The MSI GF65 Thin is on Sale Now

If you’re like me and you’re looking to upgrade from the average, run-of-the-mill laptop to a gaming PC, then you’re probably running into the exact same issue: a gaming PC with a decent GPU isn’t cheap, and getting your hands on the components to build one yourself is arguably going to be even more expensive thanks to scalpers buying up every component that’s ever existed.

Thankfully, gaming laptops exist, and while you pay a bit more for what’s basically the same performance as a PC with the same parts, laptops go on sale a lot more often, are a lot harder to buy en masse and resell (suck it scalpers) and are far more portable, meaning that as the COVID pandemic rages on, if you want to work on your couch and then game at your desk, you don’t need to spend most of an hour pulling everything apart to move from one room to the next.

MSI is one of the bigger names in the gaming laptop industry, and given what’s on sale, it isn’t hard to see why they’re also pretty popular. The MSI GF65 Thin is on sale for $799 USD at Newegg, down from its usual list price of $1,049 USD. That’s savings of $250 USD, which may not sound like a lot, but considering what you’re getting for the price, and the fact that you’d have to spend over $1,000 USD to get a similar PC, it might be worth the upgrade, especially if you’re like me and haven’t had an upgrade in four or five years (or more, but who’s counting?)

With a 15.6-inch, 1920×1080 resolution IPS display rocking a 144Hz refresh rate, there’s very little to complain about here. Sure, it doesn’t have a higher refresh rate, but this laptop likely wouldn’t be able to put out enough frames for that to make a difference. An Intel Core i7-9750H CPU is paired with a GeForce GTX 1660 Ti GPU and 8GB of RAM to put out the performance worthy of the normally higher price tag.

Don’t get me wrong, this is by no means a top-of-the-line laptop. Both the CPU and GPU are a little over a year old as of the time of writing, meaning that they will be able to play the latest games for now, but likely won’t stand the test of time, especially if games continue to be as demanding as titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and Watch Dogs: Legion. More RAM would have been lovely, especially since we’ve long since moved to a point where 16GB of RAM is more or less the minimum. Sure, 8GB will give decent performance, but the performance boost, and relatively low cost of high-speed RAM, makes me wonder why a machine normally retailing for just over $1,000 USD ships with a measly 8GB; another 8GB stick would only run around $40 USD depending on who you’re buying from, so I can’t help but wonder if it was avoided to market this laptop as just over $1,000 USD as opposed to a more common $1,100 USD. Regardless, this is a laptop deal that’s more than worth the price, especially when it’s on sale for so much.