The MSI Cyborg 15 is a beautiful looking machine. When I took it out of the box, I expected its impressive list of specs to top the charts. However, after using the Cyborg for a while, my opinion of it has dropped. It dropped precipitously. This is a gaming laptop focused on low temperatures and quiet operation, but it lags far behind in most other metrics to try to achieve that.

The Cyborg 15 is one of two RTX 4060 laptops I tested over the past week, the other being a Gigabyte G5 (2023) (open in new tab). Both are fairly competitively priced at around $1,100, but in the UK (the specific market where these two exact models are sold), the MSI is cheaper at £1,099 (opens in new tab). The Gigabyte is £1,200; the US and UK models differ slightly, with the US model having only 8GB of RAM, putting it at a disadvantage. The two units I tested both come with 16GB.

Superficially, the Cyborg is the more impressive device, with surprisingly attractive translucent highlights and a solid feel design. The large trackpad and easy-to-use keyboard with numeric keypad also quickly became my favorite. By comparison, the Gigabyte looks much more tasteless. But looks aren't everything.

The Cyborg 15 is powered by one of Nvidia's latest GPUs, the RTX 4060. It packs an Ada Lovelace architecture with improved RT cores, tensor cores, and more cache than the previous generation's Ampere; it has 3,072 fewer CUDA cores compared to RTX 3060's 3,840, and fewer TMUs and ROPs, but in general RTX 4060 is being put to practical use as a faster gaming GPU.

Cyborg my problem is not with the choice of GPU, but rather with how MSI configures it. While modern mobile GPUs can run at a variety of different power envelopes to match the laptop chassis size, MSI has chosen to limit the RTX 4060 within the Cyborg 15 to just 45W. This is considerably less power than the Gigabyte G5 KF, which runs the RTX 4060 chip at 75W.

This 30W makes a huge difference in gaming performance.

Cyborg 15 was 13-22% slower than the G5 KF across our entire benchmark suite. This is despite running both laptops in their highest performance mode. The G5 KF was 2,123 MHz while the Cyborg 15 was 1,788 MHz, a difference of nearly 16%.

The advantage of Cyborg's modest operation is that it runs very quietly under load. However, it is hard to consider this a plus, as MSI has no option to remove the limited power limit, even though Gigabyte also offers a low-wattage mode that can dramatically reduce noise (and performance) if desired. 52Wh battery is the lowest of any laptop of this generation drained faster than any of the laptops we have tested so far at.

One possible explanation for why MSI limited the RTX 4060 inside the Cyborg 15 is to minimize the laptop's cooling solution. If you peel back the back of the laptop chassis and look underneath, you will see that MSI has a single-fan cooling solution with three heatpipes for the CPU and GPU, with one shared across both components. Gigabyte, on the other hand, has a two-fan cooling solution with four heatpipes. Again, one heatpipe jointly cools both the CPU and GPU.

MSI's cooling solution itself is not the problem. In fact, MSI's CPUs and GPUs run much cooler than Gigabyte's and are noticeably quieter. However, they do so by severely limiting performance. I find this measure too drastic.

Interestingly, MSI has a better CPU and better RAM than Gigabyte, but it does little for gaming with the RTX 4060. I much prefer the 10-core Intel Core i7 12650H on the Cyborg 15 to the 12-core Core i5 12500H on the Gigabyte. Before anyone asks in the comments, I say this because the Core i7 has six performance cores (P-cores) and four efficient cores (E-cores), whereas the Core i5 has four P-cores and eight E-cores. Only four may be a bit of a limitation for Gigabyte down the road, as we gamers will generally be utilizing more P-cores.

However, it is not such a big limitation today. The two different CPU configurations make little difference. In terms of gaming performance, the addition of the P-core did not help the Cyborg 15 in the CPU-intensive Hitman Dartmoor test; the Gigabyte was still tops; the Cyborg performed slightly better in 3DMark, Cinebench, and Blender It showed some gains, but only negligible gains that did not actually lead to noticeable performance gains.

Laptops are an overall purchase, and I am not that impressed with how MSI provisioned the storage on this Cyborg 15. Its rated speed is approximately 3,500 MB/s read and 2,500 MB/s write. Performance is fine, and while it is one of the slower Final Fantasy load times tested, it is not far off the pace.

The problem is that the capacity is only 512GB and there is no room for a secondary M.2 drive. Or rather, there is no physical M.2 port, although there is space inside the chassis and a space marked "SSD2" on the PCB for another M.2 connection.

Let's see if we can solder it in and see if it works: ......" Not to be a dead-beat, but the Gigabyte G5 KF has a spare M.2 port. It also has two cyborg USB Type-C ports; there's a MicroSD card reader.

And unfortunately, my complaints don't end there: the MSI comes with Norton preinstalled, which I quickly uninstalled using the official Norton Remove and Reinstall tool. However, that didn't stop it from trying to reinstall and adding folders to my desktop every time I rebooted the machine. It boggles the mind how frustrating this experience can be for the end user. The MSI Center application, which controls the laptop's performance profile, among other system functions, failed to install and required me to reboot the machine after every boot to finish the installation, so I had to restart the machine frequently I had to reboot the machine frequently.

Eventually, I solved the MSI Center problem by removing all traces of the MSI Center application and MSI Center SDK from my system and reinstalling the application from the laptop's support page. Norton also had to root out all descriptions of the app so that it could not sneak into the system folder and rear its ugly, annoying head.

Yes, the MSI Cyborg 15 was a frustrating experience, and I think another M.2 slot and fewer pre-installed poor quality apps would solve some of my issues with this particular model. And the Cyborg 15 is not cheap enough to convince me that it's worth it over the Gigabyte G5 KF.