MSI has made a name for itself in the laptop space, reselling its latest gaming laptops before others, and the MSI GS66 Stealth is the first of its next-generation gaming laptops announced in early April, featuring Intel's top-of-the-line Core i9 10980HK and Nvidia's RTX 2080 Super Max-Q, the fastest mobile components available today. Will it be among the best gaming laptops? It's time to find out. [MSI has added complexity by packing the GS66 Stealth into a thin and light chassis. The toned-down styling, especially in the "Core Black" finish, makes it a machine you can happily take to the most serious meetings without betraying its gaming performance. The downside is that there is not much room to cool the high-end components.

MSI has named the GS66 Stealth Cooler Boost Trinity+ and hints that the last part employs three fans to cool everything. There is a network of heat pipes to draw heat away from the main components, and grills on the back and sides to vent hot air. The laptop gets warm during use, but the cooling generally works well, albeit a bit noisy depending on the temperature setting selected (more on this later).

This is a top-end version of the GS66 and costs a decent amount of money, so it's not too surprising to learn that the rest of the specs are just as impressive as the main CPU and GPU: the 1TB Samsung PM981 M.2 PCIe SSD is fast, the graphics card A vivid 300 Hz screen is also available for torture. Considering all this hardware, the decision to stick with just 16GB of DDR4-2666 RAM seems a bit strained, but it can handle most of the usual tasks.

MSI uses Steelseries for the keyboard, which makes for comfortable typing, but the function keys interfere with the right control key, which is a bit annoying. Of course, RGB lighting is hidden under each key in a chiclet style, and a wide variety of coloring and pulsing options are available if you are so inclined.

The touchpad is quite large and a bit unwieldy, as right-clicking seems more difficult than it should be. For a serious gaming laptop, a mouse would be better. The webcam is functional and supports Windows Hello, but the streamer could use a little more punch.

In terms of connectivity, there is much to like, including support for Wi-Fi 6, which comes standard on Intel's latest chips. If you want to physically connect the laptop to a network, there's enough room to squeeze in an RJ45 port on the right side; Thunderbolt 3 is also included, and there are plenty of USB ports on the sides.

On paper at least, the 8-core, 16-thread Core i9 10980HK is a powerful chip, capable of a maximum turbo frequency of 5.3 GHz. In fact, in our tests, it reached a maximum of 4.9 GHz (for a very short time) and only 4.8 GHz on a single core. When all the cores are pushed, the chip starts at 4.6 GHz but quickly drops below 3.6 GHz for demanding tasks such as rendering and video encoding.

The single-core performance of the Cinebench R20 is 477 ppt, putting the new 10980HK on par with the desktop Core i7 7700K, which is no mean feat for a laptop CPU. A multi-core result of 3,723 pts would also be fine if AMD's Renoir Ryzen 4000 chip wasn't sitting in the corner cursing the blue team and everything these days (for reference, the 4900HS in the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 scored 4,183 pt score, which is half the price of this machine). Given that this is Intel's top-end chip, the performance is not enough to justify the price premium over something like the i7 10750H, which is available in the same smart chassis.

The GS66, like almost all modern laptops, supports a variety of noise vs. performance settings so that you can try to keep the machine quiet or, conversely, abandon the quiet life and go all out for speed. The MSI Dragon Center provides a "User Scenario" settings under which you have the option to do this, with the main options being "Extreme Performance," "Balanced," "SIlent," and "Super Battery." There is also an option to create your own "user" settings, but this is not as Not as convenient.

Switching to "Balanced" produced a score of 3,704 pts on the Cinebench R20, which is within the margin of error of the "Extreme Performance" score of 3,723. In fact, the fans ran just as loud in "Balanced" as they did in "Extreme Performance. This is one of the reasons we tested the machine almost exclusively in the "Balanced" user scenario, and only ran it a few times to make sure there were no significant differences.

If you are looking for numbers on this, we recorded 45 dB at the fans during Cinebench (measured at head height in a normal sitting position). This sound may not seem like much, but the pitch is so high that it is deafening. When the fan is turned to full speed (which can be done at any time by pressing the Fn+F8 keys), it rises to 55 dB, which is truly deafening. If you want full performance, you need a decent gaming headset.

The "silent" setting is genuinely quiet (32 dB at the same distance), although it does not reach the portable nirvana of completely silent gaming. However, this did affect performance, with the Cinebench score dropping to 3,102 (equaling a 17% drop in performance); a similar drop was seen in Metro Exodus, which dropped from 49 fps to 42 fps (14% slower) after three runs with RTX on and top settings.

I want a quiet gaming machine, but this performance drop is a bit too much given the price of the system and the performance I actually see. In fact, when I compare this machine to a bulky laptop with a standard RTX 2070 in terms of gaming, the system often comes out on top. Not what you'd expect for a $3,000 (£3,000) investment; Max-Q is a great concept, but when you're heavily frequency-limited to keep heat down (the RTX 2080 Super Max-Q's boost clock limit here is 1080 MHz), the same not necessarily comparable to other members of the family.

That said, most games should run fine on the RTX 2080 Super Max-Q (with 3,072 CUDA cores), and 60 fps should be achievable in all games. the usual caveat that RTX titles are a bit too demanding still holds true, and if ray tracing is required, the settings will need to be lowered a bit. 56 fps in Shadow of the Tomb Raider and 49 fps in Metro Exodus are both tough numbers for a high-end laptop. There is also the option to lower the presets in esports to take full advantage of the 300 Hz screen (I recorded just under 200 fps in Fortnite simply to prove an ugly point).

The overall look of the GS66 is great and has many advantages, but at the same time, somewhat frustratingly, its thinness ultimately drags it down and feels overly compromised; the Core i9 10980HK does not have enough space to reach its full potential, and the RTX 2080 Super Max Max is a bit too thin for its size. and the RTX 2080 Super Max-Q also feels too constrained. Therefore, in the end, it seems as if the money would be better spent elsewhere.

That said, while the GS66's appearance doesn't quite hit the mark, the lesser SKUs perform nearly as well, look better, and save a considerable amount of money in the process.