The latest version of the MSI GF63 Thin is here, and I won’t beat around the bush: it’s one of the best budget gaming laptops you can buy right now. At £799 (and there are cheaper models), it has good 1080p gaming performance that won’t make your bank account cry. It also has a sturdy design that feels good to use.
The GF63 Thin has an Intel Core i7 processor, but it’s an older model (the 11800H) and not one of the newer 12th-gen Alder Lake chips. It also has an Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti graphics card. At Ultra settings, the GF63 Thin won’t hit 60fps in every game, but you can get comfortable frame rates in most games on its 15.6-inch 1080p display by turning down the texture details a bit.
It is quieter than many gaming laptops even when the fans are going full speed. The GF63 series has been around for a while. Earlier models used GPUs like the GTX 1660 and 1650, but this move into RTX territory changes everything. Nvidia’s budget GPUs are now more powerful than ever, which makes them a great choice for a cheap gaming laptop.
The GF63 Thin looks the same as it did when it first came out in 2018. It might have seemed cool back then, but now it shows its age. The black and red colour scheme and the thick top and bottom display bezels make this even more obvious. The MSI is mostly made of plastic, but the palm rest and lid are made of stamped aluminium.
Even though the aluminium is very thin, it is worth a nod at this low price. Its hairline-brushed pattern makes it look high-end, but it tends to get dirty quickly. The MSI dragon shield logo on the lid gives it more style and a sense of identity that feels important when you’re not spending a lot of money.
The RTX 3050 is Nvidia’s weakest laptop core, and its specs show that: it only has 2,048 stream processors and 4GB of memory. It also has a power limit of 40W in the MSI, which is a long way from its theoretical peak of 80W. The Core i5-11400H is a generation behind, but it still has six Hyper-Threaded cores and a top Turbo speed of 4.5GHz, which is good.
The 2022 MSI GF63 Thin has a 52.4Whr battery, which is a bit more power than previous models, but it’s still pretty average. There isn’t enough room in the thinned-down chassis for a bigger battery, and even though you might think that the lower-end internal components would use less power, the GF63 Thin can’t last much longer than 5 hours at 50% brightness.