The MSI GS75 Stealth 85E Gaming Laptop Reviewed

When I get a chance to check out a piece of hardware, I usually, of course, accept. When I was offered a look at the MSI GS75 Stealth 8SE, one of MSI’s latest RTX-based, ultra-thin, gaming laptops, of course, I said send it! I anxiously awaited its arrival over the next few days.

There are a few variations on the GS75 Stealth ranging in configuration starting at the top with the fully decked out 32 GB DDR4, an Nvidia RTX 2080, and dual SSDs set up in RAID 0. Still, the one I will be looking at is the GS75 Stealth 8SE, which is the Intel i7 8th Generation with 16 GB DDR4 and the RTX 2060 with a single 512GB SSD. This 17.3-inch gaming laptop also features a 144Hz IPS panel with a skinny bezel, a keyboard made by SteelSeries, Killer networking components and all housed in a beautiful metal-looking exterior with copper accents.

First Impressions

I am not going to be doing a What’s in the Box with this review as what I received was strictly the MSI GS75 Stealth 8SE, and it’s a relatively thin power pack. A full retail experience would be different, of course, but then there is not a whole lot needed when it comes to a laptop itself.

Ths first thing I noticed was how thin this laptop is.  My first ever gaming laptop was an ASUS G51Jx that was at least twice the thickness and felt super chunky compared to this MSI GS76 8SE. The MSI gaming dragon adorns the top of the chassis with a copper-accented trim around the edge of the super-thin screen.

The MSI GS75 Stealth 8SE has a plethora of I/O ports that should suit anyone’s needs. On one side, you have two USB 3.1 Type-A, one USB 3.1 type-C, thunderbolt, a full HDMI port and, of course, the cable lock. You can see one of the copper accented exhaust ports as well.

Rotate the laptop to the other side, and you can see the power port, the full-size Ethernet port, another USB 3.1 Type-A port, a microSD card slot and gold-plated headphones and mic jacks. The cooling system expands across both sides of the MSI GS75 Stealth to help ensure adequate heat dissipation.

The profile of the MSI GS75 Stealth is the same between the models in this series. Here you can see how thin the 17-inch 144Hz panel compares to the rest of the laptop. Not only is it thin, but the bezel is also as thin, which provides a great viewing experience.

The keyboard is from SteelSeries and has per-key RGB lighting. Users may find the keyboard hard to get used to as the keys are different than some more standard layouts. The small Numpad on the left is handy, as I personally always prefer to have a Numpad available. The trackpad, even positioned in the centre, is in an odd place. When your fingers are on the keys, the trackpad will be positioned more on the right side than the middle. It may be a bit awkward for some users who navigate the keyboard and trackpad at the same time. I’ve also noticed that the trackpad was not as accurate as other trackpads I have used in the past.

You might also notice that there is only one Windows key and located on the right side of the keyboard. I understand how sometimes the windows key can become a nuisance when gaming, but I prefer the key on the left side but with the ability to either disable it or remap it while gaming. Perhaps not a big deal for most people, but it was a bit of an annoyance for myself.

The power button, located above the speaker grill at the top of the keyboard, took me a little bit to find. It is nice that it is not an in-your-face type of thing.

As I mentioned, the keyboard is per-key RGB and being SteelSeries; you can configure the lights via the SteelSeries Engine. There is an almost infinite amount of options when configuring the lighting of the keyboard itself, and of course, RGB lighting is a personal preference. If you like it, great, you can customize it to your lighting. If you don’t like it, then you can easily disable it and carry on with your day. The above image has the keyboard’s lighting scheme set to “Disco.”

It might be a bit hard to see on the above image, but there is a webcam located in the center of the top bezel. Typically, laptop webcams are of the 720p variety, and quality is nothing you would want to use if you were to be streaming. On that note, it is nice to have one included, and one that is almost hidden from sight as it would be good for quick Skype calls if on the road or something.

Cooling Performance

As with any benchmarking, you would expect the hardware to be pushed to its limits. When the GPU and CPU are under load in the MSI GS75 8SE, the cooling and fans kick into overtime. The noise is quite audible and could probably distract from whatever it is you are doing. Though if you are gaming and have a headset on, you might not notice when the fans kick in to help keep the laptop cool. Come to think of it, even though this computer is a laptop. You do not want to have it on your lap when you’re diving into Fortnite or editing and rendering videos. The heat from the bottom of the laptop would be most uncomfortable. Best to ensure the computer is on a solid surface with plenty of space for that hot air to escape.

Gaming Performance

The MSI GS75 Stealth 8SE is a gaming laptop, so how does it perform under some of the more popular games? Let’s take a peek!

I do not have a vast array of tricks when it comes to benchmarking gaming performance. I run the hardware through a variety of PC games and, of course, some of the standard DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 benchmarks. I know some people will overclock their components and then do some benchmarking to get the most out of their gear, but being a laptop and one on loan for the review, I will keep everything at stock settings.

First up, I took a look at how the MSI GS75 Stealth 8SE handled playing Fortnite. After all, Fortnite is what everybody plays these days, right? Okay, kidding aside, I’m not a big fan of Battle Royale games like Fortnite, but I did play a couple of rounds to see how well the frame rate handled the game on Ultra settings.

The GS75 Stealth 8SE was showing approximately 100 FPS while running around and collecting resources. The frame rate would drop when other players were visible, and depending on what was happening, the lowest I experienced the frame rate to drop was 40FPS, though that was very briefly. It would always recover and bounce around 70-60 when a lot of action was happening. The GS75 Stealth 8SE is easily capable of keeping up with what is going on in the middle of a Fortnite session.

Next up, I loaded a quick game of Green Hell. Green Hell is a recent release of a single-player, sandbox survival game based in the jungles of the Amazon. I wanted to see how the RTX 2060 with its Ray Tracing would make the game look but also how it might handle running around the forest floor of the Amazon jungle, so I thought it might be a fun game to play that isn’t c. With Green Hell’s settings maxed out on High, running around the forest gave me around 60-70 FPS, rarely dipping below 60 FPS, so the game was playable on High graphics settings through the little time that I played. I’m sure the RTX 2060 helped make the environment look spectacular, and I am kind of sad that I will have to give the laptop back to MSI as I will miss making use of the RTX 2060 GPU.

Heaven – DirectX 11

People still make use of Heaven and its DirectX 11 benchmarking ability. I had it run through the benchmark a couple of times just to let the machine warm up a bit and see if there was any thermal throttling. As you can see from the above screenshot from the final score was 2602 for the MSI GS75 Stealth 8SE with its NVIDIA RTX 2060. The GS75 Stealth 8SE was able to average 103.3 FPS, maxing out at 197.0 FPS and dipping way down to 30.4 FPS.

3DMark – DirectX 12

Next up was to put the GS75 Stealth through its paces with 3DMark’s TimeSpy. I also ran the TimeSpy benchmark a couple of times, especially after I updated the NVIDIA drivers to their lastest (435.15 at the time of this review). Updating the drivers improved the score by at least 500 points. For a gaming laptop that has not been overclocked, I think it did pretty good against similar laptops running similar GPUs, GPU core clocks.

Non-Gaming Benchmarks

Cinebench R20

One of the benchmarking utilities that can put the CPU through its paces is Cinebench, and I was curious how the MSI GS75 Stealth 8SE with its Intel i7-8750H would handle rendering the image, but I think it didn’t do that bad of a job.

When I look at the single-core score, it is almost an even match with the single-core performance of the AMD Ryzen Threadripper and nudged out the Intel Xeon, though the previous 7th generation i7 nudges out this i7-8750H.

When Cinebench accesses all cores/threads, the big CPUs, AMD Threadripper and Intel Xeon, of course, blow the other CPUs out of the water. It is nice to see that the 8th generation Intel i7 does beat out the previous generations when you make use of the additional cores and threads, as one would hopefully expect to see. Granted, the AMD Ryzen, with its eight cores and 16 threads, of course, can outdo a six-core, 12 thread CPU. It would be interesting to see how the Intel i9 stacks up against the AMD Ryzen 3rd generation CPUs. Perhaps that could be a future review?

I/O Speed

The MSI GS75 Stealth 8SE comes with a Samsung 512GB NVMe SSD. So as any good reviewer, I did a quick read/write test to see how well the single NVMe SSD performs.

It may not perform to that of a PCIe 4.0 NVME (as it is not a PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD), but it can handle an excellent sequential read of 17561 MBps, and a write of 1856 MBps. When you are running NVMe, I would expect that the read and write speeds were relatively similar. These speeds show that the Samsung NVMe SSD is pushing the PCIe 3.0 limit; if you wanted any faster, you would have to opt for a PCIe 4.0 NVMe with available PCIe 4.0 bandwidth, which the MSI GS75 Stealth does not have.

The MSI GS75 Stealth 8SE does have a second NVMe slot that you could utilize a 2nd SSD and RAID them for better performance if you so desired.

Final Thoughts

If you are looking for an ultra-portable gaming laptop and want to save a few dollars, then the MSI GS75 Stealth 8SE is a great option. The thin design allows it to slide into and out of your backpack, without weighing you down too much. If this 17-inch version is too big for you, there is a 15-inch version of the GS65 Stealth.

I enjoyed how thin the MSI GS75 Stealth 8SE  is compared to other gaming laptops. The slim bezel and IPS screen delivered a most excellent gaming experience. The build-in RTX 2060 worked as expected with what I able to throw at it in terms of games. This machine will last a while in terms of being able to handle new PC titles as they are released. You will want to ensure you don’t play games with this on your lap, though, as it does get quite hot. When placed on a flat surface, there seems to be enough air space underneath to move the hot air away, and you could utilize a laptop cooler to help offset the heat it pushes out as well.