MSI Thin 15 Black 2023

You're buying an RTX 4060 that happens to come with a mediocre screen and last-gen RAM. Great for pure gaming on a budget, but a tough sell for anything else.

The RTX 4060 is the star here, landing in the 84th percentile for GPUs. That's genuinely impressive for a laptop in this weight class, and it'll chew through most modern games at 1080p without breaking a sweat. The surprise, though, is how much the CPU bottlenecks things. That Core i5-13420H is just average, sitting right in the middle of the pack. For pure gaming, it's mostly fine, but if you try to stream or do any heavy multitasking, you'll feel it wheeze. The 16GB of DDR4 RAM is another head-scratcher, falling behind most competitors that have already moved to DDR5.

The ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 is the obvious rival here. It costs more, but you get a much better screen, DDR5 RAM, and a more premium build in a similarly portable package. The Lenovo Legion 5i is another strong alternative if you care more about raw performance and cooling than portability, though it's a chunkier machine. The MSI Thin 15 wins on price and weight, but it loses on almost everything else. If you can stretch your budget, the Zephyrus G14 is the smarter long-term buy.

Pricing is all over the map, from a reasonable $1029 to an absurd $234,115, so obviously shop around. At the low end, you're getting a lot of GPU for the money, but you're also getting a mediocre screen and last-gen RAM. If you can snag it for close to a grand, it's a decent deal for a pure gaming machine. Just don't pay a penny more than you have to, and definitely don't be the person who buys the $234K listing.

The MSI Thin 15 is a classic case of a laptop that gets the big things right and fumbles the details. You're getting a genuine RTX 4060 with 8GB of VRAM in a machine that weighs just over four pounds, which is a pretty sweet combo for gaming on the go. The 144Hz screen keeps things smooth, and the 1TB SSD means you won't be uninstalling games every other week. But that i5 processor and the DDR4 RAM hold it back, and the 45% NTSC screen is a letdown if you care about colors popping. It's a solid budget gaming rig, but you need to know exactly what corners MSI cut to hit this price.

If you need a laptop for creative work or anything beyond gaming, this isn't it. The screen's color accuracy is rough, and the CPU will choke on video editing. Go get an ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 or a MacBook Air instead.

The MSI Thin 15 is a budget gaming laptop that makes one smart trade-off: it gives you a killer GPU in a light body and cheaps out on almost everything else. If you just want to play games at high settings and don't care about color accuracy, streaming, or future-proofing, it's a solid pick. For everyone else, the compromises on the screen, RAM, and CPU will start to grate after a few months. It's a good laptop for a specific type of buyer, but it's not the all-rounder it pretends to be.