A gaming notebook that is thin, light and powerful might sound like an oxymoron, but the MSI GS70 Stealth is exactly that.

The desktop replacement notebook, which is made with brushed aluminium sporting a gunmetal grey finish, is just 2 2mm thin and weighs in well under the 3 kg mark at just 2.6 kg. The MSI GS70 Stealth notebook further boasts a large 17.3” screen, with full-HD (1920x1680) resolution and a matte finish to avoid glare. But, the most important in a gaming notebook are of course its internal components, which dictate the performance on offer. On this front, the news is very encouraging.

Guts and Grunt

To start with, the processor is no slouch – its Intel Core i7 (4700Q) CPU offers more than enough grunt to handle work applications as well as intensive office software; and with the added feature of Hyper-Threading, users can benefit from an all-round multi-tasking machine as well. This is complemented by a very generous 16 GB of DDR3 memory, which means that no task is too great for this notebook and that it should be able to hold its own for years to come.

With regards to the ever-important graphics, the GS70 Stealth boasts a formidable solution – an Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M with 2 GB of dedicated video memory. Nvidia’s excellent new ‘Maxwell’ architecture produces insane levels of performance with low power-consumption, which makes it the ideal GPU for a gaming notebook.

Play your way

According in Evetech, the strength of the onboard graphics solution means that you will be able to play games like Bioshock Infinite and Battlefield 3 on an average frame rate of between 50-60 fps, at the highest of quality options. It can most certainly handle most of the newest games without having to compromise too much on the quality settings, letting you play your games the way they are meant to be played.

Finally, the internals are rounded out with a pair of 64 GB SSDs (total 128 GB) in SuperRAID. This writes data across two SSD drives to produce unrivalled levels of performance in storage. All disk operations are sped up dramatically and, so, booting into Windows, loading games and storing files all happen at lightning fast speeds.

Never miss a click

This unit comes equipped with the SteelSeries gaming keyboard, which sports full illumination in a colour of your choice. This enables you to customise the keyboard with more than a billion different combinations of modes, effects and colours. With consistent feedback on the buttons you are guaranteed a comfortable use whether gaming or typing. Along with catering for gaming, as a workstation, the unit can deliver on a number of other fronts, including general office use, editing your pictures with Photoshop, or doing complex modelling designs on the go. The GS70 Stealth also comes with an accompanying Sandisk dual ultra 16 GB flash drive, SteelSeries mousepad, $150 (R1 500) In-Game Currency for Warface, Heroes of Newerth and Path of Exile, as well as a GS Protective bag.

The MSI GS70 Stealth has a RRP of R23 700 and includes free delivery across South Africa. This notebook, and some of its variants, are available from Evetech at www.evetech.co.za