The Creator 17 has a more button-heavy appearance compared to other MSI gaming laptops. The cooling vents on the bottom are arranged in funky geometry, but you won’t find aggressive red accents, sculpted vents or RGB lighting. Despite its strong components, the laptop manages to stay fairly cool and quiet, but the bottom panel does heat up during long periods of intensive graphics work. The keyboard, however, does not get warm. A system of this size is unlikely to be kept on your lap for long periods of time, so it’s better that the desk gets hotter than the keyboard deck.
The all-metal enclosure is basic business black and thin. The unit measures 0.8 x 15.6 x 10.2 in, which is remarkably thin for a large laptop. It’s also relatively light at 5.4 lb. The Dell XPS 17 is almost as thick and weighs slightly less at 5.34 lb (4.87 lb) with a touchscreen; the LG Gram 17 is the lightest 17-inch laptop we saw at just 2.98 lb.
Aside from the excellent port selection, MSI’s other design choices were a little more ‘hit and miss’ for me. The keyboard is sturdy, but the keycaps are a little smaller than I’m used to and have more travel than most thin keyboards I’ve used. This gives it a slightly ‘mushy’ feel and personally makes typing feel slower.
The number pad is another questionable design. I don’t use it much, but it does cause the rest of the keyboard to be closer to the left, meaning that one palm is always resting on the trackpad while typing. Palm rejection works well and I only accidentally moved or clicked the mouse a few times, but overall it’s not comfortable and I’m not sure the number pad is up to it.
Also, in the Handbrake test, which encodes a 420 MB video as H.265, the MSI Creator came third, but in performance mode it finished the test in 70 seconds, the fastest of the comparators. According to these CPU-intensive benchmarks, the MSI did a great job extracting a large amount of performance from the Core i7-12700H.
The gaming benchmarks yielded mixed results. First, the Creator Z17 failed to run the Civilisation VI benchmark consistently. For no apparent reason (e.g. vertical sync being turned off), it regularly locked up at 60 fps for multiple runs and also returned results that were too high for the GPU. For this reason, unfortunately, we cannot include this title in our comparisons.