MSI Alpha 15 Owner's Thread

[Sandy Bridge]

This is the thread for owners of MSI Alpha 15 machines.  The latest one, featuring the Ryzen 5800H and Radeon 6600M, has its web page at https://us.msi.com/Laptop/Alpha-15-B5EX/Specification

 

I recently purchased one of these and am so far quite happy with it.  It's fast with an octo-core Zen 3 CPU and that mid-tier current-generation Radeon, has really good battery life between the 90 WHr battery and AMD's battery life optimizations, and is ergonomically comfortable to use, with its good keyboard, nearly-full-size arrow keys, and rounded plastic edges on the chassis.  Pretty much exactly what I was looking for.

 

Its 512 GB SSD is a Kingston OM8PDP3512B-AI1, which isn't going to win any land speed records, but it's still NVME, and the startup time is noticeably faster than on my previous MSI laptop with a SATA M.2 drive.

 

I haven't used its display for gaming purposes yet - I have it connected up to a 24" monitor on my desk when gaming - but I did once game without remembering to plug in the charger, and a couple hours later got a warning, not having noticed the difference the whole time.  Granted, it was a Paradox strategy game, but that's still noticeably better gaming battery life than any of my other laptops, and no noticeable performance throttling.

 

Unfortunately for anyone who's interested, it was removed from the MSI U.S. store recently, the 20% discount I snagged in November was likely part of inventory clean-out.  I'm hoping there's a Zen 4 successor some time next year, granted I won't need to upgrade any time soon, but the price-performance ratio (total cost = $840 shipped, plus tax) was great and there still aren't a lot of all-AMD laptops with a dGPU.

 

I'll post some more benchmarks as I collect them.

[Sandy Bridge]

Disk Benchmarks

 

I'll edit this thread with disk benchmarks.  The SSD is a Kingston OM8PDP3512B-AI1, which has a NotebookCheck page here.

 

CrystalDiskMark:

 

 

It might not be considered fast by NVME standards, but it's still quite a bit faster than a SATA drive.