The tech market’s conditioned us to believe in an equal relationship between size and specs over the decades. Smaller mobile devices were for pootling around with word processor on, big ones were where the real choice silicon lay. And sure, although the accuracy of that sentiment might have gone out of the window on or around the time Pop Idol changed its name to The X Factor, sometimes it takes a laptop like MSI’s GF75 Thin to prompt us to update that mental rolodex.
These are serious gaming PC specs, packed into a light and thin chassis that doesn’t overdo the ‘gamer’ aesthetic. It starts with the six-core, 12-thread Intel Core i7 10750H, clocked at a max turbo frequency of 5GHz and representing Intel’s bleeding-edge 10th gen of mobile CPUs. The previous gen’s 9750H model was a pretty ubiquitous chip in gaming laptops for years previously and its newer cousin confidently outstrips it in benchmarks.
It’s with Nvidia’s 6GB GTX 1660 Ti that the GF75 Thin’s gaming chops really stand out though. Roughly equivalent to the GTX 1070’s formidable pixel-pushing powers, it actually outperforms the desktop card in many benchmarks thanks to its newer Turing architecture. It’s a DirectX 12 thoroughbred with a boost clock speed of 1770MHz, making it a monster at 1080p.
But when you push components to their performance limits, you create heat. Dispersing that heat efficiently is essential for any PC, and in a laptop configuration where the potential pitfalls range from a warm lap to the BSOD, it’s especially vital. MSI’s expertise, built on many years of constructing high-performance gaming laptops, pays off here in a bespoke cooling solution. Featuring seven heat pipes, two fans and four exhausts, MSI’s exclusive Cooler Boost tech keeps things icy even when components are being pushed to their max performance.
And all that performance conveys the action beautifully on the GF75 Thin’s 120Hz IPS panel. 17.3-inches wide and offering full HD 1080p resolution, it’s the ideal counterpart to the componentry under the hood. It’s a big deal to have specs like these baked into the chassis - in laptop world you can’t swap out monitors on a whim, and fortunately this screen hits a sweet spot in the inky blacks and vibrant colour reproduction of IPS, and the smoothness of its 120Hz refresh rate. The latter’s also a spec that anyone with a passing dabble here and there in the likes of PUBG, Fortnite, or Apex Legends will consider a must - there’s a tangible in-game performance advantage to going behind the usual 60Hz, and the responsiveness of 120Hz makes it very difficult to go back.
Rounding off those specs are some lightning-quick data access times from the 512GB of SSD storage, and 8GB of RAM, together working in harmony to keep your apps and games responsive whatever you throw at them.
Packing all that into a 17-inch laptop design that’s 8% smaller, 15% lighter and 16% thinner than the average is no mean feat, making the GF75 an incredible one-off.
Light, thin, and powerful enough to put consoles to shame. Get your MSI GF75 now for just £1,099 at Currys PC World.
