I was able to achieve up to 120 frames per second while playing Doom Eternal on Ultra settings, and around 70 fps when playing Starfield on Medium settings. Starfield dropped down to 50 fps on Ultra, but was still playable. However, I was able to get it up to 80 fps on Ultra by enabling frame generation. I’m not a big fan of this feature, as it can cause some weird smoothing effects. In my opinion, it irritates the same nerves as TV motion smoothing. However, your experience may vary.
As for battery life, your best bet is to have a charger nearby while gaming — the nearly 100 watt-hour battery is big, but it also draws a lot of power — I got about three hours of hard gaming and closer to six to seven hours with more general use.
These limitations make the MSI Stealth 18 a great choice as a work laptop that can also play games at the end of the day. Media editing apps like DaVinci Resolve and Blender run smoothly and I barely noticed any performance issues while working. Most gaming laptops will perform similarly with comparable GPUs, but the new Meteor Lake CPUs make them more future-proof. Companies like Blackmagic are generally working on adding support for NPUs, so if there’s one area where Intel’s NPUs could find use in the future, it’s probably media creation.
For pure gaming, there may be better laptops out there — the Razer Blade 18, for example, trades a lower-resolution screen for an impressive 300Hz refresh rate — but if you want one powerful laptop for both work and play, the Stealth 18 is a solid investment.
Appropriate additional features
The Stealth 18’s design feels a little more gaming-oriented than I like, but I can live with it thanks to the little touches MSI has put into this product. First off, it comes with a number pad. No matter what others say, number pads are great and I’m glad to see one on a powerful gaming laptop. It’s most useful when doing various video editing tasks, not so useful for gaming, but I’m sure you’ll appreciate the presence of a number pad, just like I do.
The rest of the keyboard is just as great. The font on the keys is strikingly similar to the font Sony inexplicably used for both its PlayStation and Spider-Man branding in the 2000s. The chiclet-style keys are flat and not indented, but are raised enough to be easily distinguished while typing. However, the most common mistake I made was hitting the new and largely unnecessary copilot key, which takes up space near the space bar. The trackpad is very smooth. It could be a little larger, but that’s something I only wanted when I was connecting to a second monitor.
Photo: Eric Ravenscraft
The back of the device has an Ethernet port, an HDMI port, a dedicated charging port, and is a very convenient place to connect your laptop to a desk workstation. It’s not as convenient as a laptop docking station, but it’s neater than having cables sticking out of the side. I also like the dedicated fingerprint sensor, which makes it easy to sign in to Windows and unlock your password manager.
Overall, the MSI Stealth 18 is a powerful machine even without the NPU, and at $3,300 for the RTX 4080 model, you’ll save hundreds of dollars over a similarly specced (except for refresh rate) laptop like the Razer Blade 18. Make sure you keep a wall charger handy.
