TL;DR: This is an excellent gaming laptop for the $1000 or under budget. It's surprisingly lightweight. Ventilation is good. Keyboard works well, and the hardware packs a punch. The GTX 1050Ti is an extremely stout graphics card. The only drawbacks are that it's not designed with the user/owner doing their own upgrades in mind (opening it up to add storage or RAM can be tricky), and the battery doesn't last very long (but that's understandable considering it contains a lot of resource-heavy hardware). Read below for my long-winded review of the product and my experience with MSI in general.
I just recently graduated college, and purchased this for myself to replace my old MSI laptop. I've come to trust MSI and their brand thanks to my experience with their products.
My old laptop, I bought my senior year of high school in preparation for college, in 2009. It was the MSI MS-1651. It came with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor. An Nvidia GT9600 graphics card, 4GB of RAM, and 500GB of spinning storage. At the time, it was a pretty good budget-line gaming laptop. When I was shopping for a laptop for school, I new I wanted something that could play games, because PC gaming was something I'd been wanting to tap into.
I'm writing this review in 2017, and that old 1651 I bought back in '09 is still functional. The only problem I ever had out of it was one of the sticks of RAM going bad, and that only just happened last year. Other than that, for the last 7-8 years, the thing has served me well. It got me through two degrees. When I first got it, it competently played most contemporary games at High settings, and is what got me into PC gaming (I would later build a desktop using MSI components to further my PC gaming experience). I played many an hour of CSS and TF2 on it in the dorms. Today it sits in my "spare tech" drawer, retired. Before I put it away to make room for my new GL62M, though, it still played TF2 and Bad Company 2 like it used to, and even managed CSGO on medium settings. I probably could've squeezed a few more years out of it if I truly wanted to. I would confidently say that laptop was good for 10 years of function. Of course compared to this GL62M it's bulky, slow, and horribly out-dated hardware-wise. But I'll be darned if it didn't refuse to die.
I've had my new GL62M for a few weeks now and I'm not the least bit surprised in that it's working great. With how much entertainment, function, and use I got out of my old 1651, I was pretty confident this would be a wise purchase.
I've upgraded its RAM to 16GB and added a chunkier SSD to store more games. It runs quietly and keeps itself cool. The ventilation works great. Sound quality is about what I'd expect for a laptop of this nature. The speakers won't blow anyone away, but they produce quality sound. This thing's GTX1050 Ti takes anything I throw at it in stride. I play the new DOOM with Ultra settings at a smooth 60FPS (V-sync on). BF4 plays great at Ultra as well. Alien: Isolation looks and plays great. DOOM is probably the most taxing game I own and the machine has no issues with it whatsoever. If you want a good gaming laptop, this is a great product for the budget minded. It might not be as future proof as a laptop with a 1060, 1070, or 1080, but with 4GB of VRAM it should be competently playing contemporary games for the next 5-10 years at reasonably appealing graphics settings. I don't doubt that this thing will still be perfectly bootable and usable 8 years from now. It might not play all the latest games at High or higher settings, but it'll be there.
The battery life is not amazing, but this is a gaming laptop, so I wouldn't expect anything much there anyways. Battery technology hasn't made the next leap, so don't be upset when you cram a bunch of high-end components into something like this and the battery only lasts a couple of hours. If you want longer battery life, you won't get it with a gaming laptop, at least not with our current battery tech.
The BIOS is easy to use and lets you adjust quite a few things. I tend not to tinker with the BIOS unless I'm troubleshooting, so I can't speak for much other than it's easy to access and navigate.
Design-wise the keyboard is wonderful and the numpad is excellent, as far as laptop keyboards go.
Upgrading is not fun. In order to add an SSD or additional RAM, you need to pop off the entire bottom bezel assembly of the machine, and its kind of worrying/scary to do the first time. That said, once you do get it opened up, you've got a perfectly sized, SSD-shaped SATA connector waiting for more storage, and you have two slots of DDR4 RAM ready to go. Mine came with 1 8GB stick, I added a second 8GB stick to get me up to 16MB.
Sorry for the short novel. I bought this to replace my old MSI gaming notebook, not because my old one failed, but because my old one just lasted so long it couldn't keep up with gaming development. Based on my limited time using the product I feel it's an extremely agile and efficient machine suitable for gaming. The only drawbacks is that upgrading it as a user can be difficult if you're not comfortable with snap-on bezel plates, and the lack of battery longevity (which is a given with a gaming laptop). I'd highly recommend this and most other MSI products!
| Standing screen display size | 15.6 Inches |
|---|---|
| Screen Resolution | 1920 x 1080 pixels |
| Max Screen Resolution | 1920x1080 Pixels |
| Processor | 2.8 GHz core_i5 |
| RAM | 8 GB DDR4 |
| Memory Speed | 2400 MHz |
| Hard Drive | 256 GB SSD |
| Graphics Coprocessor | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti |
| Chipset Brand | NVIDIA |
| Card Description | Dedicated |
| Graphics Card Ram Size | 4 GB |
| Wireless Type | 802.11b, 802.11a, 802.11g |
| Number of USB 2.0 Ports | 1 |
| Number of USB 3.0 Ports | 2 |
