Review: MSI Stealth 18 AI Studio A1V

I was able to max out at 120 frames per second while playing Doom Eternal on Ultra settings, and even got around 70 fps in Starfield on Medium. Starfield dropped down to a still-playable 50 fps on Ultra, though I got it up to 80 fps on Ultra by enabling frame generation. I’m not a fan of this feature as it can sometimes lead to some weird smoothing effects—to my mind, it hits the same nerve as motion smoothing on TVs—but your mileage may vary.

In terms of battery life, your best bet is to keep your charger nearby for gaming sessions. The nearly 100-watt-hour battery is massive, but so is the power draw. It lasted around three hours of heavy gaming, and closer to six to seven hours with more typical use.

These limitations make the MSI Stealth 18 best suited to being a workhorse laptop you can play games on at the end of the day. Running media editing apps like DaVinci Resolve and Blender was smooth, and I rarely noticed performance problems while working on it. Most gaming laptops would run 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 NPUs generally, so if there’s an area where Intel’s NPU is likely to be used in the future, it’s likely media creation first.

There might be better laptops purely for gaming—the Razer Blade 18, for example, trades a lower-resolution screen for a whopping 300-Hz refresh rate. But if you’d rather have one powerful laptop for work and play, the Stealth 18 is a solid investment.

All the Right Extras

The design of the Stealth 18 feels a little bit more gam3r than I like, but I can live with it for all the extra little touches MSI has put in this thing. For starters, it comes with a NumPad. I don’t care what anyone else says, NumPads are great, and I appreciate that there’s a powerful gaming laptop with one. It’s most handy while doing various video editing tasks, less for gaming, but if you’re like me, you’ll appreciate its presence.

The rest of the keyboard is similarly delightful. The font on the keys looks strikingly similar to the font Sony inexplicably used for both PlayStation and Spider-Man branding back in the aughts. The chiclet-style keys are flat, with no dimples, but they’re raised enough to feel easy to distinguish while typing, though my most common mistake was hitting the new and largely unnecessary Copilot key, which takes up room near the space bar. The trackpad is super smooth. It could be a bit bigger, but I only wished this while connected to a second monitor.

Photograph: Eric Ravenscraft

There’s an Ethernet port, HDMI port, and the proprietary charging port on the rear of the device, which is an incredibly convenient location for plugging the laptop into a desk workstation. It’s not quite as convenient as a laptop docking station, but it’s less cluttered than cables sticking out the sides. I’m also a fan of the dedicated fingerprint sensor, which makes it easier to sign in to Windows and unlock password managers.

Overall, the MSI Stealth 18 is a powerhouse, even without the NPU. At $3,300 for the RTX 4080 model, you can save a few hundred dollars compared to comparably-specced (minus the refresh rate) laptops like the Razer Blade 18. Just make sure to keep your wall charger handy.