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If there were ever a laptop design to be right "up my alley", as we brits like to say, it would be this one. That's because it makes its sacrifices in exactly the right places to deliver something genuinely portable, sleek, elegant, and satisfying to use both for gaming and work.
The MSI 'Stealth' laptop looks to have been reimagined along these MacBook or Razer Blade-esque lines—and successfully so—featuring a giant touchpad, thin aluminium form factor, subtle upward-facing speakers, and a spacious screen.
It's not just a looker, though, as MSI has crammed an RTX 5080 mobile GPU into it, making for genuine high-end performance. It has, however, had to be power-limited to play nicely with the slim chassis, meaning you're not getting quite the performance you could get out of a chunkier laptop for the same very expensive price or cheaper.
Buy if...
✅ You use your laptop in public: This thing definitely looks the part alongside MacBooks and other such suave devices, with its aluminium frame and giant trackpad. ✅ You use a USB headset: I didn't have any of the audio latency issues I noticed when using USB earphones/headset.
Do not buy if...
❌ You like to game using the laptop speakers: I noticed definite audio latency over the default audio device with this laptop, which can be annoying in shooters, for instance. ❌ You just want raw performance: This laptop looks gorgeous and is very portable for a 16-inch machine, but you can get more high-end horsepower for less if you don't mind something chunkier.
After powering on the laptop for the first time, I was immediately impressed by how it feels to use. The trackpad doesn't require much force to press but just enough so you're not accidentally pressing it, and it has a very satisfying click. I didn't have many problems with accidentally moving the cursor while typing because of the size of the trackpad, but it did happen occasionally.
'Satisfying' is also the word I'd use to describe the pleasantly tactile chiclet keyboard. This keyboard has four-zone RGB that I set to solid white to match the classy look.
There's also a decent selection of ports on the Stealth, including two Thunderbolt 4, a HDMI, and even an Ethernet port. This, I found to be particularly impressive given the sleek form factor.
(Image credit: Future)
Sleek, that is, and very shiny thanks to its 240 Hz OLED. It's of the 16:10 variety, too, which is the best kind as it gives you plenty of space for browsing and so on. I'd say 16-inch with a 16:10 aspect ratio is pretty much ideal for a laptop, especially one like this that's also slim and portable. The OLED panel itself is fantastic, too, with plenty of contrast thanks to the true blacks and vibrant colours. And of course the smooth 240 Hz certainly doesn't hurt in those games that can push frame rates up that high.
Specs-wise, this particular version gives you only the choice of the Core Ultra 9 386H for the processor, but you can choose between an RTX 5070, 5070 Ti, or 5080 version. The latter two come with 32 GB of DDR5 RAM, but the RTX 5070 version comes with just 16 GB. All configs except for one 2 TB version comes with 1 TB of storage.
The version I tested has 1 TB of storage, 32 GB of DDR5-5600 memory, and an RTX 5080 mobile. The RTX 5080 here has a big asterisk: it's a nerfed—ie, power-limited—version of the GPU. With a max draw of just 125 W, that's 50 W less juice than you get with a full-fat RTX 5080 mobile like the one in the Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 , the current best high-performance gaming laptop . That's a sacrifice made to keep things so slim, as is the choice of CPU which sacrifices some top-end compute performance for efficiency.
(Image credit: Future)
So far so good, but there is one area that unfortunately rains all over the parade, and that's audio. The problem isn't the sound quality or volume, as things are great in both these respects—clear, punchy (though not as bassy as standalone speakers, of course), and plenty loud.
The problem is latency and glitching, though mainly the former. Initially the speakers would spit every now and then, but that seemed to clear up after using the laptop for a while. I'm not sure why that is, given I had Windows update paused, but whatever the reason, I was glad when it stopped.
The persistent problem was poor audio latency. There is a delay between my in-game action (such as shooting) and the sound coming through. It's about the same level of delay as I experience using Bluetooth earphones without any low-latency mode enabled. It only happens over the default audio device, not when I plug in a new USB device like my earphones with USB-C DAC.
(Image credit: Future)
That leads me to believe it might be a problem with the default audio device drivers, and after checking various ( x ) discussions ( x ) online it seems like the problem could be with Nahimic, however I cannot confirm this. I can say that I tried different methods to disable and uninstall the drivers, which didn't work, and I also uninstalled the Norton antivirus that comes bundled with the laptop just to see if that was the issue, but that didn't resolve it. MSI says it is looking into the issue, but so far I haven't heard any results of this investigation.
To be clear, using the speakers is fine for listening to music and for playing casual, non-shooter games, but for playing shooters the latency is definitely noticeable, meaning a separate USB audio device might b...
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