Msi 14" GS43VR Phantom Pro Notebook

Even if it meant a price hike, however, we'd like to see a bigger solid-state drive, ideally a 512GB SSD in lieu of a hard drive, and larger arrow keys to prevent finger fumbling.

• +

  Top-notch gaming performance, No burden in a briefcase, Plenty of ports

• -

  Only 128GB of SSD storage, Tiny arrow keys, Runs hot

The MSI GS43 is an ultraportable gaming laptop to consider if you absolutely must have powerful specs in a compact enclosure, cause otherwise squeezing high-performance hardware in a tight case leads to high temperatures under load and a noisy cooling system.

• +

  compact and light; nice looking; good matte display; good IO, although not the best positioning of important ports on the right edge; fast performance in most tasks once you handle the bloatware; easy to upgrade; decent battery life considering the hardware; well priced for the specs

• -

  some flex in the chassis, treat this well; the metallic surfaces show smudges easily; room for improvement on the keyboard and trackpad; way too much bloatware, with an impact on performance, but this is fixable; gets loud and very hot under load; horrible speakers

A few weeks ago I reviewed the Asus ROG G752VS , a massive gaming laptop with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 inside. Asus’ offering is powerful, but just too large to be a practical, portable gaming machine, which is why I reached out to MSI.

• +

  The GTX 1060 is perfect for 1080p, packing 50% more punch than the GTX 970M. Great brushed aluminium design. Thunderbolt 3 and a SteelSeries keyboard are decent inclusions.

• -

  The poor ELAN trackpad has been retained. Fans are loud under heavy load.

I’ll try to keep it short. The MSI GS43VR is a nice laptop with good basic features (keyboard, IPS display, 3D performance, enough RAM, SSD). If you want a small and relativelty light weight gaming laptop, this is a good option. However, the laptop has some caveats.

• +

  Excellent gaming performance with a GTX 1060 I7-6700HQ, Relatively compact and lightweight at around 1.8kg, Very comfortable keyboard, in my opinion, with very good feedback, respond and travel depth and sufficient resistance, Cooling system keeps the CPU and GPU temps at reasonable levels (although...

• -

  Performance/price isn't as good as other laptops, Some GPU throttling under gaming laptop, Chassis could get quite hot in hot environment (summer), Included SSD is not NVMe like in previous model, Only 3xUSB ports including the TB3 port, one of them USB 2.0, Speakers can barely make you feel...

There's a lot to consider with the GS43VR Phantom Pro and sadly it isn't all rosy. The throttling issues are a shame and possibly even avoidable if MSI had used larger vents for the intake fans.

The MSI GT83VR Titan SLI wasn’t the only standout product launched by MSI today; there’s also the slim and light GS43VR Phantom. While this little gaming machine isn’t as powerful as its bigger siblings, it’s definitely an interesting product – I personally find it to be the perfect gaming laptop...

Really sweet machine! I'm not a gamer but needed a high performance PC to work with CAD programs and other apps needing a little more processing power than average. Machine is really solid. Excellent build quality, great 2017 features.

Edited: I have had this laptop for 4 months and I have to change some of my comments, I am having a terrible time with this laptop now. It is now having issues booting up. It is having stuttering issues when playing games like Overwatch, Doom, and Elder Scrolls.

• +

  Since this is my first laptop, I am trying to be flexible with what is acceptable and what are things I won't be satisfied with. As of right now, I am satisfied with particular features and not satisfied with others. Also, this is my first review, so I am going to try and be as thorough as possible.

• -

  Cons - It gets hot, and I mean uncomfortable hot when sitting on the coach playing WoW, Overwatch, ect. The back sometimes gets to hot to touch and honestly that is an issue, especially if I want this to last me for a while.

This little guy does what most desktop replacements do, but it's only a 14 inches and 4 pounds. I've had it a coupled weeks and the only complaint I have is that I wish it had a bigger battery.

I have only had this laptop for a few weeks, but so far it is amazing! I am not a gamer. I am a photographer. I needed all the speed and graphics for editing photos and videos. For years I had struggled with regular laptops and desktops until a MicroCenter salesman told me I would benefit from a...

• +

  As I travel a lot for work I wanted something in a pretty small form factor to be able to do development work for VR while on the road. So far this laptop is performing flawlessly in that regard as well as the the occasional Overwatch game on max settings.

• -

  Like others have mentioned just know this will get super hot (VR mode is no exception). I bought a laptop cooler to try and help a little but I always keep this on a desk (home or hotel) so I can live with some heat in such a small package.

I would recommend this product. Coming from someone who has used a Macbook Pro for 5 years and a budget $600 AMD gaming computer build for 3 years, this is a really big upgrade for me.

• +

  - Fast. Fast bootup times and file transfer with ssd. The GTX 1060 6gb DDR5 is more than enough to handle games my games 1080p. - Trackpad works very well and feels nice. Very responsive. - The overall design is very nice.

• -

  - Bloatware. It is very annoying with popups and it unnecessarily taxes the cpu. - Battery Life. I get about 3-3.5 hours with very light internet browsing. - Buggy trackpad drivers or trackpad hardware. It would randomly makes loud beeps when scrolling down with two fingers.