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Are you looking for a gaming laptop to justify as a work expense? Well, MSI's

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got you covered because they sponsored this ShortCircuit today to take a look at the MSI Vector 16 HX AI. And I say

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that because this laptop kind of has an identity crisis. While they market it as

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a STEM laptop, this bad boy is packing all the power you could want for gaming.

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We're going to open it up here. And holy crap, that is a huge power brick.

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My goodness, you could kill a man with this thing. and you'd have fun doing it.

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>> How many watts is this bad boy? 330 watts. While this seems like a lot for a

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laptop, because it is, this laptop can drop to 250 watts at its max load.

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Meaning if you're drawing that much power, you'll still be able to get a

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charge. So, that's kind of nice. And then we've got the other end, which is

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our C13. Oh, wow. Nice 6T C13. How long

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is this one too? You might be able to plug this thing in like three desks

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away. Three work desks away. Yes. Thank you,

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Andrew. another like fourish, fiveish

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feet. So, you got quite a long power cable for this thing. And then, of

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course, the laptop itself.

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Is there anything else in here before I look at the laptop? Just some MSI

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propaganda. Wow, look at that. See what

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I mean by identity crisis? It's marketed for STEM students, but this is a gaming

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laptop as far as I'm concerned. On the right side here, you've got two USBA

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ports and a headphone audio jack combined. On the back here, you've got

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your Kensington lock, your power plug, HDMI 2.1, and LAN 2.5 Gbit. So, again,

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full fat speed on this bad boy. And on the last side here, you've got two

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Thunderbolt 5 ports, and a full size SD card reader, which again kind of goes

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back to their point of maybe a student laptop because depending on the projects

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you're working on, you might be plugging in an SD card from a camera cuz again,

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they talk about some editing workloads as well, some video editing or photo

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editing. I'm more interested in the gaming side.

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Oh my gosh, these hinges are like crazy. I don't know if I'm going to be able to

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get them really good on camera. These hinges are kind of crazy. Like a full

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90° hinge. They look super cool. They

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feel fine. It's got that one-handed laptop open. That's always nice to see.

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It lifts it a tiny bit, but that's fine. I call that passible. As for the screen

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itself, oh, that is quite strong, actually. Even though it's only held on

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by the two little hinges here, I'm moving the laptop more than I'm like

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twisting the actual screen. And on the bottom, oh

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wo. Oh, we're going to have to open this bad boy up after. Can you see the heat

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pipes in there? Oh, it's really hard to see with it closed on camera cuz this

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bad boy has kind of a crazy cooling system because it has to cool a 5080.

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specifically a 5080 that draws 175

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watts, which in case you don't know, is the maximum wattage that you can get on

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a mobile 5080. As well as cooling the 5080, it also has a core Ultra 9

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processor, the 275HX in here, which is a 24 core processor.

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Eight of those are performance and 16 of those are efficiency cores, which again

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just kind of speaks to how much power this bad boy is going to be drawing. I

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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

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disclosure, Lionus is invested in framework laptops. Man, actually doing

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another tour of the outside. Look at how much space there is of cooling. I I

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mean, I hope that translates to excellent cooling performance, but these

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bad boys got like full headers on this. I would actually worry I would spill a

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drink in there or something, but no

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Mountain Dew when you're gaming on this bad boy. Let's give it a power up here.

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The first thing I noticed when booting this up, I mean, obviously, is the

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screen. It is a 16x10 aspect ratio at

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240 hertz, which again for school work,

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a little bit insane if you ask me. And MSI says this hits 100% of the DCIP3

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coverage spectrum on this IPS display.

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When we tested it, we didn't quite get to 100%. Which we did talk to them about

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and they said that there could have been some variance in the displays that they're using. At least they're aware of

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it and hopefully they'll make some changes by the time you get your laptop.

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But even just saying that, I'm on the Windows home screen right now and it

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looks fantastic. I mean, I want to boot up a video to actually verify this. I

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[music] want to crank the brightness up on this first.

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Unless it's already up all the way. It was already up all the way. Okay. Would

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have expected it a little bit brighter then, but it looks very good for

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watching this video that we're watching. We're watching the re test footage,

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which is our HDR content, even though the screen isn't in HDR. The one thing

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I've noticed a tiny bit again is in these black bars, it almost gets a

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little bit I don't want to say cyan like the framework laptop had, but like it's

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not quite a solid deep black. I mean, it's not an OLED display, so I wouldn't

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expect it to get super super black there. Could be a little distracting,

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especially since I actually can see it more on the camera than in front of me.

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But right here, I can almost see the RGB backlight like reflecting on the bottom

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of the screen. So maybe you want to turn yours off. I was going to comment on the

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keyboard and trackpad, but one thing I'm hearing just now is the fans are on. And

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I've been wondering if they've been on this whole time now, which for watching

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a YouTube video, I wouldn't necessarily expect fans to ramp up a little bit. But

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hopefully that means it's just staying super cool, but it's so faint that if

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you didn't have headphones on, be like maybe a little bit of white noise for

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you. It's a nice large trackpad, which I like. My fingers are getting a tiny bit

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stuck. I have greasy fingers though, I will admit that. So, if you don't have

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greasy fingers, you're probably fine. [laughter] This feels like a very good trackpad

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when my finger is actually sliding on it, though. And as for the click, I am

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very satisfied with a nice click on a trackpad. I hate kind of squishy

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trackpads that don't give me the feedback. It's able to register all my

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gestures that I would need. So, for me, I feel like it's totally fine.

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Man, this is a nice keyboard. I'm

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bringing up my daily driver, my Lenovo here. I want to just test it. My Lenovo

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has way more flex. And I've always found that this was my bar of like acceptable

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for me. This, if you like a nice stiff keyboard in your laptop, holy, I like

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this keyboard a lot actually. And they managed to fit a numpad in on it. It's a

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probably the smallest numpad I've ever seen on a laptop. But I love numpads. I

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when we had to pick our internal laptop, I made sure I picked one with a numpad.

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It's so much easier just to type anything, whether it's a phone number or

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an address or something. I'm very happy they managed to squeeze one in on here.

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I'm I got to push really hard to get any bend on that. But just like normal

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typing,

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our configuration, we have 16 GB of memory. You can configure it on their

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website up to 32. The board says it supports up to 96 GB. So, I don't know

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why they would only let you configure up to 32. I guess it's very much BYOM then.

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Bring your own memory. Holy crap. This thing's ready to go. Oh, I got a hand

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warmer, though. If I put my hands right here.

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Okay, it seems like everything is on our Labs test suite. I thought maybe it was

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dialed down somehow because I'm getting over 100 FPS as my average.

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And on this display, it looks really, really good. I had a little hitch there,

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but I was loading something, so understandable.

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For not even the topsp spec version of this laptop.

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Dude, this is sick. this would be a great portable gaming work work machine.

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Great portable work machine. My only complaint about this gaming experience

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would be that I would need headphones, which I don't think is necessarily a

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complaint cuz again, if you're in the middle of class and you just heard all

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this gunshot going on, people would know anyway. So, you're probably wearing headphones. Holy cow. 1% lows have

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dropped down to 70ish there, but it seems to bounce back up to 80. And I can

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actually I can actually feel a tiny bit of the fan pressure coming back up

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through the keyboard. It's keeping my fingers nice and toasty. I complained

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when I first walked on set that it was cold in here. I'm happier now.

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[laughter] I wasn't the only one that was happy with the numbers. Labs told me they were

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pretty happy with the numbers as well, considering at the 1200 resolution, our

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Cyberpunk was getting 170 FPS average,

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which again is a lot for a mobile

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device. You're still not even pushing the full display though in that game.

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And same with F124. That was one of our games that managed to push over 220 FPS,

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which is freaking amazing at 12,200 resolution. When you go up to the full

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resolution of the display, which is 1,600, our FPS drops a little bit, but

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it's still above 120 in Cyberpunk average and almost 180 in F124, which

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again for a gaming experience is more than enough on a device like this. And

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our last game of Total Warhammer 3, same story. We saw 150ish FPS in 1200. Once

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we bumped up the resolution, it dropped down a little bit. And that was the only game in our test suite that actually

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dipped just barely below 100 FPS. [music]

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Wow, these are loud. Holy crap.

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Oh, that's a lot of bass though.

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That's a lot of bass in that laptop and they are very loud. So, my point stands

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earlier. If you were playing uh Cyberpunk on these speakers in your

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class, they would probably drown out that fan noise. I'm going to drop it

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down to 50%, which is what I often find is like the sweet spot for mobile

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devices. It's still very loud at 50% YouTube.

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They're loud. I I I think it's too much bass for my personal liking, but I think

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once you dial it down a little bit, I don't think it overpowers it anymore.

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So, I think it's totally fine. But to each their own. Don't listen to it on

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full volume, then I guess. As for the webcam on this thing, this is what I

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look like. It's a webcam that is good enough for

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the schooled work that you will be doing on this laptop. I would not record a

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professional YouTube video on it like I am right now. But let's make sure my

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kill cam works. I hope that worked. And turn it back on.

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Hey, there we go. I'm still recording. Does this have a microphone kill switch?

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I don't see one at immediate glance,

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which might be a turnoff for you, but at least you have a hard a hardware

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covering the camera, which is really important. Now comes my favorite part to

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suffocate this thing until it turns off.

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Beauty. Those are some thick feet, actually. I never even realized. Look at

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those feet. My goodness. That way hopefully you'll have lots of clearance.

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We're on a squishy mat, so that might not be the best, but you should have plenty of airflow on the underside.

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Let's open this up. Where's my screwdriver? Oh, finally.

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My goodness. That took me a bit to get into, but I did have to take off the

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hinge in order to get at some of the clips under here. Now that I have the

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back panel off, it looks really [music] good. So, you got your two SSD slots

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right here. You have your Wi-Fi. This is our Wi-Fi 7 chip here. And I'm just

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looking overall, where's our battery size here? 87.4Wh

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hour battery. That's a bit smaller than I would expect in a device like this. I

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think the legal limit for like airplanes is 99 W hours, which I guess I don't

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know, maybe if you're just taking it around for land, you're always plugging it in. You're probably going to have to

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plug it in, though. If you're just using the iGPU on this bad boy and you're

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idling, just watching a YouTube video, you get 6 and 1/2 hours of battery. If

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you decide to use the dedicated GPU, that number goes all the way down to 2

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and 1/2 hours battery. I won't lie, MSI,

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I'm a bit disappointed in that. But I

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kind of understand your vision if you're plugging this in and always using it

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because then you don't have to worry about it. But if this is supposed to be

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a student laptop, like you're going to use it, right, viewer? That might be a

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little bit of a concern for you. So, always keep your power cord, I guess,

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under here, I'm assuming. And yeah, that's our memory, which again you can

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swap out for any other sodium. And this confirms yes, this is 16 GB total for us

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here. While I just mentioned the battery results, I might as well talk about the display results as well. And across the

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board, it seems to hit about 500 nits, which is what was advertised from MSI.

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So that's positive that it hit our brightness. But I was on to something

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again when I talked about the black bars on the YouTube video. It seems to again

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trend a little bit above average, which kind of gives it that little bit of a

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cyan blue gray tint, especially in the

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max brightness. Again, it's not an OLED panel, so I wouldn't expect perfect

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blacks, [music] but if you're going to use this for any sort of color

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correcting, might want to be a little bit careful on that. But for gaming

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performance, it's going [music] to look beautiful. And I thought it looked incredible even in just that quick demo

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in Cyberpunk. And I'm sure any other game that could push this thing to 240

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hertz, for example, or just with a little bit of ray tracing is going to

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look immaculate. [music] I'm also going to call MSI out on one more thing, even

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though they sponsored. Again, thank you guys very much. They mentioned that you

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can put these two M.2 two drives into something called a super RAID 5, which

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basically is a RAID zero >> except you get to use the speed benefits

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of having that PCIe gen 5 slot cuz one of them is gen 5, one of them is gen 4.

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So if you're reading that and a little bit confused, it's not actually RAID 5,

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which MSI just call it faster. I don't

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confuse the user in my opinion, but it is nice that you are able to raid them

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together if that's something you're wanting to do. I know some other boards

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in this market might not actually be able to raid the two M.2s together, so

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at least you're getting that. Overall, for gaming, this thing is pretty sick.

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[music] I'm not again sold on the whole for STEM students or for school

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research, but I'm sure that if you wanted to still do some rendering,

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whether that's video editing or 3D modeling, CAD work, this bad boy is

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going to be able to do it totally fine for you. And MSI is trying to be

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competitive in the market by pricing this specific skew at $2,400ish US.

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Again, you can change that depending on the GPU versus how much RAM or storage

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you can get. And for that price with a 5080, that's cheaper than some other

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laptops we've looked at that had a [music] 5070. So, that seems pretty in

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line with them wanting to be competitive. [music] If this one is too

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much for you, though, they have a slightly more affordable laptop called the Cyborg A15 AI. [music] a little bit

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less powerful, but again, it might be more affordable for you. If you're interested in checking out either one of

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these laptops, we're going to have them linked down below. Thanks again, MSI, for sponsoring this video. Let me know

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what you guys thought about these down below. And if you uh like the video,

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subscribe for me. [music] It would mean a lot to me.

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Belle might break my knees if you