You can depend on a gaming laptop that is named after a fabled sword to represent the leading edge of low-cost equipment. With an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 GPU at a price you might often expect to see an RTX 3050 Ti, an eight-core Intel Core i7 CPU, and a spacious 1TB solid-state drive, the MSI Katana GF66 stands out among 15.6-inch budget gaming laptops.
The Katana still fulfils the necessary requirements for gaming without significant flaws, even though its battery life is shorter than we’d like and its screen is less vivid than we’d like. This is especially true in these days of rising core-component prices and a redefining of what constitutes a “budget” gaming laptop. As our Editors’ Choice winner among inexpensive 15-inch gaming systems, it takes the position of MSI’s Bravo 15.
[content-egg-block template=offers_logo hide=price]When you lift the lid, the 15.6-inch, 144Hz Full-HD display is visible. Similar to the rest of the design, the bezels around the display are somewhat thick. A 720p webcam is located at the top, positioned in the middle of the display. The camera will serve its purpose for the rare Zoom business call, but you won’t want to use it for something like Twitch streaming. However, that is typical for almost all laptop webcams.
The GF66 12UGS’s display is noticeably inferior to the GF66 11UG’s. The panel’s other parameters prevent it from being used as a gaming monitor, even though 144 Hz and a Full-HD resolution are sufficient for a gaming laptop with the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti. The new AU Optronics screen performs worse than the panel in the previous model in all categories: sRGB colour space coverage (58.3%), brightness (225 cd/m2 on average), and response times. Here, MSI made a blatant degradation.
The Asus TUF Gaming A15 is the only device in our comparison field with a lower value than the 1081:1 contrast ratio. The gaming laptop’s display features values more in line with a business laptop, aside from the 144 Hz. The GF66’s casing conceals an Intel Core i7-11800H processor from the 11th generation, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU, 16GB of 3200Mhz memory, and a 1TB SSD. The 1080p 144Hz display is powered entirely by it, and it does a fantastic job at it. The MSI Katana GF66 is one of the gaming laptops with a particularly poor battery life, despite improvements in this area.