MSI GF65 Thin Review - A Gaming Laptop Now With Intel 10'th Gen CPU
Slowly, but surely, gaming laptops featuring 10'th Gen Intel CPUs are coming out, and the MSI GF65 Thin is one of these brand new laptops that feature yet another 14nm Intel CPU.
Table of contents:
Since this is the first time we had the opportunity to test a new Intel 10'th gen mobile CPU (H series to be more precise), we were curious to see how does the new series perform (if 14nm can be called new). And to much of our surprise it handles itself very well as you will see later on.
The second thing we were curious about, was to see how does a new entry-level gaming laptop compares with the other players from the market like the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14, the Lenovo Legion Y540 or the ASUS TUF A15. We will talk more about the MSI GF65 competitors in a sec.
Let's have a look first at what the new GF65 Thin brings to the table.
As the name says the MSI GF65 is slim enough for its class. If we compare it with it's bigger brother the GF65 which comes with a 42mm thick chassis, the GF65 has only 21.7mm.
Of course, the MSI GF65 Slim does not compete with high-end ultra-slim gaming laptops, but if we take into account that this laptops has an RTX 2060 Desktop graphics card crammed inside, and a 45W TDP CPU which can easaly go over 70W in high loads, than we can say that this laptiop is pretty slim considering all of the above.
The case is made out of plastic and alluminum, the laptop cover and the area around the keyboard are made of aluminum, while the screen frame and the bottom of the laptiom are made of plastic.
We really like this aluminum - it gives it a more premium feel, but the "brushed aluminum" finishing technology is awful when it comes to gathering fingerprints.
What we liked about the ergonomics is the relatively small weight, only 1.86 kg, given that we have a fairly massive, complex cooling system, and aluminum, which "pulls" more than a magnesium alloy or clean plastic. In short - the laptop is very portable.
The side edges of the screen are only 5mm, and we think it is the lowest value we have encountered with a gaming laptop.
The top frame is thicker, but we were glad to see that the webcam was not killed like some other manufacturers do, forcing the user to buy aftermarket cameras later.
The base of the laptop is quite well ventilated, and we sincerely recommend for such generous intake systems - especially since summer is here - to buy a good laptop cooling solution. One with a good airflow, not some weird china brand with many unnecessary fans.
The keyboard is a downgrade from what we've seen so far from MSI, but let's not be absurd - RGB keyboards by Key SteelSeries are a note of the premium range. The GF Thin range comes with a "simple" gaming keyboard, with a red backlight, and three levels of lighting intensity - nothing fancy here. The keys have a bit of that "rubbery" feel, but they don't have that "spongy" feeling that most of us like.
The keystroke is short, the sound of the keys being a bit louder than the premium keyboards mentioned above, so in short, the keyboard is somewhere in the middle, as a feeling, between the soft, quiet, long-running keys on top of the MSI gaming laptops (and some high-end Predator models) and the rigid keyboards, with short runs, on many other laptops (usually business ones, but also on gaming laptops I've come across less suitable, in our opinion - but this can also be a matter of personal taste after all).
We will not talk about the screen too much - like any screen of a gaming laptop in the mid-ranage category, it is exactly where we were expected it to be, right there in the middle. The screen is fast enough (120Hz for this model), high contrast, but a bit thin at gamut. In short, not photo/video editors are targeted by this range.
MSI GF65 Thin has a screen with a more modest gamut, like all gaming laptops have, but tries to compensate with a good contast. The uniformity of the brightness is above average. The contrast is good, even very good - it is close to 1200:1.
Color accuracy is surprisingly good, but somewhere you can see that a step back has been taken: color uniformity.
Now the moment we have been waiting for, gaming performance. We ran this bad boy over 7 games such that we can see how well it performs in different titles. The chosen ones were: Far Cry 5, Far Cry New Dawn, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Ghost Recon Breakpoint, Borderlands 3, Shadow of the Tombraider and Metro Exodus.
Again, we tried to compare apples to apples, in terms of performance, although we're sure there will be some of you who will say that Zephyrus G14 is not an apple, but an exotic laptop, a metaphorical pineapple, that it's in another class. We say NONSENSE. From a gamer's perspective, FPS is FPS, an RTX 2060 is exactly that an RTX 2060, it doesn't matter what chassis it's in.
So in the graphs below are four laptops, all featuring a full blown RTX 2060, two laptops with the new AMD Ryzen 7 4800H, two with Intel processors (ninth and 10th generation respectively). Watch how the graphics change depending on the optimizations of the game from one CPU architecture to another.
If we take out of the equation Far Cry 5 and New Dawn, where the difference was 1-2 fps between ASUS TUF A15 FA506IV and MSI GF65 Thin, there are 5 games left where the differences were bigger, of about 5-10%. In three games it seems that the pair AMD Ryzen 7 4800H + NVIDIA RTX 2060 is the winner, and in only two games the new 10750H CPU managed to come out the winner. So the score AMD - Intel: 3:2 and two draws.
In synthetic tests, the AMD 4800H + RTX 2060 outperforms the Intel i7-10750H + RTX 2060 in all tests.
Another problem with the new Intel processor is that it runs pretty hot. It's not very friendly with thin chassis. The MSI GF65 Thin ran the games without throttling or very little throttling, but if I were to give some advice, it could use a laptop cooling solution, something like we mentioned earlier in the article.
Temperatures: most of the time, the processor runs in the 80-85C range, but in demanding scenes, which require more tasks from the processor, it can jump 90C. The graphics card is in the 70-80C range, but in some places it reaches 85C.
In Blender, for example, we have the following temperatures: 86C processor, 80C for the graphics card, 54W processor consumption (!!), and 80W for the graphics card.
The MSI GF65 Thin has an upgraded cooling - a complex heat pipe system: 6 heat pipes, 2 for the processor, 3 for the graphics card, and one for VRMs. All separate, just as we like to see.
And if we still got to what's inside, although it's a bit off-topic, we should mention the two storage solutions:
1x M.2 SSD Combo Slot (NVMe PCIe Gen3 / SATA)
1x M.2 SSD Slot (NVMe PCIe Gen3)
That is where, on the upgradability side, the MSI GF65 Thin is very good.
But back to the cooling system, the GF65 Thin comes with 3 outlets (two in the back, one outlet on the left side).
The area above the keyboard arrives after a gaming session at quite high temperatures (almost 50C), luckily it is in an area where you don't have to put your fingers.
The people from MSI claim that it is better to remove the heat from the system, even if it is bad on the thermal map, than to have a plastic housing, whose surface does not heat up, but does not dissipate the heat inside. That means, in the long run, reliability suffers where heat is stored and does not dissipate.
Even if the keyboard heats up (39-45C), but I've seen many other laptops with keyboard areas at 43-44C in the past - the feeling isn't annoying up to these temperatures.
The noise produced by the GF65 Thin's fans is, compared to other gaming laptops, pretty low, meaning we didn't measure more than 45-46dB. When you start a game or a benchmark, the fans turn higher, somewhere around 49dB, but after a few seconds it feels like they calm down a bit.
Honestly, we would have liked some fan profiles set more aggressively, more courageously by Taiwanese engineers. We saw so many laptops with over 50dB in full load and no one complained. After all, 95% of those who game on a laptop use headphones, right?
We would also link the GF65 Thin's connectivity strictly to ergonomics: we liked the fact that there are four USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports, two Type-A, and two Type-C, but we would have liked them to be better distributed, no all on the right side, where we also have the audio jack and the network port. On the left we only have the power port and the HDMI port - obviously, the rest of the space is occupied by the air vents from the processor.
With the screen brightness set to 100cd / m2, with the 1st backlight of the keyboard, on the Super battery saver mode in the MSI Dragon Center profile, I got 5 hours and 7 minutes in PC Mark Applications Battery Life - good value for this range of laptops, especially for a 51Wh 3-cell Li-Polymer battery.
So here we are at the end and it's time to draw some conclusions. And it's really hard for us to draw the right conclusions, especially after playing with two very powerful AMD laptops. Can the new 10th generation Intel i7 cope with the Ryzen 4000 avalanche? In games, they are almost 50-50%, ie some games favor one or the other platform. In multitasking applications, it is clear that AMD is the undisputed king.
But if all you're looking for is a gaming laptop, and you're still a fan of the blue team, the old 14nm still delivers the desired performance, even if I didn't notice the leap in performance from one generation to the next for this laptop. I will definitely have to see a few more laptops, preferably even thicker ones, to be able to see if we have any increase in performance, compared to the previous generation, or it's just a nicely packaged story by Intel.
14nm no matter how much you refine it, let's be serious: it's a 5 year old technology! How long can Intel hammer it when it comes with many compromises like high power consumption and high temperatures?
Instead, we appreciated that the Thin series is really thin, thinner than it seemed in the manufacturer's pictures. It is a very light laptop, and although it comes with a battery of only 51Wh, in PCMark 10 Applications Battery Life we crossed the 5 hour barrier, which is very good for a gaming laptop.