This is the MSI leopard GP 65 gaming laptop 15.6 inch though. If you want a 17 inch is also available as a GP 75. Which is the 17 inch version of this laptop. So, the casing hasn’t changed much from the last generation 2019.
Overview
Now we have Intel 10th generation CPUs inside and I have to say that this is considered a mid tier gaming laptop $1500. This is the kind of mid tier that I personally like all the performance 144 Hertz IPS display inside the package.
I’m okay if it’s got a plastic casing and some of those other things but you know most of the boxes are actually ticked for the price. We’re gonna look at it now so the laptop has a Intel Core i7 that’s a 10th gen 45 watt CPU.
That CPU shows a power almost 15 percent improved performance over the ninth gen which is nice lately you know. Intel’s not making big leaps and bounds improvements in performance.
So that’s decent and AMD Ryzen is chasing them these days and it’s available with Nvidia RTX 2070 graphics since the phone does not max Q graphics. One of the things that I particularly like there is eight gigs of ram and it’s also available with an RTX 2060 for less money.
So for $15 bucks e at the RTX 2070 they then ask for RAM slots so you can go up to 64 gigs of ram. It has an m2 nvme SSD slot and a one terabyte hard drive in a two and a half inch bay. You can upgrade that yourself to it two and a half inch SSD.
Speakers
Also we have giant speakers this is actually the marketing really msi needs to hire someone a little more sophisticated in the marketing department. So you have two three watt speakers here and they are loud but the bass is pretty lacking.
You can play around with the software I do and you know tweak it and try to bring some bass up there but it’s pretty much trebling oriented. But for a laptop in this price range I don’t expect the best speakers.
You do get a headphone and a microphone jack with SP diff support on and so MSI usually goes that extra mile with pretty good external audio support output. So if you wanna do headphones or 5.1 speakers or whatever it is you’ve got you can do them.
Display
The display is an IPS matte non-touch display. There’s a 144 Hertz refresh rate. Ours is an LG display and much like the last generation of this. It’s really a good display and partly because I did a good job of the factory calibration on this.
It looks even higher contrast than our test results show it looks sharp contrasting and colorful. You know full srgb coverage. You can see the rest of the metrics on screen but it’s a really pleasant display.
I like it. It’s all XI it’s also good for reading text should you actually want to use this for work. By the way for a gaming laptop this display is unusually bright 414 nits I. You know doing the usual playing games and the woman came thing I’m really turned it down to about 50% brightness right away.
Because it’s eye searingly bright so it’s great if you happen to work outdoors with or near windows during the day. MSI has the Dragon Center software so you can customize the fans, the cooling, the clock speeds and all that sort of thing.
Which is nice to have when we did our tests we had it set to high performance mode. There’s actually a turbo mode one level above that and we tried it with fans set to auto and there with me adjusting the fan curve.
Basically down the fans ramped up more aggressively as the CPU got hotter this is not a quiet laptop folks. I mean if you just do Word or Excel it’s not gonna make noise or if you’re streaming something on YouTube like you’re doing right now.
It’s not that but when you’re gaming you will hear the fans when it’s installing software windows updates. In fact you will hear the fans a bit louder than average. I suspect that’s because of the big open mesh grille that covers about two-thirds of the bottom of the laptop.
Fan & Heat
We saw this before like on the big desktop replacement MSI Titan. Which though it doesn’t get so loud but it could be you’re just hearing the fans more. Because it’s such a big open mesh grille. It’s a brilliant idea for cooling but it also means you should use it on a desk or a laptop desk, don’t put it directly on your legs.
So it can breathe and so you don’t get the hair singed off your legs and in terms of speaking of that. If you’re just doing everyday productivity work editing in Photoshop s or that you’re not really gonna feel a lot of heat.
It’s a fairly thick chassis it’s about a little over 23 millimeters thick 1.08 inches and it’s plastic so that it doesn’t get that hot but the bottom because it opens up the match area you will feel the heat if you put it directly on your legs when you’re gaming.
Again I don’t think you should really do that. Fan exhausts at the sign and the back on one side and the other side just out of the rear. Overall the heatsink on this. It’s fairly well done again, it’s just not a quiet laptop when gaming you can get the chorus to hit near thermal max 98 centigrade for example.
But if you look at the average for the CPU temperature for example in hardware info 64 it averages in the 70s to the 80s. This is while playing the division 2 on Ultra and Far Cry new dawn on high to very high settings.
So that is actually pretty good the machine is operating safely in terms of performance when gaming since this was a gaming laptop though you may be buying it for doing 4k photo editing for doing blender renders.
You’re learning 3d in school whatever it is a numerical analysis you know all that sort of stuff it’s good for that too but when gaming I have to say man it’s gonna do and he triple-a title that’s been made recently really well.
On high to Ultra settings no problem really pretty much Ultra at 1080p which is a display resolution of the built-in panel. If you want to do 4k it’s going to depend on the gaming. You should still be able to do high and a playable framerate again varying depending on the game.
Anywhere from 30 to 45 to 60 frames per second depending on the game. It’s a real powerhouse. Again that’s what I like about this particular model and it ain’t the prettiest it doesn’t have the new 300 Hertz refresh display is overkill.
You don’t really need it but you got an RTX 2070 full mobile card and they’re not the max Q. You’ve got the new processor which is showing some improvement over the previous generation and some nice benchmarks they’re good very good.
Also good as a precision trackpad unit MSI’s tortured us with some of the track players they’ve used in the past. This one’s fine. The only thing I don’t like is that clicky buttons as dedicated clickers are a little stiff, not as stiff as some of the past one.
So we are seeing an improvement there and it’s not unusable. I’m not going to dislocate my thumb or something like that. Just could be better, the keyboard is SteelSeries as always and as always it’s a good keyboard it’s got a nice tactile feel.
It’s perky RGB you can have it do the wave like ours is doing you can have disco options you can light it up any way you want or you can just make it all white when you have to take it to the office.
If you ever get to go back to the office again and you want to look more staid for ports we have three USB a three point, two ports gen1, there’s a USB C port Gen 2 not Thunderbolt 3 but in this price range given the other goodies that you’re getting here that’s okay until Wi-Fi 6a x201 onboard, HDMI which they say only does 4k at 30 Hertz which is a little strange but you do have mini DisplayPort 1.2.
So you can get your 60 Hertz display or faster going that way, full-size SD card slide very handy for creators and an rj45 Ethernet jack some as you’d expect from a gaming laptop, even one that’s relatively light and not super super chunky.
Battery
You’ve got good connectivity here so it’s all sounding really good so what’s the drawback other than the fact that it has your usual kind of bland black plastic design. Add the battery life and this has been going on for a while with the leopard series and with its competitors as well to get it to be as light as. It is and the footprint is as small as it is.
We have a small battery inside folks. it’s a 51 watt hour battery ok you know I mean a Dell XPS 13 can do a little bit better than that for battery capacity.We do have Nvidia Optimus switchable graphics which can help so it can run on Intel integrated graphics.
when you’re not doing heavy lifting and all that sort of thing but don’t expect great runtimes here. If you’re doing light productivity work and streaming video you can do four and a half hours five hours at best you know.
If you’re gaming just plug it in because you want that performance. Anyway it comes with a 231w charger. Which is perfect and adequate so you’re not going to see any kind of power throttling on this or any power drops while you have it plugged in and you’re working it hard so good.
Technical Specification
Processor
- Up to 10th Gen. Intel® Core™ i7 Processor
Operating System
- Windows 10 Home
Memory
- DDR4-2666 Memory Type
- 2 Slots Number of SO-DIMM Slot
- Max 64GB Max Capacity
Display
- 15.6″ FHD (1920×1080), 144Hz, IPS-Level
- 15.6″ FHD (1920×1080), 120Hz, IPS-Level
Graphic
- NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 2070 with 8GB GDDR6
Storage
- 1x M.2 SSD Combo slot (Nvme PCIe Gen3 / SATA)
Keyboard
- Backlight Keyboard (Single-Color, Red)
Networking
Wi-Fi
- Gb LAN 802.11 ax Wi-Fi 6 + Bluetooth v5.1
Bluetooth
- Bluetooth®
Interface
- 1x RJ45
- 1x SD (XC/HC)
- 1x (4K @ 30Hz) HDMI
- 1x Mini-DisplayPort
- 1x Type-C USB3.2 Gen2
- 3x Type-A USB3.2 Gen1
Weight
- 2.3 kg
Manufacturer Warranty
- 1 year Limited warranty (Include 1 Year Global)
Final Words
So that’s the msi GP 65 leopard gaming laptop / world pro apps whatever you need to use it for. Not the prettiest guy that you’ve ever seen but for $1,500 a horse power performance on this is fantastic.
The GPU on the CRT X 2070 has a nice latest Intel tenth generation CPU 144 Hertz very bright IPS display, a good keyboard, and a precision trackpad. The only things that hold it back are pretty noisy fans and well battery life for you know just so-so