I was able to hit a maximum of 120 frames per second while playing. Eternal perdition on Ultra settings, and I even got around 70fps on Star field on Medium. Star field On Ultra, the frame rate dropped to a still playable 50fps, though I pushed it up to 80fps on Ultra by enabling frame generation. I’m not a fan of this feature, as it can sometimes lead to some weird anti-aliasing effects (in my opinion, it hits the same spot as motion smoothing on TVs), but your mileage may vary.
As for battery life, it’s best to keep the charger nearby for gaming sessions. The nearly 100-watt-hour battery is huge, but so is the power draw. It lasted around three hours with intense gaming and closer to six or seven hours with more regular use.
These limitations make the MSI Stealth 18 best suited to be a work laptop that you can game on at the end of the day. Running media editing applications like DaVinci Resolve and Blender was smooth and I rarely noticed any performance issues while working on it. Most gaming laptops would perform similarly with comparable GPUs, but the new Meteor Lake CPU gives you a bit of future-proofing. Companies like Blackmagic are working on Adding support for NPU in generalSo if there’s one area where Intel’s NPU is likely to be used in the future, it’s likely to be media creation first.
There may be better laptops out there that are purely for gaming – the Razer Blade 18, for example, trades a lower-resolution display for an incredible 300Hz refresh rate. But if you’d rather have a powerful laptop for work and The Stealth 18 is a solid investment.
All the right extras
The design of the Stealth 18 feels a bit more game3r I don’t like it, but I can live with it because of all the little extra touches MSI has put into it. For starters, it comes with a number pad. I don’t care what anyone says, number pads are cool and I appreciate that there’s a powerful gaming laptop with one. It’s most useful for performing various video editing tasks, less so for gaming, but if you’re like me, you’ll appreciate its presence.
The rest of the keyboard is equally nice. The font on the keys looks surprisingly similar to the font that Sony inexplicably… used for both PlayStation and Spiderman horseshoe Back in the 2000s. The chiclet-style keys are flat, with no dimples, but raised enough to make them easy to distinguish while typing, though my most common mistake was hitting the new and largely unnecessary Copilot key, which takes up space near the space bar. The touchpad is very smooth. It could be a bit larger, but I’d only want that when connected to a second monitor.
Photography: Eric Ravenscraft
There’s an Ethernet port, an HDMI port, and the dedicated charging port on the back of the device, which is an incredibly convenient location for connecting the laptop to a desktop workstation. It’s not as convenient as a laptop docking station, but it’s less of a hassle than cables sticking out the sides. I’m also a fan of the dedicated fingerprint sensor, which makes logging into Windows and unlocking password managers a breeze.
Overall, the MSI Stealth 18 is a powerful machine, even without the NPU. At $3,300 for the RTX 4080 model, you can save a few hundred dollars compared to similarly specced laptops (minus the refresh rate) like the Razer Blade 18. Just make sure you have a wall charger handy.
