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 gonna 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.
Well, 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 six foot 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 four-ish, five-ish feet, so you got quite a long power cable for this thing.
And then of course, the laptop itself, whoop.
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 USB-A 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 gigabits.
So again, full fat speed on this bad boy. And on the last side here,
you've got two Thunderbolt five ports and a full-size SD card reader,
which again kind of goes back to their point of maybe a student's laptop
because depending on the projects you're working on, you might be plugging in an SD card from a camera
because 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 gonna be able to get them really good on camera. These hinges are kind of crazy,
like a full 90-degree hinge. They look super cool.
If you'll find 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 passable. As for the screen itself,
well, 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, whoa.
Oh, we're gonna 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
because 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 ultranine 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 gonna be drawing. I, man, I don't know how much I can wait.
I kind of wanna just get right into this. By the way, investment disclosure,
Linus is invested in framework laptops. Man, actually doing another tour of the outside.
Look at how much space there is of cooling. 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 16 by 10 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 DCI-P3 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 wanna boot up a video to actually verify this.
I wanna crank the brightness up on this first,
unless it's already up all the way. It was already up all the way.
Okay, we did expect 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 wanna say cyan like the framework laptop had, but 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 wanna turn yours off.
I was gonna 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.
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 wanna 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 probably the smallest numpad I've ever seen on a laptop.
But I love numpads. When we had to pick our internal laptop,
I made sure I picked one with a numpad. 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 gotta push really hard to get any bend on that.
But just like normal typing.
Our configuration, we have 16 gigabytes of memory. You can configure it on their website
up to 32. The board says it supports up to 96 gigabytes.
So I don't know why they would only let you configure up to 32. I guess it's very much BYOMM 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 a hundred FPS as my average.
And on this display, it looks really, really good.
Oh, I had a little hitch there, but I was loading something so understandable.
For not even the top spec version of this laptop.
Dude, this is sick. This would be a great portable gaming,
oh, 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
because 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 70-ish there,
but it seems to bounce back up to 80. And 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. 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 1200 resolution.
When you go up to the full resolution of the display, which is 1600, our FPS drops a little bit,
but it's still above 120 in Cyberpunk average.
And of 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 150-ish 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.
Wow, these are loud. Holy crap.
Ooh, 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 Cyberpunk on these speakers
in your class, they would probably drown out that fan noise. I'm gonna 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 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 turn off for you, but at least you have 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 school driver? 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 good.
So you got your two SSD slots right here. You have your Wi-Fi.
This is our Wi-Fi 7 chip here. And just looking over,
where's our battery size here? 87.4 watt 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 watt 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 gonna 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 six and a half hours of battery.
If you decide to use the dedicated GPU, that number goes all the way
down to two and a half hours of 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 gonna 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, yeah, that's our memory.
But again, you can swap out for any other Sodium. And this confirms, yes,
this is 16 gigabytes 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 onto 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. But if you're gonna use this for any sort of color correcting,
might wanna be a little bit careful on that. But for gaming performance, it's gonna 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 gonna look immaculate.
I'm also gonna call MSI out on one more thing, even though they sponsored it again.
Thank you guys very much. They mentioned that you can put these two M.2 drives
into something called a Super Raid 5, which basically is a Raids Hero,
except you get to use the speed benefits of having that PCIe Gen 5 slot,
because 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 Raids Hero.
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.
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's gonna be able to do it totally fine for you. And MSI is trying to be competitive in the market
by pricing this specific SKU at $2,400-ish US dollars.
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 5070.
So that seems pretty in line with them wanting to be competitive.
If this one is too much for you, though, they have a slightly more affordable laptop
called the Cyborg A15 AI, 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 gonna 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 liked the video, subscribe. For me, it would mean a lot to me.
Bell might break my knees if you don't.