got a really solid middle ground in terms of
power efficiency and performance and guys I also want to mention that I
haven't tested other 15-inch notebooks with lower voltage processors and lower
end discrete graphics cards so the four core a threaded CPU is a decent
performer obviously keep your expectations lower since it doesn't get
anywhere closer to the six core 8750 H processor but you can still get a
lot of work done and I was really surprised with the video editing
experience as well now typically on any notebook reviews I would take our
standard 13 minute 4k project and I would render that on the machine to see
how fast renders but weirdly enough this notebook had some issues with Adobe
Premiere and that project which was so odd
obviously premiere is broken I mean I'm having issues with my desktop PC so I
tried rendering another project which is a 10-minute 4k clip and you know it
completed that render in just a bit over 14 minutes which is really respectable
because you've got CUDA acceleration paired with good Intel Quick Sync so
like I said you can get away with video editing on this thing I wouldn't push it
to the extreme and but I'm actually really surprised by the playback
performance on this guy gaming on the other hand well let's just save the
10:50 max-q pushed out respectable frame rates paired with a wisk cubic processor
I mean the fact that the memory is running in single channel mode certainly
bottleneck the performance and this is the PS 63s biggest disappointment
because I actually made a separate video comparing dual channel versus single
channel on notebooks and the results were substantial I mean if you're
interested you can actually check that video right over here but you know if
msi pre-loaded this with a dual channel configuration it just would have made
this notebook a lot more responsive and the frame rates would have obviously
topped the charts especially at 1080p at medium to low settings taking a look at
temperatures things are not looking that great on a full synthetic load using
either 64 the CPU did get toasty at 95 C and India throttle however do keep in
mind that it's a full synthetic load and not a real-world use case scenario
especially for content creators so I did monitor clock speed when rendering
the premier project and CPU got around four gigahertz which is again well
respectable and the temperatures are also well under control unless if you
decide to fully push the processor to its absolute limits you shouldn't have a
problem the GTX 1050 max-q did peak at 84 C which is to be expected considering
the form factor of this notebook and the clock speeds were shifting back and
forth between 1200 and 1683 megahertz fan noise is tolerable I mean the good
thing is that it doesn't sound like a jet fan when gaming or doing anything
productive under idle scenarios it's also really quiet which fits the
notebooks character now MSI has pre-installed control center that lets
the user switch between different performance modes and of course adjusts
fan speeds as well and you can also set you know CPU and GPU preferences for
certain applications which is pretty nice and the one thing that I'm really
surprised is the lack of crazy amount bloatware on this notebook considering
that is an MSI laptop because you know the last MSI notebook that I reviewed
was again this was a while back it was a huge thick beast gaming beast from MSI
and that thing was just loaded with bloatware apps but I'm really surprised
by the cut down of that on this notebook I'm hoping it's the same case with their
gaming lineup but yeah on this guy very minimal so I guess it's time to conclude
my thoughts on the ps6 between modern from MSI you see the biggest strengths
of this notebook is the battery life the fact that I was able to get over 11
hours of use in my use case scenario is just fascinating I mean when you look at
the hardware configuration this thing you know has a you series rescale like
processor and when you pair that up with a respectable again gtx 950 max-q GPU
it's the combination is just very unique and I think it establishes a solid
middle ground especially for people who don't want to spend too much on a
super-fast gaming laptop but also don't want to compromise on just an ultrabook
featuring integrated UHD graphics that gtx 1050 guys it really does elevate the
content grading experience that being said there are some things that I'm not
a fan of especially on this notebook so first and foremost the speakers they're
not that great they're downwards firing and they completely just block because I
know it's just a weird implementation I would prefer to fund facing speakers
for better protection also the single channel memory mode is just a big red
flag in my books because it affects gaming performance now you can upgrade
it on your own to a dual channel config but that's an investment on your end so
keep that in mind and in micro SD card reader is an ironic implementation
especially since MSI is gearing this for content creators who travel a lot lastly
there's the cost so as I mentioned earlier you can pick up this notebook
for anywhere between thirteen hundred and sixteen hundred dollars and that
puts it at a very interesting spot especially the competition because you
can pick up a faster gaming laptop with the gtx 1060 and a faster six core
processor for around the same price so I guess it's ultimately depends on what
you really need I mean are you someone who's looking for exceptional battery
life in a notebook that has you know decent performance that can comfortably
push games at 1080p over sixty frames per second and that's the question that
has to be answered especially by the user and I think the PS63 is a really
good middle ground between you know a super-fast high performance gaming
system and an ultrabook and I think if you're willing to you
know do the memory upgrades on your own and if you're willing to go past the
speakers and the micro SD card implementation I don't think you can go
wrong with a notebook like this but I want to know your thoughts about the PS63 Modern
from MSI what do you guys think about it first and foremost do you like
the design also are you comfortable with the combination up at GTX 1050 max Q
and a whiskey a processor I do want to quickly point out that I did notice a
listing on MSI's website where they're offering this notebook with a 1650 max Q
GPU although it is not available to buy right now so I guess we'll just have to
wait and see how that goes but let me know what you guys think about this
notebook in the comments down below I'm Ivar with Hardare Canucks thank you
so much for watching make sure to check out some relevant content over here
subscribe to our new channel here and I'll see you in the next one