A lot of times we see a laptop either being touted as a gaming machine that sacrifices on mobility, or a sleek one that doesn’t pack enough to get gaming done. MSI’s P65 tries to bridge that gap.
The P65 Creator is a sleek looking Windows notebook that comes equipped with relatively high-end hardware and aims to fulfil the creators’ needs while also giving you sufficient horsepower to play an intensive game on the go.
The P65 boasts an aluminium chassis, weighs about 1.8kg and is sleek and compact enough to carry around. The gap-hinge design on the lower back adds to its aesthetics and speakers-like cutout just above the keyboard are also a nice little addition though the actual speakers are only on the bottom alongside the fan vents. The left side sports two USB A 3.1 ports sandwiched between the mic and audio jacks and ethernet port; while the right side houses the power/charging port, USB type C gen. 3 port for data transfer, an HDMI port, mini display port, and another USB A 3.1 port.
The notebook has a 15.6-inch full HD 60 FPS IPS display that is really nice and bright to look at and produces vivid colours good enough for some amateur video and image editing. The screen has slim bezels around it though the thicker chin below it sticks out especially on the silver model. The keyboard has big and spacious keys with a lot of added shortcuts in addition to standard ones, like changing backlight brightness of the keyboard (only white), which is a nifty little option to have.
The trackpad is also large and smooth to scroll on, though it is a little finicky at times when used for gestures like a two-finger horizontal swipe, but it’s not really a deal breaker. There’s also a little fingerprint scanner on the top left of the trackpad that can be used for unlocking the device after enabling Windows Hello in the OS. The speakers are bundled with pre-installed Dolby Access sound software and the result is a great and crisp sound for gaming and quite loud even for casual music listening.
My unit had an 8th generation Coffee Lake i7 chipset with the 2.2 GHz 6-core processor and Intel Graphic 630 coupled with nVidia’s GeForce GTC 1060 with Max-Q GPU, along with 32 GB of DDR4 RAM and 500 Gb of SSD, which is one the beefiest variants of the P65 (creator 8RE), so your mileage may vary. You can expect to play games like Sniper Fury, or edit a full HD video on a piece of editing software and the machine would be up to the task. There isn’t much where the machine would struggle to keep up or lag in any major way. Web browsing and switching from one tab or another browser is also smooth and stutter-free. The fans really blow up during peak performance and don’t really keep quite enough but it’s still not the noisiest one out there by any stretch. It comes loaded with Windows 10 Home version and MS Office (trial) pre-installed. The laptop boots in under 15 seconds and gave me around 7-7.5 hours of battery life on a full single charge, and it takes nearly 2 hours to charge fully when idle.
All in all, the P65 seems like a powerful machine that does deliver on its performance promise as well. MSI seems to be getting more serious about its offerings in the Indian market, and its P series looks to be on the right path to start with.
Base price: Rs. 79,900.
