Laptop MSI Sword 15 gf Series Gaming Features

The MSI Sword 15 is an intriguing gaming laptop that's priced competitively. While many gaming laptops are in your face with tons of RGB and flashy designs, MSI plays it safe with a simple white and black color scheme, coupled with cool blue backlighting for the keyboard. The 15.6-inch chassis weighs a hair under five pounds, and it should easily slip into a laptop bag when traveling.

Design of the MSI Sword 15 The MSI Sword 15 is a beefy laptop with an attractive design. The lid and keyboard deck are made of white plastic with a shimmering, pearlescent finish. The Sword 15 flies under the radar, and even the MSI logo embossed on the lid blends in, as it is devoid of color. There’s an interesting mix of finishes as well. While the top of the lid and keyboard deck are smooth, the sides feature a brushed finish.

Flipping up the lid reveals the keyboard, with white keycaps backlit with blue LEDs. Black plastic trims the display and makes up the chassis's bottom half. A 720p webcam is situated above the 15.6-inch (16:9) 144 Hz IPS display. The display features a matte finish, and the bezels are minimal along the right and left. However, the top bezel is a bit on the thick side, while the bottom bezel – which houses the MSI logo – is also on the chunky side.

Gaming and Graphics on the MSI Sword 15 Our review configuration of the Sword 15 is powered by an Intel Core i7-12650H processor and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 GPU. That puts it a step ahead of competitors like the Acer Nitro 5 (Core i5-12500H, RTX 3050), and you still have enough muscle to play most games at 1080p resolution with the goodies turned on.

I fired up Control (High, 1080p) and jumped right into the action with generally smooth frame rates, although I saw performance dip just below 50 frames per second during combat. Dropping to 720p and flipping on DLSS saw performance stabilize around the 70 fps (frames per second) mark during the same gaming conditions.

Productivity Performance on the MSI Sword 15 While we’d all love to game on our laptops 24/7, they should also be capable of pulling double duty as work machines. In that case, this configuration of the Sword 15 comes ready to rumble thanks to its Core i7-12650H (10 cores, 16 threads) processor, 16GB of DDR4-3200 RAM and a generous 1TB NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD. Geekbench 5 is a synthetic benchmark primarily tasked with measuring CPU performance. The Sword 15 pulled in a single-core score of 1,760, putting it within striking distance of the TUF Gaming F15 (1,781). In the multi-core benchmark (10,259), the Sword 15 with its Core i7-12650H just couldn't keep up with the Core i7-12700H found in the x14 R1 and TUF Gaming F15 (12 cores, 20 threads).