I won't lie, I often fantasized about some R&D lead at MSI looking at a prototype of their new gaming laptop, losing their temper, flipping a table, and shouting to the rest of their team, 'it needs to be thinner." Weird daydreams aside, ultra-thin gaming laptop users know all too well that the sacrifices in gaming performance that have to be made for the sake of portability.
Best gaming PC: the top pre-built machines from the pros
Best gaming laptop: perfect notebooks for mobile gaming
We first got a glimpse of the MSI Stealth 15M during Geforce RTX Game On showcase this week, where they revealed a host of new RTX 30-series gaming laptops releasing on with pre-orders starting now. These new systems are loaded with RTX 30-series mobile GPUs for 2021, such as the much-rumored RTX 3060, whose gaming performance is 30% faster than a PS5.
The Stealth 15M measures 0.63 inches high when closed, beating the Razer's ultra-thin Blade 15 by 0.03 inches. Now, 0.04 inches might not seem like much, but in the cutthroat world of ultra-thin gaming laptops, every fraction counts. And, at just under 4 lbs, the only laptop I can see being smaller and lighter is the 13-inch Apple MacBook Pro.
What's more impressive is what MSI is cramming inside its slim aluminum chassis. According to the MSI info, the base Stealth 15M has the new Intel H35 Tiger Lake CPU Core i7-11375 CPU, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, and newly announced RTX 3060 laptop GPU handling the graphics.
The Newegg preorder listing has this $1,400 configuration also packing a 144Hz 1080p IPS panel, making it cheaper than Razer's slightly less slim counterpart. Another small improvement coming to MSI's gaming laptops line is that their webcams are being upgraded to 1080p from 720p.
The White or Black Stealth M15 will take full advantage of some special features such as Dynamic Boost 2.0, which uses AI to shift power from the CPU to the GPU, managing power on a per-frame basis, and Whisper Mode 2.0 to provide better acoustic control. The newly enabled resizable BAR feature now allows the CPU to access the entire GPU memory, where previously it was only able to grab a fraction at a time, all for improved performance.
Pre-orders are now open for the Stealth 15M with a release date of March 8, and we can't wait to get our hands on one.
