Are you looking for a gaming laptop to justify as a work expense? Well, MSI's
got you covered because they sponsored this ShortCircuit today to take a look at the MSI Vector 16 HX AI. And I say
that because this laptop kind of has an identity crisis. While they market it as
a STEM laptop, this bad boy is packing all the power you could want for gaming.
We're going to open it up here. And holy crap, that is a huge power brick.
My goodness, you could kill a man with this thing. and you'd have fun doing it.
>> How many watts is this bad boy? 330 watts. While this seems like a lot for a
laptop, because it is, this laptop can drop to 250 watts at its max load.
Meaning if you're drawing that much power, you'll still be able to get a
charge. So, that's kind of nice. And then we've got the other end, which is
our C13. Oh, wow. Nice 6T C13. How long
is this one too? You might be able to plug this thing in like three desks
away. Three work desks away. Yes. Thank you,
Andrew. another like fourish, fiveish
feet. So, you got quite a long power cable for this thing. And then, of
course, the laptop itself.
Is there anything else in here before I look at the laptop? Just some MSI
propaganda. Wow, look at that. See what
I mean by identity crisis? It's marketed for STEM students, but this is a gaming
laptop as far as I'm concerned. On the right side here, you've got two USBA
ports and a headphone audio jack combined. On the back here, you've got
your Kensington lock, your power plug, HDMI 2.1, and LAN 2.5 Gbit. So, again,
full fat speed on this bad boy. And on the last side here, you've got two
Thunderbolt 5 ports, and a full size SD card reader, which again kind of goes
back to their point of maybe a student laptop because depending on the projects
you're working on, you might be plugging in an SD card from a camera cuz again,
they talk about some editing workloads as well, some video editing or photo
editing. I'm more interested in the gaming side.
Oh my gosh, these hinges are like crazy. I don't know if I'm going to be able to
get them really good on camera. These hinges are kind of crazy. Like a full
90° hinge. They look super cool. They
feel fine. It's got that one-handed laptop open. That's always nice to see.
It lifts it a tiny bit, but that's fine. I call that passible. As for the screen
itself, oh, that is quite strong, actually. Even though it's only held on
by the two little hinges here, I'm moving the laptop more than I'm like
twisting the actual screen. And on the bottom, oh
wo. Oh, we're going to have to open this bad boy up after. Can you see the heat
pipes in there? Oh, it's really hard to see with it closed on camera cuz this
bad boy has kind of a crazy cooling system because it has to cool a 5080.
specifically a 5080 that draws 175
watts, which in case you don't know, is the maximum wattage that you can get on
a mobile 5080. As well as cooling the 5080, it also has a core Ultra 9
processor, the 275HX in here, which is a 24 core processor.
Eight of those are performance and 16 of those are efficiency cores, which again
just kind of speaks to how much power this bad boy is going to be drawing. I
man, I don't know how much I can wait. I kind of want to just get right into this. [music] By the way, investment
disclosure, Lionus is invested in framework laptops. Man, actually doing
another tour of the outside. Look at how much space there is of cooling. I I
mean, I hope that translates to excellent cooling performance, but these
bad boys got like full headers on this. I would actually worry I would spill a
drink in there or something, but no
Mountain Dew when you're gaming on this bad boy. Let's give it a power up here.
The first thing I noticed when booting this up, I mean, obviously, is the
screen. It is a 16x10 aspect ratio at
240 hertz, which again for school work,
a little bit insane if you ask me. And MSI says this hits 100% of the DCIP3
coverage spectrum on this IPS display.
When we tested it, we didn't quite get to 100%. Which we did talk to them about
and they said that there could have been some variance in the displays that they're using. At least they're aware of
it and hopefully they'll make some changes by the time you get your laptop.
But even just saying that, I'm on the Windows home screen right now and it
looks fantastic. I mean, I want to boot up a video to actually verify this. I
[music] want to crank the brightness up on this first.
Unless it's already up all the way. It was already up all the way. Okay. Would
have expected it a little bit brighter then, but it looks very good for
watching this video that we're watching. We're watching the re test footage,
which is our HDR content, even though the screen isn't in HDR. The one thing
I've noticed a tiny bit again is in these black bars, it almost gets a
little bit I don't want to say cyan like the framework laptop had, but like it's
not quite a solid deep black. I mean, it's not an OLED display, so I wouldn't
expect it to get super super black there. Could be a little distracting,
especially since I actually can see it more on the camera than in front of me.
But right here, I can almost see the RGB backlight like reflecting on the bottom
of the screen. So maybe you want to turn yours off. I was going to comment on the
keyboard and trackpad, but one thing I'm hearing just now is the fans are on. And
I've been wondering if they've been on this whole time now, which for watching
a YouTube video, I wouldn't necessarily expect fans to ramp up a little bit. But
hopefully that means it's just staying super cool, but it's so faint that if
you didn't have headphones on, be like maybe a little bit of white noise for
you. It's a nice large trackpad, which I like. My fingers are getting a tiny bit
stuck. I have greasy fingers though, I will admit that. So, if you don't have
greasy fingers, you're probably fine. [laughter] This feels like a very good trackpad
when my finger is actually sliding on it, though. And as for the click, I am
very satisfied with a nice click on a trackpad. I hate kind of squishy
trackpads that don't give me the feedback. It's able to register all my
gestures that I would need. So, for me, I feel like it's totally fine.
Man, this is a nice keyboard. I'm
bringing up my daily driver, my Lenovo here. I want to just test it. My Lenovo
has way more flex. And I've always found that this was my bar of like acceptable
for me. This, if you like a nice stiff keyboard in your laptop, holy, I like
this keyboard a lot actually. And they managed to fit a numpad in on it. It's a
probably the smallest numpad I've ever seen on a laptop. But I love numpads. I
when we had to pick our internal laptop, I made sure I picked one with a numpad.
It's so much easier just to type anything, whether it's a phone number or
an address or something. I'm very happy they managed to squeeze one in on here.
I'm I got to push really hard to get any bend on that. But just like normal
typing,
our configuration, we have 16 GB of memory. You can configure it on their
website up to 32. The board says it supports up to 96 GB. So, I don't know
why they would only let you configure up to 32. I guess it's very much BYOM then.
Bring your own memory. Holy crap. This thing's ready to go. Oh, I got a hand
warmer, though. If I put my hands right here.
Okay, it seems like everything is on our Labs test suite. I thought maybe it was
dialed down somehow because I'm getting over 100 FPS as my average.
And on this display, it looks really, really good. I had a little hitch there,
but I was loading something, so understandable.
For not even the topsp spec version of this laptop.
Dude, this is sick. this would be a great portable gaming work work machine.
Great portable work machine. My only complaint about this gaming experience
would be that I would need headphones, which I don't think is necessarily a
complaint cuz again, if you're in the middle of class and you just heard all
this gunshot going on, people would know anyway. So, you're probably wearing headphones. Holy cow. 1% lows have
dropped down to 70ish there, but it seems to bounce back up to 80. And I can
actually I can actually feel a tiny bit of the fan pressure coming back up
through the keyboard. It's keeping my fingers nice and toasty. I complained
when I first walked on set that it was cold in here. I'm happier now.
[laughter] I wasn't the only one that was happy with the numbers. Labs told me they were
pretty happy with the numbers as well, considering at the 1200 resolution, our
Cyberpunk was getting 170 FPS average,
which again is a lot for a mobile
device. You're still not even pushing the full display though in that game.
And same with F124. That was one of our games that managed to push over 220 FPS,
which is freaking amazing at 12,200 resolution. When you go up to the full
resolution of the display, which is 1,600, our FPS drops a little bit, but
it's still above 120 in Cyberpunk average and almost 180 in F124, which
again for a gaming experience is more than enough on a device like this. And
our last game of Total Warhammer 3, same story. We saw 150ish FPS in 1200. Once
we bumped up the resolution, it dropped down a little bit. And that was the only game in our test suite that actually
dipped just barely below 100 FPS. [music]
Wow, these are loud. Holy crap.
Oh, that's a lot of bass though.
That's a lot of bass in that laptop and they are very loud. So, my point stands
earlier. If you were playing uh Cyberpunk on these speakers in your
class, they would probably drown out that fan noise. I'm going to drop it
down to 50%, which is what I often find is like the sweet spot for mobile
devices. It's still very loud at 50% YouTube.
They're loud. I I I think it's too much bass for my personal liking, but I think
once you dial it down a little bit, I don't think it overpowers it anymore.
So, I think it's totally fine. But to each their own. Don't listen to it on
full volume, then I guess. As for the webcam on this thing, this is what I
look like. It's a webcam that is good enough for
the schooled work that you will be doing on this laptop. I would not record a
professional YouTube video on it like I am right now. But let's make sure my
kill cam works. I hope that worked. And turn it back on.
Hey, there we go. I'm still recording. Does this have a microphone kill switch?
I don't see one at immediate glance,
which might be a turnoff for you, but at least you have a hard a hardware
covering the camera, which is really important. Now comes my favorite part to
suffocate this thing until it turns off.
Beauty. Those are some thick feet, actually. I never even realized. Look at
those feet. My goodness. That way hopefully you'll have lots of clearance.
We're on a squishy mat, so that might not be the best, but you should have plenty of airflow on the underside.
Let's open this up. Where's my screwdriver? Oh, finally.
My goodness. That took me a bit to get into, but I did have to take off the
hinge in order to get at some of the clips under here. Now that I have the
back panel off, it looks really [music] good. So, you got your two SSD slots
right here. You have your Wi-Fi. This is our Wi-Fi 7 chip here. And I'm just
looking overall, where's our battery size here? 87.4Wh
hour battery. That's a bit smaller than I would expect in a device like this. I
think the legal limit for like airplanes is 99 W hours, which I guess I don't
know, maybe if you're just taking it around for land, you're always plugging it in. You're probably going to have to
plug it in, though. If you're just using the iGPU on this bad boy and you're
idling, just watching a YouTube video, you get 6 and 1/2 hours of battery. If
you decide to use the dedicated GPU, that number goes all the way down to 2
and 1/2 hours battery. I won't lie, MSI,
I'm a bit disappointed in that. But I
kind of understand your vision if you're plugging this in and always using it
because then you don't have to worry about it. But if this is supposed to be
a student laptop, like you're going to use it, right, viewer? That might be a
little bit of a concern for you. So, always keep your power cord, I guess,
under here, I'm assuming. And yeah, that's our memory, which again you can
swap out for any other sodium. And this confirms yes, this is 16 GB total for us
here. While I just mentioned the battery results, I might as well talk about the display results as well. And across the
board, it seems to hit about 500 nits, which is what was advertised from MSI.
So that's positive that it hit our brightness. But I was on to something
again when I talked about the black bars on the YouTube video. It seems to again
trend a little bit above average, which kind of gives it that little bit of a
cyan blue gray tint, especially in the
max brightness. Again, it's not an OLED panel, so I wouldn't expect perfect
blacks, [music] but if you're going to use this for any sort of color
correcting, might want to be a little bit careful on that. But for gaming
performance, it's going [music] to look beautiful. And I thought it looked incredible even in just that quick demo
in Cyberpunk. And I'm sure any other game that could push this thing to 240
hertz, for example, or just with a little bit of ray tracing is going to
look immaculate. [music] I'm also going to call MSI out on one more thing, even
though they sponsored. Again, thank you guys very much. They mentioned that you
can put these two M.2 two drives into something called a super RAID 5, which
basically is a RAID zero >> except you get to use the speed benefits
of having that PCIe gen 5 slot cuz one of them is gen 5, one of them is gen 4.
So if you're reading that and a little bit confused, it's not actually RAID 5,
which MSI just call it faster. I don't
confuse the user in my opinion, but it is nice that you are able to raid them
together if that's something you're wanting to do. I know some other boards
in this market might not actually be able to raid the two M.2s together, so
at least you're getting that. Overall, for gaming, this thing is pretty sick.
[music] I'm not again sold on the whole for STEM students or for school
research, but I'm sure that if you wanted to still do some rendering,
whether that's video editing or 3D modeling, CAD work, this bad boy is
going to be able to do it totally fine for you. And MSI is trying to be
competitive in the market by pricing this specific skew at $2,400ish US.
Again, you can change that depending on the GPU versus how much RAM or storage
you can get. And for that price with a 5080, that's cheaper than some other
laptops we've looked at that had a [music] 5070. So, that seems pretty in
line with them wanting to be competitive. [music] If this one is too
much for you, though, they have a slightly more affordable laptop called the Cyborg A15 AI. [music] a little bit
less powerful, but again, it might be more affordable for you. If you're interested in checking out either one of
these laptops, we're going to have them linked down below. Thanks again, MSI, for sponsoring this video. Let me know
what you guys thought about these down below. And if you uh like the video,
subscribe for me. [music] It would mean a lot to me.
Belle might break my knees if you