I confess that I have often fantasized about MSI's R&D director looking at a prototype of a new gaming laptop, losing his temper, flipping the table, and yelling to the rest of the team that it needs to be thinner. Strange daydreams aside, ultra-thin gaming laptop users know all too well that they must sacrifice gaming performance for portability.

We first saw the MSI Stealth 15M at the Geforce RTX Game On showcase this week. These new systems will feature RTX 30 series mobile GPUs for 2021, such as the much-rumored RTX 3060, whose gaming performance is 30% faster than the PS5.

The Stealth 15M is 0.63" tall when closed, 0.03" taller than Razer's ultra-thin Blade 15. Now, 0.04 inches may not seem like much, but in the cutthroat world of ultra-thin gaming laptops, even the smallest margin of error matters. And at just under 4 pounds, the only smaller, lighter laptop to be found is the 13-inch Apple MacBook Pro.

Even more impressive is what MSI is packing into its slim aluminum chassis: according to MSI's information, the base Stealth 15M comes with a new Intel H35 Tiger Lake CPU Core i7-11375 CPU, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, and a newly announced RTX 3060 laptop GPU handling graphics.

On Newegg's pre-order list, this $1,400 configuration also features a 144Hz 1080p IPS panel, which is cheaper than its slightly less slim counterpart from Razer Another small improvement brought to MSI's gaming laptop line, webcam upgrade from 720p to 1080p.

The Stealth M15, available in white or black, has several special features, including Dynamic Boost 2.0, which uses AI to shift power from the CPU to the GPU and manage power frame by frame, and Whisper Mode 2.0, which provides better acoustic control to Maximize the use of the system. The newly enabled resizable BAR feature allows the CPU to access the entire GPU memory.

The Stealth 15M is now available for pre-order with a scheduled release date of March 8.