MSI GS66 Stealth Owner's Thread

[Nigh on Noon]

My System: 

• i7-11800H
• 64GB DDR4-3200 (upgraded from 16GB out of the box)
• RTX 3080 16GB Laptop GPU
• QHD 240Hz display panel

 

Why this laptop?

I wanted a "thin and light" (I'm fine with heavy, but I appreciate compact volume) non-gamery looking laptop. I wanted it to be upgradeable (at least 2 ram slots and an SSD slot), have 10GB+ of VRAM, have a QHD 165Hz+ panel, and have a dgpu-only mode. I really would have liked a full-size SD reader, and 16:10 would have been a plus.

 

The Blade 15 checks a lot of those boxes, in particular I have to commend Razer for actually giving it an SD reader. However, I don't love the green snake logo, and AFAIK Razer only gave you the 8GB version of the 3080, unless you got the 4k 60hz panel. (In which case, why not just go with the 3070?)

 

MSI's own Delta 15 with the RX 6700M 10GB looked (and still looks) like a great value. Unfortunately it has no QHD option, nor a MUX switch. It also notably has no ethernet port, let alone an SD reader. What MSI really should have done is just used the GS66 chassis, but oh well...

 

I do like Dell's Precision lineup; my 7710 is easily the most well-built and modular laptop I have ever used. The 7560, 7760, and 7770 check most of my boxes. But seeing as they are intended as professional machines, I personally can't really justify their price, especially the high-end configs. Fair enough.

 

Lenovo's Legion laptops look like good value. However, I really don't like the "butt extending past the hinge" design, aesthetically. I really want my laptop to look as close to a monolithic black box as much as possible.

 

HP's recent Omen 15 and 17 with Zen3/Tiger Lake and Ampere are worth a mention. Their port selection is about as good as it gets. The 15" couldn't be specced any higher than the 3070, though.

 

I've been rather attracted to the GS66 design since it was first released with Comet Lake + Turing in 2020. My only real complaint with the physical design is the lack of SD reader. And to be honest, it doesn't look quite as monolithic/sexy as a Blade or XPS. I finally bought the config listed above when I saw it for sale. Suffice it to say, Alder Lake would have been nice. However, to get Alder Lake AND 16GB of VRAM requires the 3080 Ti, which really balloons the price. I do resent Nvidia not giving the 3070 Ti 16GB!

 

My Thoughts so far

 

Overall, I do like the machine. I haven't done any benchmarks yet, really. Overwatch and Black Ops Cold War run as well as I would expect. Davinci Resolve and Lightroom also run well, not surprisingly. As you can see, I've only judged the performance subjectively, so far.

 

The trackpad is kind of awkward; it's too wide and too short. I am getting used to it, though. The keyboard is fine, nothing special.

 

The QHD 240Hz screen is a joy in every way except for the brightness, which is lower than I would like, but it is usable indoors. I do have some old games that can easily max it out, which is fun.

 

I do like that MSI laptops have almost desktop-like BIOSes. I've looked around a bit in there. I've read that the GS66 supports RAM overclocking, but I can't find that option where I think it should be, so that's something to research further.

 

Opening the back panel was a bit more harrowing than I would have liked.

 

 

Thanks for reading! I'm all ears for benchmark recommendations. I'd like to upload some photos sometime, too.

[DukeCLR]

Good luck with your new machine. 

[Nigh on Noon]

I have found memory overclocking in the BIOS. It turns out that, under the advanced tab, it is in "System Agent (SA) Configuration", NOT under "Overclocking Performance Menu" as I assumed.

 

The first thing I tried was setting the speed to 3333Mhz, but the system seems to have tried to boot, fail, reset to default settings, then boot again.

 

Then I tried simply lowering the CAS latency to 20, from the default of 22. The new CL shows up in HWinfo and the system seems stable so far. 

 

This user was able to get some pretty impressive timings with their Leopard 11UG, so I expect there is at least a little more headroom to tighten the timings.

https://www.reddit.com/r/overclocking/comments/q5b369/beyond_impressed_with_the_i711800h_under_liquid/

 

Also, user hackness from this forum was able to reach 3467Mhz  19-20-19-49 on their GS65 with 8750h! (https://notebooktalk.net/topic/112-guide-how-to-take-full-control-of-the-i7-8750h-advanced-version/#comment-740

 

 

Edit: here are some before/after screenshots.

 

 

[Nigh on Noon]

I've achieved some modest timing improvements. Note Gear Mode is now 1. The following settings have passed a Memtest86, so long as I keep the memory voltage at 1.25V. There is probably room for slightly better timings, but given that memtest takes ~11 hours, I'm happy with this configuration for now.

[ryan]

i'm a little late to the party but do you mind running timespy. score? curious how the 95w 3080 compares to the 3060 115w

[Nigh on Noon]

Sure, here is a timespy run:

 

 

[ryan]

I have the same cpu and usually get 9k in cpu and max 10500

with gpu i get 8700- 9100 usually 8900/ so pretty similar

 

your laptop is faster by like 8 percent, but thinner and lighter, with better build quality and materials!

 

 

[Nigh on Noon]

17 hours ago, ryan said:

I have the same cpu and usually get 9k in cpu and max 10500

with gpu i get 8700- 9100 usually 8900/ so pretty similar

 

your laptop is faster by like 8 percent, but thinner and lighter, with better build quality and materials!

 

 

Nice, what laptop is that?

 

Your Windows 7 skin fooled me there for a second. "Wait, how are you running... oh, its a skin, ha."

[ryan]

HP omen 16

[Nigh on Noon]

On 2/23/2023 at 2:24 PM, Nigh on Noon said:

I've achieved some modest timing improvements. Note Gear Mode is now 1. The following settings have passed a Memtest86, so long as I keep the memory voltage at 1.25V. There is probably room for slightly better timings, but given that memtest takes ~11 hours, I'm happy with this configuration for now.

 

Unfortunately, I've had to go back to default timings. Despite passing memtest, I eventually experienced some graphical glitches. Specifically, there were some small black boxes that would show up on screen. One time, when the glitches appeared, during a game, the laptop actually hard shut down. So I reset ram timings, and the glitches stopped occurring. Then one day I re entered the tweaked timings, and within two days the exact same graphical glitch was back. So, that's why I'm pretty sure the issue was ram related. (If anyone has a better explanation of what happened, I'm all ears.)

 

Does there exist some set of timings that wouldn't cause glitches like this? Probably, but they would be so close to default timings that I'm not sure they'd be worth finding.