1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:03,280 Are you looking for a gaming laptop to justify as a work expense? 2 00:00:03,280 --> 00:00:06,400 Well, MSI's got you covered, because they sponsored this ShortCircuit today 3 00:00:06,400 --> 00:00:10,120 to take a look at the MSI Vector 16 HX AI. 4 00:00:10,120 --> 00:00:14,320 And I say that because this laptop kind of has an identity crisis. 5 00:00:14,320 --> 00:00:19,160 While they market it as a STEM laptop, this bad boy is packing all the power 6 00:00:19,160 --> 00:00:22,360 you could want for gaming. We're gonna open it up here, 7 00:00:22,360 --> 00:00:25,280 and holy crap, that is a huge power brick. 8 00:00:27,280 --> 00:00:30,480 My goodness, you could kill a man with this thing. And you'd have fun doing it. 9 00:00:30,480 --> 00:00:33,800 How many watts is this bad boy? 330 watts. 10 00:00:33,800 --> 00:00:37,040 Well, this seems like a lot for a laptop, because it is. 11 00:00:37,040 --> 00:00:40,160 This laptop can drop to 250 watts at its max load, 12 00:00:40,160 --> 00:00:43,560 meaning if you're drawing that much power, you'll still be able to get a charge. 13 00:00:43,560 --> 00:00:48,280 So that's kind of nice. And then we've got the other end, which is our C13. 14 00:00:48,280 --> 00:00:51,720 Oh wow, nice six foot C13. How long is this one too? 15 00:00:51,720 --> 00:00:54,600 You might be able to plug this thing in like three desks away. 16 00:00:55,720 --> 00:00:58,040 Three work desks away. Yes, thank you, Andrew. 17 00:00:59,040 --> 00:01:03,960 Another like four-ish, five-ish feet, so you got quite a long power cable for this thing. 18 00:01:03,960 --> 00:01:08,680 And then of course, the laptop itself, whoop. 19 00:01:08,680 --> 00:01:13,840 Is there anything else in here before I look at the laptop? Just some MSI propaganda. 20 00:01:13,840 --> 00:01:17,400 Wow, look at that. See what I mean by identity crisis? 21 00:01:17,400 --> 00:01:23,040 It's marketed for STEM students, but this is a gaming laptop as far as I'm concerned. 22 00:01:23,040 --> 00:01:27,800 On the right side here, you've got two USB-A ports and a headphone audio jack combined. 23 00:01:27,840 --> 00:01:33,720 On the back here, you've got your Kensington lock, your power plug, HDMI 2.1, and LAN 2.5 gigabits. 24 00:01:33,720 --> 00:01:37,240 So again, full fat speed on this bad boy. And on the last side here, 25 00:01:37,240 --> 00:01:41,520 you've got two Thunderbolt five ports and a full-size SD card reader, 26 00:01:41,520 --> 00:01:45,040 which again kind of goes back to their point of maybe a student's laptop 27 00:01:45,040 --> 00:01:49,920 because depending on the projects you're working on, you might be plugging in an SD card from a camera 28 00:01:49,920 --> 00:01:55,000 because again, they talk about some editing workloads as well, some video editing or photo editing. 29 00:01:55,960 --> 00:02:00,800 I'm more interested in the gaming side. Oh my gosh, these hinges are like crazy. 30 00:02:00,800 --> 00:02:04,640 I don't know if I'm gonna be able to get them really good on camera. These hinges are kind of crazy, 31 00:02:04,640 --> 00:02:08,240 like a full 90-degree hinge. They look super cool. 32 00:02:08,240 --> 00:02:12,320 If you'll find it's got that one-handed laptop open, 33 00:02:12,320 --> 00:02:15,960 that's always nice to see. It lifts it a tiny bit, but that's fine. 34 00:02:15,960 --> 00:02:19,000 I call that passable. As for the screen itself, 35 00:02:19,000 --> 00:02:23,000 well, that is quite strong actually. Even though it's only held on by the two little hinges here, 36 00:02:23,000 --> 00:02:25,920 I'm moving the laptop more than I'm like twisting 37 00:02:27,080 --> 00:02:31,200 the actual screen. And on the bottom, oh, whoa. 38 00:02:31,200 --> 00:02:35,600 Oh, we're gonna have to open this bad boy up after. Can you see the heat pipes in there? 39 00:02:35,600 --> 00:02:38,600 Oh, it's really hard to see with it closed on camera 40 00:02:38,600 --> 00:02:44,120 because this bad boy has kind of a crazy cooling system because it has to cool a 5080, 41 00:02:44,120 --> 00:02:47,840 specifically a 5080 that draws 175 watts, 42 00:02:47,840 --> 00:02:53,560 which in case you don't know, is the maximum wattage that you can get on a mobile 5080. 43 00:02:53,560 --> 00:02:56,760 As well as cooling the 5080, it also has a core ultranine processor, 44 00:02:56,760 --> 00:03:01,640 the 275HX in here, which is a 24-core processor. 45 00:03:01,640 --> 00:03:05,800 Eight of those are performance and 16 of those are efficiency cores, which again, just kind of speaks 46 00:03:05,800 --> 00:03:10,440 to how much power this bad boy is gonna be drawing. I, man, I don't know how much I can wait. 47 00:03:10,440 --> 00:03:14,040 I kind of wanna just get right into this. By the way, investment disclosure, 48 00:03:14,040 --> 00:03:18,440 Linus is invested in framework laptops. Man, actually doing another tour of the outside. 49 00:03:18,440 --> 00:03:24,720 Look at how much space there is of cooling. I mean, I hope that translates to excellent cooling performance, 50 00:03:24,720 --> 00:03:29,480 but these bad boys got like full headers on this. I would actually worry I would spill a drink 51 00:03:29,480 --> 00:03:33,000 in there or something, but no mountain dew 52 00:03:33,000 --> 00:03:36,720 when you're gaming on this bad boy. Let's give it a power up here. 53 00:03:36,720 --> 00:03:40,320 The first thing I noticed when booting this up, I mean, obviously, is the screen. 54 00:03:40,320 --> 00:03:44,840 It is a 16 by 10 aspect ratio at 240 Hertz, 55 00:03:44,840 --> 00:03:48,560 which again, for school work, a little bit insane if you ask me. 56 00:03:48,560 --> 00:03:53,000 And MSI says this hits 100% of the DCI-P3 coverage spectrum 57 00:03:53,000 --> 00:03:57,800 on this IPS display. When we tested it, we didn't quite get to 100%, 58 00:03:57,800 --> 00:04:01,200 which we did talk to them about, and they said that there could have been some variance 59 00:04:01,200 --> 00:04:05,200 in the displays that they're using. At least they're aware of it, and hopefully they'll make some changes 60 00:04:05,200 --> 00:04:11,000 by the time you get your laptop. But even just saying that, I'm on the Windows home screen right now, 61 00:04:11,000 --> 00:04:15,600 and it looks fantastic. I mean, I wanna boot up a video to actually verify this. 62 00:04:15,600 --> 00:04:17,840 I wanna crank the brightness up on this first, 63 00:04:19,000 --> 00:04:22,460 unless it's already up all the way. It was already up all the way. 64 00:04:22,460 --> 00:04:27,480 Okay, we did expect it a little bit brighter then, but it looks very good for watching this video 65 00:04:27,480 --> 00:04:30,880 that we're watching. We're watching the RE test footage, which is our HDR content, 66 00:04:30,880 --> 00:04:35,840 even though the screen isn't in HDR. The one thing I've noticed a tiny bit again 67 00:04:35,840 --> 00:04:39,380 is in these black bars, it almost gets a little bit, 68 00:04:39,380 --> 00:04:44,400 I don't wanna say cyan like the framework laptop had, but it's not quite a solid deep black. 69 00:04:44,400 --> 00:04:48,680 I mean, it's not an OLED display, so I wouldn't expect it to get super, super black there. 70 00:04:48,680 --> 00:04:52,000 Could be a little distracting, especially since I actually can see it more 71 00:04:52,000 --> 00:04:57,400 on the camera than in front of me. But right here, I can almost see the RGB backlight, 72 00:04:57,400 --> 00:05:01,200 like reflecting on the bottom of the screen. So maybe you wanna turn yours off. 73 00:05:01,200 --> 00:05:06,800 I was gonna comment on the keyboard and trackpad, but one thing I'm hearing just now is the fans are on, 74 00:05:06,800 --> 00:05:09,800 and I've been wondering if they've been on this whole time now, 75 00:05:09,800 --> 00:05:14,240 which for watching a YouTube video, I wouldn't necessarily expect fans to ramp up a little bit, 76 00:05:14,240 --> 00:05:17,560 but hopefully that means it's just staying super cool, 77 00:05:17,560 --> 00:05:21,080 but it's so faint that if you didn't have headphones on, 78 00:05:21,080 --> 00:05:25,000 be like maybe a little bit of white noise for you. It's a nice large trackpad, which I like. 79 00:05:25,000 --> 00:05:28,800 My fingers are getting a tiny bit stuck. I have greasy fingers though. 80 00:05:28,800 --> 00:05:33,320 I will admit that. So if you don't have greasy fingers, you're probably fine. 81 00:05:33,320 --> 00:05:37,960 This feels like a very good trackpad when my finger is actually sliding on it though. 82 00:05:37,960 --> 00:05:41,640 And as for the click, I am very satisfied with a nice click on a trackpad. 83 00:05:41,640 --> 00:05:45,320 I hate kind of squishy trackpads that don't give me the feedback. 84 00:05:45,320 --> 00:05:50,120 It's able to register all my gestures that I would need. So for me, I feel like it's totally fine. 85 00:05:53,120 --> 00:05:58,640 Man, this is a nice keyboard. I'm bringing up my daily driver, my Lenovo here. 86 00:05:58,640 --> 00:06:04,480 I wanna just test it. My Lenovo has way more flex, and I've always found that this was my bar 87 00:06:04,480 --> 00:06:09,440 of like acceptable for me. This, if you like a nice stiff keyboard in your laptop, 88 00:06:09,440 --> 00:06:14,280 holy, I like this keyboard a lot actually. And they managed to fit a numpad in on it. 89 00:06:14,280 --> 00:06:17,480 It's probably the smallest numpad I've ever seen on a laptop. 90 00:06:17,480 --> 00:06:21,320 But I love numpads. When we had to pick our internal laptop, 91 00:06:21,320 --> 00:06:25,280 I made sure I picked one with a numpad. So much easier just to type anything, 92 00:06:25,280 --> 00:06:31,040 whether it's a phone number or an address or something. I'm very happy they managed to squeeze one in on here. 93 00:06:31,040 --> 00:06:33,560 I gotta push really hard to get any bend on that. 94 00:06:34,480 --> 00:06:35,840 But just like normal typing. 95 00:06:38,320 --> 00:06:41,920 Our configuration, we have 16 gigabytes of memory. You can configure it on their website 96 00:06:41,920 --> 00:06:46,240 up to 32. The board says it supports up to 96 gigabytes. 97 00:06:46,240 --> 00:06:50,760 So I don't know why they would only let you configure up to 32. I guess it's very much BYOMM then. 98 00:06:50,760 --> 00:06:54,240 Bring your own memory. Holy crap, this thing's ready to go. 99 00:06:54,240 --> 00:06:57,600 Oh, I got a hand warmer though. If I put my hands right here. 100 00:06:58,800 --> 00:07:02,720 Okay, it seems like everything is on our Labs test suite. 101 00:07:02,720 --> 00:07:09,040 I thought maybe it was dialed down somehow because I'm getting over a hundred FPS as my average. 102 00:07:09,040 --> 00:07:12,120 And on this display, it looks really, really good. 103 00:07:12,120 --> 00:07:16,920 Oh, I had a little hitch there, but I was loading something so understandable. 104 00:07:16,920 --> 00:07:19,720 For not even the top spec version of this laptop. 105 00:07:21,200 --> 00:07:25,280 Dude, this is sick. This would be a great portable gaming, 106 00:07:25,280 --> 00:07:28,560 oh, work machine, great portable work machine. 107 00:07:28,560 --> 00:07:31,680 My only complaint about this gaming experience 108 00:07:31,680 --> 00:07:36,600 would be that I would need headphones. Which I don't think is necessarily a complaint 109 00:07:36,600 --> 00:07:40,320 because again, if you're in the middle of class and you just heard all this gunshot going on, 110 00:07:40,320 --> 00:07:47,000 people would know anyway. So you're probably wearing headphones. Holy cow, 1% lows have dropped down to 70-ish there, 111 00:07:47,000 --> 00:07:54,040 but it seems to bounce back up to 80. And I can actually feel a tiny bit of the fan pressure 112 00:07:54,040 --> 00:07:58,160 coming back up through the keyboard. It's keeping my fingers nice and toasty. 113 00:07:58,160 --> 00:08:01,560 I complained when I first walked on set that it was cold in here. 114 00:08:01,560 --> 00:08:05,080 I'm happier now. I wasn't the only one that was happy with the numbers. 115 00:08:05,080 --> 00:08:09,160 Labs told me they were pretty happy with the numbers as well considering at the 1200 resolution, 116 00:08:09,160 --> 00:08:12,920 our Cyberpunk was getting 170 FPS average, 117 00:08:12,920 --> 00:08:16,360 which again, is a lot for a mobile device. 118 00:08:16,360 --> 00:08:21,600 You're still not even pushing the full display though in that game. And same with F124, that was one of our games 119 00:08:21,600 --> 00:08:25,080 that managed to push over 220 FPS, 120 00:08:25,080 --> 00:08:28,200 which is freaking amazing at 1200 resolution. 121 00:08:28,200 --> 00:08:33,120 When you go up to the full resolution of the display, which is 1600, our FPS drops a little bit, 122 00:08:33,120 --> 00:08:36,360 but it's still above 120 in Cyberpunk average. 123 00:08:36,400 --> 00:08:39,920 And of almost 180 in F124, 124 00:08:39,920 --> 00:08:45,520 which again, for a gaming experience, is more than enough on a device like this. 125 00:08:45,520 --> 00:08:50,520 And our last game of Total Warhammer 3, same story, we saw 150-ish FPS in 1200 126 00:08:50,520 --> 00:08:54,560 once we bumped up the resolution. It dropped down a little bit. And that was the only game in our test suite 127 00:08:54,560 --> 00:08:57,680 that actually dipped just barely below 100 FPS. 128 00:08:59,920 --> 00:09:03,240 Wow, these are loud. Holy crap. 129 00:09:07,360 --> 00:09:10,240 Ooh, that's a lot of bass though. 130 00:09:12,560 --> 00:09:17,440 That's a lot of bass in that laptop. And they are very loud. 131 00:09:17,440 --> 00:09:21,240 So my point stands earlier, if you were playing Cyberpunk on these speakers 132 00:09:21,240 --> 00:09:25,920 in your class, they would probably drown out that fan noise. I'm gonna drop it down to 50%, 133 00:09:25,920 --> 00:09:29,440 which is what I often find is like the sweet spot for mobile devices. 134 00:09:31,360 --> 00:09:34,240 It's still very loud at 50% YouTube. 135 00:09:36,360 --> 00:09:46,880 They're loud, I think it's too much bass 136 00:09:46,880 --> 00:09:50,960 for my personal liking, but I think once you dial it down a little bit, 137 00:09:50,960 --> 00:09:54,840 I don't think it overpowers it anymore. So I think it's totally fine, but to each their own, 138 00:09:54,840 --> 00:09:58,320 don't listen to it on full volume then I guess. As for the webcam on this thing, 139 00:09:58,320 --> 00:10:03,880 this is what I look like. It's a webcam that is good enough for the schooled work 140 00:10:03,880 --> 00:10:08,320 that you will be doing on this laptop. I would not record a professional YouTube video on it 141 00:10:08,320 --> 00:10:11,560 like I am right now, but let's make sure my kill cam works. 142 00:10:13,200 --> 00:10:17,280 I hope that worked. And turn it back on. 143 00:10:17,280 --> 00:10:21,520 Hey, there we go, I'm still recording. Does this have a microphone kill switch? 144 00:10:21,520 --> 00:10:25,000 I don't see one at immediate glance, 145 00:10:25,000 --> 00:10:31,040 which might be a turn off for you, but at least you have a hardware covering the camera, 146 00:10:31,040 --> 00:10:34,560 which is really important. Now comes my favorite part, 147 00:10:34,560 --> 00:10:36,760 to suffocate this thing until it turns off. 148 00:10:39,280 --> 00:10:44,160 Beauty. Those are some thick feet actually, I never even realized. 149 00:10:44,160 --> 00:10:48,120 Look at those feet. My goodness, that way, hopefully you'll have lots of clearance. 150 00:10:48,120 --> 00:10:52,880 We're on a squishy mat, so that might not be the best, but you should have plenty of airflow on the underside. 151 00:10:52,880 --> 00:10:58,160 Let's open this up. Where's my school driver? Oh, finally. 152 00:10:58,160 --> 00:11:03,040 My goodness, that took me a bit to get into, but I did have to take off the hinge 153 00:11:03,040 --> 00:11:06,600 in order to get at some of the clips under here. 154 00:11:06,600 --> 00:11:10,000 Now that I have the back panel off, it looks really good. 155 00:11:10,000 --> 00:11:14,080 So you got your two SSD slots right here. You have your Wi-Fi. 156 00:11:14,080 --> 00:11:18,480 This is our Wi-Fi 7 chip here. And just looking over, 157 00:11:18,480 --> 00:11:23,800 where's our battery size here? 87.4 watt hour battery. 158 00:11:23,800 --> 00:11:27,040 That's a bit smaller than I would expect in a device like this. 159 00:11:27,040 --> 00:11:30,440 I think the legal limit for like airplanes is 99 watt hours, 160 00:11:30,440 --> 00:11:34,040 which I guess, I don't know, maybe if you're just taking it around for land, you're always plugging it in. 161 00:11:34,040 --> 00:11:38,320 You're probably gonna have to plug it in though. If you're just using the IGPU on this bad boy, 162 00:11:38,320 --> 00:11:43,440 and you're idling, just watching a YouTube video, you get six and a half hours of battery. 163 00:11:43,440 --> 00:11:47,360 If you decide to use the dedicated GPU, that number goes all the way 164 00:11:47,360 --> 00:11:51,240 down to two and a half hours of battery. I won't lie, MSI. 165 00:11:51,240 --> 00:11:55,960 I'm a bit disappointed in that, but I kind of understand your vision 166 00:11:55,960 --> 00:12:01,080 if you're plugging this in and always using it, because then you don't have to worry about it. 167 00:12:01,080 --> 00:12:04,080 But if this is supposed to be a student laptop, 168 00:12:04,080 --> 00:12:08,920 like you're gonna use it, right viewer? That might be a little bit of a concern for you. 169 00:12:08,920 --> 00:12:14,320 So always keep your power cord, I guess. Under here, I'm assuming, yeah, that's our memory. 170 00:12:14,320 --> 00:12:17,760 But again, you can swap out for any other Sodium. And this confirms, yes, 171 00:12:17,760 --> 00:12:21,640 this is 16 gigabytes total for us here. While I just mentioned the battery results, 172 00:12:21,640 --> 00:12:25,480 I might as well talk about the display results as well. And across the board, 173 00:12:25,480 --> 00:12:28,960 it seems to hit about 500 nits, which is what was advertised from MSI. 174 00:12:28,960 --> 00:12:32,680 So that's positive that it hit our brightness, but I was onto something again 175 00:12:32,680 --> 00:12:36,120 when I talked about the black bars on the YouTube video. 176 00:12:36,120 --> 00:12:40,360 It seems to, again, trend a little bit above average, which kind of gives it that little bit 177 00:12:40,360 --> 00:12:43,680 of a cyan, blue, gray tint, 178 00:12:43,680 --> 00:12:46,880 especially in the max brightness. Again, it's not an OLED panel, 179 00:12:46,880 --> 00:12:53,120 so I wouldn't expect perfect blacks. But if you're gonna use this for any sort of color correcting, 180 00:12:53,120 --> 00:12:57,760 might wanna be a little bit careful on that. But for gaming performance, it's gonna look beautiful. 181 00:12:57,760 --> 00:13:01,040 And I thought it looked incredible, even in just that quick demo in Cyberpunk. 182 00:13:01,040 --> 00:13:05,880 And I'm sure any other game that could push this thing to 240 Hertz, for example, 183 00:13:05,880 --> 00:13:10,520 or just with a little bit of ray tracing, is gonna look immaculate. 184 00:13:10,520 --> 00:13:13,920 I'm also gonna call MSI out on one more thing, even though they sponsored it again. 185 00:13:13,920 --> 00:13:18,000 Thank you guys very much. They mentioned that you can put these two M.2 drives 186 00:13:18,000 --> 00:13:23,000 into something called a Super Raid 5, which basically is a Raids Hero, 187 00:13:23,000 --> 00:13:28,040 except you get to use the speed benefits of having that PCIe Gen 5 slot, 188 00:13:28,040 --> 00:13:32,800 because one of them is Gen 5, one of them is Gen 4. So if you're reading that and a little bit confused, 189 00:13:32,800 --> 00:13:37,960 it's not actually Raid 5, which MSI, just call it faster Raids Hero. 190 00:13:37,960 --> 00:13:43,560 I don't confuse the user in my opinion, but it is nice that you are able to raid them together 191 00:13:43,560 --> 00:13:47,800 if that's something you're wanting to do. I know some other boards in this market 192 00:13:47,800 --> 00:13:50,920 might not actually be able to raid the two M.2s together. 193 00:13:50,920 --> 00:13:56,200 So at least you're getting that. Overall, for gaming, this thing is pretty sick. 194 00:13:56,200 --> 00:13:59,200 I'm not, again, sold on the whole for STEM students 195 00:13:59,200 --> 00:14:04,040 or for school research, but I'm sure that if you wanted to still do some rendering, 196 00:14:04,040 --> 00:14:07,600 whether that's video editing or 3D modeling, CAD work, 197 00:14:07,600 --> 00:14:12,820 this bad boy's gonna be able to do it totally fine for you. And MSI is trying to be competitive in the market 198 00:14:12,820 --> 00:14:17,720 by pricing this specific SKU at $2,400-ish US dollars. 199 00:14:17,720 --> 00:14:20,920 Again, you can change that, depending on the GPU versus how much RAM or storage 200 00:14:20,920 --> 00:14:24,560 you can get, and for that price with a 5080, 201 00:14:24,560 --> 00:14:28,040 that's cheaper than some other laptops we've looked at that had a 5070. 202 00:14:28,040 --> 00:14:33,360 So that seems pretty in line with them wanting to be competitive. 203 00:14:33,360 --> 00:14:37,000 If this one is too much for you, though, they have a slightly more affordable laptop 204 00:14:37,000 --> 00:14:40,080 called the Cyborg A15 AI, a little bit less powerful, 205 00:14:40,080 --> 00:14:43,920 but again, it might be more affordable for you. If you're interested in checking out either one of these laptops, 206 00:14:43,920 --> 00:14:48,960 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. 207 00:14:48,960 --> 00:14:53,440 And if you liked the video, subscribe. For me, it would mean a lot to me. 208 00:14:54,600 --> 00:14:56,600 Bell might break my knees if you don't.