The Cheapest Gaming Laptop – MSI GF63 Review
MSI’s GF63 is the cheapest gaming laptop you can currently buy right now for around $500 USD, but as with most things in life, you get what you pay for, so let’s find out what compromises have been made in this review! The GF63 has an all black design with a brushed aluminum lid and interior. I was surprised that it’s not all plastic, but make no mistake, with the way it feels it might as well be. There’s quite a bit of flex to the interior, though the lid wasn’t as bad and didn’t wobble too much when typing.
There’s quite a bit of flex to the hinge when opening the lid, you can see the area underneath the hinge and just in front of it moving. If you push the lid a little too far back the panel actually pops off, and I confirmed this happened on both of my laptops, so it’s difficult to say how well this will last long term. There’s a spot on the front to get your finger in to open the lid, but it’s more back heavy so can’t easily be opened with one hand. The laptop alone weighs 1.8kg or 4lb,
increasing to 2.3kg or 5.1lb with the small 120 watt charger included. Despite being a cheaper laptop, it’s not that chunky compared to other modern 15 inch designs. I bought two versions
camera and microphones look and sound, and this is what it sounds like while typing on the keyboard. The keyboard has a single zone of red backlighting, and all keys and secondary functions get lit up. Key brightness can be adjusted between 3 levels or turned off with the function and page up and down keys on the far right. Typing on the keyboard doesn’t feel great. The keys hardly press down and there’s just not really much feedback. It works fine, but I wouldn’t want to use it for long typing sessions. The plastic touchpad worked fine, though felt
a little small at times. The left side has the power input and a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port. Most of the ports are on the right, so cables are more likely to get in the way of right handed mouse users. From the front there are separate 3.5mm headphone and mic jacks, two more USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports, a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C port, gigabit ethernet facing down so you have to lift the laptop up to unplug the cable, and Kensington lock up the back. The back just has a HDMI port towards the
center. It would have been nice if some of the bulkier cables like Ethernet were here and out of the way, but I guess that costs more money. Unfortunately you cannot charge the GF63 with USB Type-C, and the Type-C port also cannot be used to connect to an external monitor. Now the HDMI ports on the back can be used to connect an external screen, but they connect to the Intel integrated graphics and cannot be used to bypass optimus. The HDMI port supports a 4K screen at 60Hz 8-bit, if you want 10 or 12-bit then you’re limited
to 30Hz. Getting inside requires unscrewing 12 Phillips head screws, all the same length, with one hidden under a factory seal sticker. The bottom plastic panel was very difficult to open, you’ll definitely want to make sure you’ve got the right tools for the job, I’ll leave a link to the ones I use below the video. Oh and you better pray that this top plastic bar towards the back doesn’t pop off, because it’s next to impossible to get it back on. When you eventually get inside you’ve got the battery down the front, two memory slots just above
near the center, a single M.2 slot to the left, a 2.5” drive underneath towards the front, and the Wi-Fi 6 card towards the back. Both of my laptops came to me with one stick of DDR4 memory, which means slower single channel speeds as this is cheaper. Don’t worry though, we’ve also done some tests with an upgrade to dual channel to see what the differences are. The Wi-Fi speed wasn’t bad, on the lower side for Intel based Wi-Fi, but there were other more expensive machines like Razer’s Blade 14 that weren’t doing as well. The installed 512
gig SSD was doing quite well for the reads, but half as high for the writes, granted this still seems pretty good from a cheaper gaming laptop. The upgradeability score wasn’t too bad, but I took off half a point from ease of access due to the difficulties I had in opening it. Otherwise despite only having one M.2 SSD slot, we’ve still got the option of putting in a cheaper 2.5” SSD. Or I guess hard drive if you really like pain. The speakers are found on the left and right sides towards the front. Compared to the rest
of the cheaper design, they actually sounded about average for a gaming laptop. They’re not amazing, but there’s minor bass and they get loud enough, though there’s less clarity at higher volume. The latencymon results weren’t looking too bad either. The GF63 is powered by a 3-Cell 52.4Wh battery, on the smaller side owing to the space dedicated to the 2.5” drive bay. Both laptops lasted for exactly the same amount of time in my standard YouTube video playback test. Not too surprising as the same integrated graphics from the 11400H would be running this. With a game running though,
the 3050 configuration lasted 14 minutes longer. Neither are particularly impressive compared to most other laptops tested, but at least it’s ahead of another MSI laptop with similar sized battery. Let’s check out thermals next. The cooler looks a little pathetic with just a few heatpipes and only a single fan, but it doesn’t need to be anything too crazy as we’ve got lower end hardware here. A bigger cooler would increase cost. For some reason there aren’t air vents directly above the fan. The vents on the bottom panel are above the CPU and GPU. Air only gets exhausted
out of the left side as there’s just one fan, and out of one side on the back. The MSI Center software let’s us change between different performance modes, which from lowest to highest are silent, balanced and extreme performance. Extreme performance mode gives us the option of setting a GPU overclock, however it doesn’t apply one by default so we haven’t changed it. We can also enable cooler boost here, which sets the fan to max speed. We can also go into user mode to get a bit more customization over the fan, setting different speeds based on CPU
or GPU temperatures. The internal temperatures were cold when just sitting there idle. The rest of the results are from combined CPU and GPU stress tests which aim to represent a worst case full load scenario. The GPU was thermal throttling and hitting Nvidia’s defined 87 degree Celsius limit with the stress tests in silent mode, but I think that’s fine. The point of silent mode is to be quiet, and lower fans mean higher temps, it’s a tradeoff. The other modes are running fine, so yeah we don’t really need a bigger cooler. The cooling pad I test with,
linked below the video, was able to lower temperatures a bit, but setting the fans to full speed lowered temperatures more, though as you’ll hear soon it’s louder too. These are the clock speeds being reached during the same stress tests. The 1650 was clocking higher, and the CPU in the 1650 system was also slightly better, but it’s a small difference and is likely based on silicon lottery, so that could probably go either way. Both GPUs are power limited to 40 watts, even when the CPUs aren’t used at the same time. Balanced and extreme modes limit the
CPU to 25 watts when the GPU is active, so power limits are definitely on the lower side. This allows us to get away with the smaller 120 watt power brick and smaller cooler, but less power means less performance. There wasn’t much of a performance difference between the different modes with an actual game running. I expected this with balanced and extreme modes given they had the same CPU and GPU power limits, but I was surprised that silent mode wasn’t further behind. The GPU was still around 40 watts in silent mode as the CPU wasn’t used as
much in this game. Although the CPU was maxing out at 25 watts with the GPU active at the same time, it was able to get up to 45 watts with the GPU idle, like in Cinebench. It’s not that impressive compared to other laptops, though I haven’t had too many with the i5-11400H. Acer’s Nitro 5 and Lenovo’s Legion 5i were scoring 20% higher in multicore despite having the same CPU owing to higher CPU power limits, however I think both of those are better laptops that cost more. Performance lowers if we unplug the charger and instead run
purely off of battery power. Those other 11400H laptops aren’t as far ahead now, but now a 6 core Ryzen laptop from the same generation was able to do quite a bit better. Most laptops I test are in the low 30 degrees Celsius range on the keyboard at idle, and the GF63 was in line with this, so cool to the touch when not doing anything. It gets warmer with the stress tests going, but the fans are also still relatively quiet. The higher balanced mode was fairly similar despite the fan being louder now, but it’s also performing
better with higher power limits which means more heat. Extreme mode with the fan set to auto was a little cooler, the power limits are the same as balanced mode but the fan is faster and louder now. Maxing the fans out with cooler boost enabled was cooler, but it’s quite loud now, let’s have a listen. The fan was always audible, even when just sitting there doing nothing in silent mode, and it wasn’t much louder once the stress tests were going. Not only did the cooling pad lower temperatures, but it also results in the fan running quieter
as it doesn’t need to go as fast to keep things cool. It’s quite loud with the fans maxed out, but considering the temps were already fine in balanced mode or extreme with the fans on auto, you don’t really need to run them maxed out to stay cool. Just before we get into the game testing, we’ve got to check out the screens, as that’s what you’re going to be staring at when playing games. This laptop does not have a MUX switch or advanced optimus, in fact it’s not possible to bypass optimus at all because the HDMI
port connects to the iGPU. The Intel graphics still give us adaptive sync though, which removes screen tearing. Color gamut was quite poor, but that shouldn’t be a surprise considering this really is more of an entry level gaming laptop option, and the screen is one of the first places to get cheaped out on. Likewise the screen was also fairly dim looking. Generally I like to see 300 nits at maximum brightness as a minimum, but the GF63 was barely getting above 250 nits bright. Average gray-to-gray screen response time was also low too, again to be expected from
a cheaper gaming laptop, you get what you pay for. It’s not doing that well compared to other gaming laptops, on the slower side near a number of other cheaper options that came out last year. It’s actually using the same panel as both last year’s and this year’s Nitro 5, so similar results are to be expected. The total system latency is the amount of time between a mouse click and when a gunshot fire appears on the screen in CS:GO. Again it’s on the slower side, in part due to the slower screen, but the single channel memory
would also be affecting this as well as the lower CPU and GPU power limits. The nitro 5 was further ahead here as it’s also got a mux switch this year. Backlight bleed wasn’t too bad, there’s some glow from the corners in my unit, but I never noticed this during normal use, and it will vary between laptops anyway. My partner did most of the testing on both of these laptops, and in her own words “the screen is so bad, I can’t imagine having to use it every day”. So yeah, just one of the limits when you’re
looking at a cheaper gaming laptop. Good screens just cost more money. Alright now let’s see how both the GTX 1650 and RTX 3050 compare in games. Cyberpunk 2077 was tested the same on all laptops, and I’ve got the GF63 shown by the red highlights. We’ve only bothered testing the RTX 3050 configuration with a dual channel memory upgrade, and it only gave us an extra 1 FPS increase, though the increase to the dips in performance as measured by the 1% lows was a bit higher. Red Dead Redemption 2 was tested with the game’s benchmark, and the
upgrade to dual channel memory also didn’t change much here either. The 3050 was 23% faster compared to the 1650 in this game, but you could of course further boost FPS with FSR on either GPU, while the 3050 also gives you the option of using DLSS, something the 1650 does not support. Control was basically the same with either 1650 or 3050, and going to dual channel memory didn’t help too much, granted this did make the 3050 now beat the higher tier 3050 Ti with 8 core Ryzen CPU in the VivoBook Pro just below it. I’ve compared
the GTX 1650 and RTX 3050 as well as the performance boosts on offer with DLSS that the 3050 gets you in this video over here. So check that one out after this one if you’re still deciding whether or not it’s worth paying more money for the 3050. Here are the 3DMark results for those that find them useful, now for some content creator tests. Adobe Premiere was tested with the Puget Systems benchmark tool, and unfortunately I’ve got fewer similarly specced laptops to compare with in the content creation tests. We’ve also only tested the 3050 here, and
it’s just a little behind a 3050 with a higher power limit. Adobe Photoshop generally does better with more single threaded performance, so I’m not too sure why it’s behind the i7-9750H. As we saw earlier, that was behind in Cinebench, so my guess is this is a result of the single channel memory. GPU power usually matters more in DaVinci Resolve, and the low 40 watt power limit for the 3050 isn’t doing us any favors. We’ve also tested SPECviewperf which tests out various professional 3D workloads. Despite this being a cheaper gaming laptop, MSI are still giving us
full access to their advanced BIOS after you enter this keyboard shortcut. There’s an insane amount of stuff you can change in here from temperatures, power limits, undervolting and way more, so make sure you know what you’re doing and don’t brick the machine. Linux support was tested with an Ubuntu 22.04 live CD. By default the keyboard, touchpad, speakers, Wi-Fi, ethernet and camera all worked. Keyboard shortcuts for adjusting keyboard brightness and volume worked, but screen brightness didn’t, though that could be because I had to use safe graphics mode to get it to boot. Let’s discuss pricing and
availability next. This will change over time, so refer to the link below the video for current prices and sales. And speaking of sales, make sure you check out my new website gaminglaptop.deals, we update it daily with the latest deals so you can save money on your next gaming laptop! At the time of recording, in the US MSI’s GF63 with GTX 1650 graphics starts at $560 USD, though this version has half the SSD space that mine has. Bestbuy actually has the older 10th gen version with quad core CPU for $500 on sale, which is the lowest
price I think I’ve ever seen for any brand new gaming laptop. The higher tier RTX 3050 version is $750, so probably not really worth paying the extra money for considering that the difference in games wasn’t that big. In a bigger selection of games, the 3050 was 26% faster than the 1650 on average, but you’ve got to pay 34% more money to get the 3050, and honestly once you get to $750 there are better laptops. Something like HP’s Victus is probably a better deal, you’re getting a better 12th gen CPU and RTX 3050 graphics with double
the SSD space for $714. MSI also have this all new Intel version of the GF63 for $750 with 12th gen CPU and Arc graphics, granted I’ve got no idea how the A370M stacks up just yet. I’d only really consider MSI’s GF63 if you’re after the cheapest gaming laptop that money can buy. Once you start going to higher specced versions of the GF63, other gaming laptops start to make more sense. The GF63 is the cheapest brand new gaming laptop that I’ve seen so far though, but as I’ve mentioned throughout the video, there are a number of
compromises that have been made in order to hit that lower price point. The main thing is the build quality, it just feels cheap and low quality. The screen also doesn’t look great, and some performance is lost due to only having one stick of memory. You can of course upgrade that later, it just costs more money. Now don’t get me wrong, you can absolutely run games on both of these laptops and have a good time. Just set your expectations accordingly when you’re buying the cheapest gaming laptop on the market. You really are getting what you pay
for, and honestly if this is a laptop that you’re going to keep around for 3+ years, if you can save an extra $200-300 honestly I think the laptops at the $800 price point are a step ahead. But yeah if you’ve only got $500-600 then MSI’s GF63 is as good as you can get unless you’re willing to look at either second hand or refurbished options. Is it worth spending more money to get the RTX 3050 over the cheaper GTX 1650 though? I’ve compared both of these laptops in 15 games over here, so come and check out
that video next to find out if the 3050 is worth it. Otherwise you can check out my most recent budget gaming laptop review over here next.
