WIRED 12th-Gen performance boost. Fast and suitably bright display. Good gaming keyboard. Fairly portable. TIRED Lack of true budget models. Poor battery life. Small trackpad.
TIREDan ever expanding breed, especially in 2022 when machines with powerful graphics cards extend far beyond the traditional hefty devices with flashing RGB you may expect in this field. Oddly, the MSI Katana GF66 sits more firmly in the past, though not necessarily in a bad way.
It’s a laptop made for PC gamers who don’t want to splash out for the highest quality of materials and design as well as top-tier performance. As a result, there are a few compromises to accept. And perhaps the hardest to swallow is that, even though the Katana presents itself as a value proposition, higher prices across the board and a lack of low-end GPU options limit this laptop’s appeal.
The model of the MSI Katana GF66 I tested isn’t the most wallet-friendly available, sporting a 12th-Gen Intel Core i7-12700H chip, the mid- to low-tier Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, 1 TB SSD, and 16 GB RAM—all for a price of $1,399 . There’s a small but significant difference between the UK model I tested and its US equivalent, with the former featuring a faster 240-Hz display, and the latter, a 144-Hz panel. Both are 15.6-inch, with the Katana GF76 being the 17-inch version of this machine.
The performance gives little to complain about, and the same goes for some key performance-adjacent factors. The fans aren’t overly intrusive, even when this laptop really gets going, and, despite this, it never gets overly hot to the touch. The steady performance is matched by a strong display.
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