Cometh the month, cometh the deals. It’s Black Friday season, and whereas that used to conjure images of long lines and aggressive trolley-loading, thanks to the ecommerce gods Cyber Week is now a rather more sedate, convenient affair.
MSI’s seizing the day—in fact, the whole week, running November 21st-30th—and slashing prices of several of its laptop lines by up to 35%.
These are the biggest discounts on MSI’s official store all year, which means the best time to buy that new gaming laptop you’ve been umming and ahhing over for the past few months—hang on, let me just check my calculations here… carry the 1, square root of Pi… right now.
Prices have been creeping up everywhere in life for the last few months, it feels like. Well now’s our chance to fight back against that. To rage against the machine. By, er, buying one. Gaming laptops start at a pretty affordable £599, and that gets you a spec including 11th/12th gen Intel CPUs and RTX30 series GPUs. Ray traced gorgeousness is back on the menu, boys.
MSI’s gaming laptop ranges are broken down into Katana GF, Crosshair, Vector GP and Stealth GS series. Here’s what those lines of delineation mean when you’re shopping for a new portable gaming command centre.
Katana GF series models offer an accessible entry point for gaming. They’re quick enough to make use of the 144Hz panels onboard though, so high frame rates aren’t a problem.
Going up a notch in price and performance, Crosshair series laptops retain the core gaming features from pricier models higher up the ladder without sending prices into the upper echelons. The Cooler Boost 5 thermal solutions on Crosshair models are designed to keep performance levels super high even when your GPU’s working hard. Check out the limited Crosshair 15 Rainbow Six Extraction edition, if you’re into saving the world from alien goo with your mates.
Next up, the Vector GP series laptops are high-performance gaming beasts with a secret weapon. Not only can they absolutely shred any graphically demanding game you throw their way, they can also handle complex engineering tasks. These models allow the option of switching between discrete and MSHybrid/Nvidia Optimus graphics modes, and the cooling’s so substantial you can push their overclocking pretty far too. i9 CPUs and RTX 3080s are available in this range.
And then there’s the Stealth GS models. This is where top-end gaming performance is met by super sleek, slimline design. These laptops feature the world’s thinnest fan blades (smaller than 0.1mm to keep the componentry chilled) so even though you might be running Cyberpunk maxed out, your laptop won’t give the game away by wheezing away like a commercial aircraft just to handle the job.
If you’ve got productivity in mind more than sick reflections and ludicrously high frame rates, it’s worth digging into the daily use ranges. Starting at £449, you’ll get 12th gen Intel CPUs in this range.
Check out the Summit Evo, Prestige Evo, and Modern series if you’re looking for a work machine that can also sling a few frames at the latest PC games.
Check out MSI’s official store for all the latest deals on gaming laptops during the Black Friday discount period.
