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. 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. 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 it 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 of MSI’s GF63 for my GTX 1650 and RTX 3050 comparison, so both laptops have Intel’s Core i5-11400H 6-core CPU, 8 gigs of single-channel RAM, and a 15.6” 1080p 144Hz screen. The only difference is the GPUs, and we'll see how both compare in games soon.
There’s a 720p camera above the screen in the middle, but there’s no Windows Hello face unlock. Here’s how the camera and microphones look and sound. 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 three 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 it 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 an 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 a 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 volumes. 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 a similar-sized battery.
Let’s check out thermals next. The cooler looks a little pathetic with just a few heat pipes 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 lets 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 in this same test.
Now let’s check out some games. I’ve tested both laptops in 10 different games, with 1080p ultra settings, so let’s check out the differences between GTX 1650 and RTX 3050 next. The 3050 laptop was ahead of the 1650 in all games tested, but the differences really vary based on the specific game. Fortnite was the best-case scenario for the 3050, which was 59% faster than the 1650, though most other games weren’t quite as big of a difference. We could only barely hit a 60 FPS average in Cyberpunk 2077 on the 3050 at lower settings, but at least this means the game runs better compared to the 1650, which can’t even hit 60 FPS. Watch Dogs Legion was the smallest difference out of all 10 titles tested, with the 3050 just 22% ahead. This is still quite a nice boost for a budget gaming laptop though, with the 3050 being around 41% faster than the 1650 on average out of all 10 games tested at 1080p ultra settings.
Even lower-end GPUs, like the 3050, still have better support for features like ray tracing, DLSS, and DLAA. These can definitely help out in some games if you want to play around with them, and this is definitely one advantage over the 1650, as it just doesn’t have these features.
If I had to choose between the two, I’d definitely pay more for the 3050. Even in this cheaper GF63 design, it’s a nice boost. Sure, the 1650 is cheaper, but at that point, you may as well consider looking into older secondhand hardware that could do better instead. For those that are more casual and want to play a few games, the 3050 is doing alright.
I also went and tested both laptops with a second stick of memory installed to see what performance differences were possible. Shadow of the Tomb Raider was only seeing a 3% boost in performance with the extra memory stick installed, while Control got an 8% boost. Far Cry 6 was seeing the biggest change with dual-channel memory, reaching 19% higher average FPS and 12% higher 1% lows. At this point, it’s more impressive than the 3050 upgrade, but I’m going to show you some more games that were tested.
Cyberpunk 2077 was another one of the games with a lower change with dual-channel memory, seeing just a 5% boost to average FPS and only 1% higher 1% lows. The results really vary by the specific game. Most of the 10 games tested with dual-channel memory saw an 8% boost to average FPS or less. Out of all 10 games tested, the 1% lows were 13% higher, while the average FPS saw a 7% boost, so adding a second memory stick definitely helps, but it depends on the specific game as to whether or not this is worth doing. Some games have more of a boost compared to others, but I’d probably be doing it. You can always use the link below the video to see the specific memory I use and how much it costs.
Here’s how both laptops compare against others. This is how both laptops compare against others in Shadow of the Tomb Raider with the highest setting preset. This is a GPU-heavy test, but the processor can make a difference. MSI’s GF63 with the 1650 is basically at the bottom of the list. Meanwhile, the 3050 model is doing quite a bit better, but I guess it’s not too surprising given this is a 2-year-old game. It’s worth considering that the GF63 is one of the cheapest laptops I’ve tested here, but if you’ve got the money, I think the 3050 model would be the way to go.
It’s definitely not the quietest machine, though, when under load. Here’s how it sounds while running a CPU+GPU stress test. When just sitting there idle, it was on the quieter side compared to most other laptops tested. However, as soon as you start doing something, the fans ramp up fast and get quite loud. I did find it a bit odd that silent mode was quieter in the stress test compared to the extreme performance mode, as that wasn’t the case when just running a game like CS: GO. I suppose the workloads just differ and are not an apples-to-apples comparison.
There was no coil whine on either of my two GF63s, but this can vary between laptops. Let’s check out the screen. The GF63 has a 15.6” 1080p screen, but I’d be skeptical of it for content creation or anything else that needs color accuracy. MSI doesn’t officially list what the screen covers, and my measurements found around 55% of sRGB. It could just be this one laptop, but I did test two with different panels. The Nitro 5 was doing quite a bit better, and although not the best, still ahead. The screens don’t get too bright either, measuring at 263 nits at maximum brightness, again with a second screen tested doing about the same. That said, I think this is fine for indoors but might be less than ideal for bright rooms, and you probably won’t want to take it outside too much.
The screen response time isn’t the worst I’ve tested, but there are definitely better 144Hz panels out there. It’s about the same speed as other 60Hz screens I’ve tested, which is probably what we should expect for a cheaper 144Hz screen. There are no G-Sync or FreeSync features, as those usually cost extra. Backlight bleed was present in both laptops I tested, though I thought it was pretty minor. I never noticed it during regular use, but this will vary between laptops and panels. I think MSI’s GF63 is a decent option if you’re looking for a cheaper entry-level gaming laptop, but you should expect to make some compromises.
Let’s summarize the good and bad aspects of MSI’s GF63 gaming laptop.
Pros:
1. Cheaper entry-level gaming laptop.
2. RTX 3050 model can play most modern games with decent settings.
3. Aluminum lid and interior, though still quite plasticy.
4. Decent 1080p 144Hz screen for the price.
5. 2 memory slots and upgradeable storage.
Cons:
1. The build quality isn’t great with flex and wobble.
2. Can’t charge with Type-C or use Type-C for video output.
3. Loud fans when under load, but silent mode is available.
4. Color coverage and brightness are below average.
5. Quite difficult to get inside for upgrades.
6. Lower power limits mean less performance compared to some other laptops.
If you’re looking for a cheaper gaming laptop, then I think the GF63 with the RTX 3050 could be worth considering. As long as you’re aware of the sacrifices that are being made to get the price lower, you’ll probably have a good time with it. Let me know if you’re looking for something more or have any other questions about the laptop.