**A 500 Dollar Gaming Laptop Review**

As I sat down to test this laptop, I couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement and curiosity about how it would perform. With a price tag of $499, I was eager to see if this device could hold its own against more expensive gaming laptops on the market.

**Performance in 3D Mark Night Raid**

To start, we ran some benchmarking tests with 3D Mark Night Raid. The results showed scores of 28,554, which is a decent starting point for a laptop of this price range. However, I'm not entirely convinced that these scores are representative of the laptop's true potential.

**Fire Strike and Time Spy Benchmarks**

We also ran some additional benchmarks, including Fire Strike at 8,375 and Time Spy at 3,539. While these results are certainly promising, I believe it's essential to test a laptop's performance in real-world gaming scenarios rather than relying solely on benchmarking scores.

**Gaming Performance**

To put the laptop through its paces, we tested some popular games at various resolutions and settings. First up was Call of Duty Warzone, which ran at an average of 65 FPS at 1080p with a mix of normal and medium settings. While this is certainly playable, I think it's essential to see how the laptop performs when pushed harder.

Next, we moved on to GTA 5, which ran at an impressive 74 FPS at 1080p high settings. However, if you want to squeeze even more performance out of the game, dropping some settings down to normal can yield similar results. Turning on VSync also helps to maintain a smooth experience at 60 FPS.

Finally, we tested Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite at 1080p high settings, which ran smoothly at 60 FPS without any noticeable dips. However, when it comes to Doom Eternal, I had to drop some settings down to medium-low in order to achieve a stable 100 FPS at 900p low resolution scale.

**Emulation Performance**

Now that we've seen the laptop's performance in gaming scenarios, let's take a look at its emulation capabilities. The PS2 emulator, PC SX2, ran smoothly at 1440p with an OpenGL back end, without requiring Direct3D 11. Gran Turismo 4 also performed flawlessly, demonstrating the laptop's ability to handle demanding games.

Next up was Wii U emulation using Simu, which ran Breath of the Wild at a respectable 30 FPS. However, by dropping it down to 720p and 60 FPS, we could experience even smoother performance. Finally, PS3 emulation using RPCS3, Vulcan back end, yielded excellent results, maintaining 60 FPS even when set to 720p.

**CPU Temperatures**

During our testing, I monitored the laptop's CPU temperatures to ensure that they stayed within a safe range. At idle, we averaged 41 degrees Celsius, which is relatively low considering the single fan cooler on board. However, during gaming and emulation tests, we reached an average of 72 degrees Celsius, which, while still within a reasonable range, suggests that this laptop might benefit from more aggressive cooling solutions.

**Upgradeability**

One aspect that sets this laptop apart from some of its competitors is its upgradeability. The RAM can be swapped out with ease, and the SSD can be replaced with a new drive. Additionally, the 2.5-inch drive bay offers ample space for adding an additional storage solution. While I wish this laptop had utilized an 11th Gen CPU, which would have provided even better performance, the six cores and 12 threads still deliver impressive results in gaming and emulation.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, I believe that this $499 gaming laptop offers a compelling value proposition, especially when considering its upgradeability and performance in both gaming and emulation scenarios. While some might find the CPU temperatures to be slightly high during intense usage, they are generally manageable with the stock fan curve. For anyone looking for a capable and affordable gaming laptop, I would recommend this device, provided it can be picked up at a discounted price point such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's going on guys this eta prime back here again today we're going to be taking a look at this black friday special laptop that i recently picked up from my local walmart this is the msi and these were on sale for black friday and cyber monday for 499 and in this video we're going to see if it was worth picking up for that 500 price tag when it comes down to it this is not a high-end gaming laptop whatsoever this is more of a budget gaming laptop but i do think that it'll put out some decent performance and in this video we're going to be running some benchmarks testing out some of our favorite pc games we'll also throw some emulation at it and we're going to do a quick tear down just to see the upgradeability of this thing so it's known as the msi gf63 we have a 15.6 inch 1080p 60 hertz display nothing special here it is a matte display so we don't get much glare it actually looks pretty decent for a 1080p panel we've got a single zone red backlit led keyboard here we've got a decently sized track pad dual stereo speakers and this is powered by a 10th gen i5 it also comes with a 120 watt power supply when it comes to io over here on the left hand side we have a single usb 3.0 port moving over to the right hand side we do get gigabyte ethernet we have usb type-c two more usb 3.0 ports and two 3.5 millimeter audio jacks and something i actually really like about this unit here is the hdmi is located on the rear i don't see this much but i do love the way this is set up as for the specs on this unit for the cpu we have the intel i5 10500h 6 course 12 threads base clock 2.5 gigahertz with a max turbo up to 4.5 the gpu is the nvidia gtx 1650 max-q design this does draw less power and it's a bit less powerful than the regular 1650 but with an overclock we can kind of match that performance this comes with eight gigabytes of ddr4 right out of the box it's only using a single stick but we do have two dimms in here so we can easily upgrade all the way to 64. a 256 gigabyte m.2 ssd and they also send hardware to add a 2.5 inch drive so that's another easy upgrade there a 15.6 inch 60hz 1080p display ac wi-fi bluetooth 5.0 and this is running windows 10 out of the box but i've upgraded it to windows 11. as soon as i booted it up it asked me if i wanted to upgrade so yeah i'm actually super excited about testing a bunch of stuff out on this thing but before we move on any further with this review i do want to mention that this video is sponsored by simply nook and their all-new platinum snuck book we have the elite and the pro you can opt for a rtx 3060 or an rtx 3070 gpu and right now simply nook is offering 300 off the platinum snuck books the elite and the pro which makes it the lowest price that these workstations have ever been sold for this mobile workstation is based on intel's all-new x15 laptop platform which means we get that mechanical optical keyboard we've got a glass cover track pad and a full magnesium frame both of these portable workstations are powered by intel's tiger lake 11800h we have 8 cores and 16 threads there with a boost up to 4.6 gigahertz and when it comes to the gpus and the new platinum snucks you can opt for the pro model which contains the nvidia rtx 3060 and 6 gigabytes of gddr6 vram or the elite model with the rtx 3070 and 8 gigabytes of gddr6 vram these are customizable over on simply nook's website i will leave a link for this in the description we can opt for up to 64 gigabytes of ram and 16 terabytes of nvme m.2 storage they've also got onboard wi-fi 6 and a 2.5 gigabyte ethernet port built in so if you're in the market for a powerful mobile workstation that in your off time you can also play your favorite aaa games on i will leave a link to simply nook's website in the description and remember right now you can get 300 off the elite or the pro which is the lowest price that these workstations have ever been offered for all right back to the gf63 i did pull the bottom off just to show you here there is a slot for a 2.5 inch drive and they do send hardware we've got that m.2 ssd that is user upgradable we can always upgrade this if you need some more storage but i would personally probably just add a 2.5 inch ssd and as you can see we do have two ram slots i was actually worried that some of this ram would be soldered to the board but they've left it just like this it's only populated with a single eight gigabyte stick out of the box so if you wanted to bring this up to 16 it would be relatively cheap but i'm actually surprised to see the upgrade ability in this thing not bad at all for a 500 laptop we've got that 2.5 inch drive ssd and we can always add more ram jumping right into one of my new favorite games we have forza ryzen 5 1080p medium settings this is doing an amazing job we're at 73 fps on average and if you take a look at afterburner we're almost maxing out that eight gigs of ram so adding more ram would definitely help out i'm not sure if we've gained much fps with a game like this but we do have the option to overclock this max q 1650 which would definitely help out but i personally don't mind playing this at medium settings 1080p and it's gonna run it like this all day i mean it looks really good at these settings if you wanted to take this game up to ultra settings and lock it at 30 fps it's gonna run it just fine but personally i like playing at 60 so i did have to drop it down to medium so what i'm gonna do now is plug this into my game capture card that way we can get a better look at everything okay so i've had this up and running for a little while we're at four hours now i haven't run into any issues as you can see we have the i5 10 500 h six cores 12 threads we've got that eight gigabytes of ddr4 running at 29.33 but we have that extra dim so when you want to upgrade you can always do that and the gtx 1650 max-q design so with this we still get four gigabytes of vram it doesn't pull as much power as the regular gtx 1650 and it's a little less powerful overall but we always have the option to overclock and right here with the dragon center this comes built in we do have some profiles that we can choose from i'm gonna go with extreme performance but if we go into here we can actually set that core clock and overclock it basically automatically with dragon center to 160 megahertz and the vram an extra 500 megahertz we'll choose save here and another little option we have is the cooler boost but i'm going to tell you right now turning cooler boost on makes these fans go to 100 and this thing can get a bit loud when that cooler boost is on you don't have to worry about thermal throttling on the cpu or the gpu but it's pretty much unbearable because i mean this single fan here is sitting at a hundred percent when that cooler boost is on but the stock fan curve that they have here with the extreme performance mode actually does a pretty decent job keeping everything nice and cool so i'm gonna leave that off for these tests and one last thing i was actually interested to see if this max q was using gddr6 and it is in this laptop here i'm not sure if they do make a gddr5 version but it would make a difference in performance but luckily we've got ddr6 so the first thing i always like to do with these laptops is run some benchmarks and first one we have here is geekbench 5 single core 1145 multi 5068 definitely not as high as some of the newer ryzen chips with more cores but i think this is looking pretty decent for the price we paid next on the list we have 3d mark night raid with a 28 554 fire strike 8 375 and time spy 3539 i'd say for a 500 laptop these scores are looking pretty decent but we really need to see how this thing handles real world gaming so let's go ahead and test out some pc games and then we'll move over to some emulation and first up we have call of duty warzone 1080p with a mix of normal and medium settings we got an average of 65 fps out of this one i'd say it's definitely playable but you might want to just drop everything down to standard moving over to gta 5 1080p high settings average of 74 fps i knew that we'd have pretty good luck with this and if you wanted to get a little more out of it you could drop some of this stuff down to normal and if you just turn vsync on it'll run it at 60 all day i mean it's a great experience at 1080p on this machine marvel vs capcom infinite high settings 1080p we're at 60 i haven't noticed any dips and usually on some of these lower end laptops with a lot of particles on screen i do get some dips but this was at a constant 60. going into doom eternal i figured we'd have really good luck at 1080p high settings but unfortunately i did have to drop some of this stuff down to medium low i'm not exactly sure if there's a driver issue going on but i think we could get a bit better out of this and finally on the pc gaming side of things we have cyberpunk 2077 i mean this is just a harder game to run i dropped it down to 900p low we're still at 100 resolution scale and if we dropped it down to around 70 resolution scale or 720p we can run this at an average of around 63fps now it's time to move over to my favorite part and that's emulation this machine handles emulation really well first up ps2 using pc sx2 1440p opengl back end we didn't have to use directx 11 gran turismo 4 running perfectly fine here's wii u using the simu emulator we have breath of the wild 1080p vulcan back in 30 fps if you want to get 60 out of it drop it down to 720p and you're golden but i personally like running it with this higher resolution i just think it looks a lot better and finally some playstation 3 emulation using rpcs3 vulcan back in and out of the box this is set at 720p but as you can see we are locked at 60. there's a chance that this would run at 1080p and i know that some games that ran at a native 30 on the ps3 will do that another thing i always monitor while doing my testing are cpu temps and even though we have a single fan cooler in this it did way better than i thought it would at idle we averaged 41 degrees celsius average gaming and emulation 72 and in a 10 minute cinebench r23 test we did hit 91 degrees celsius but keep in mind i mean that's maxing out all six cores and 12 threads for 10 minutes straight games aren't going to do that this is with the stock fan curve and when that cpu hits around 85 degrees celsius this does kick up to 100 percent but while gaming it was very bearable but if you want to keep these temps a lot lower and you don't mind this fan going at 100 you can enable that cooler boost in the dragon center now that's really gonna help out but it does get really loud so in the end i personally think that this was worth 499 dollars and we also have some upgradeability we can do that ram we can change the ssd and we can add a 2.5 inch drive it would have been really nice if this was an 11th gen cpu but we're working with that 10th gen and those 6 cores and 12 threads actually do a really good job with gaming and emulation as you saw in this video and for 499 dollars if you're able to pick one of these up on a black friday or cyber monday deal i'd say it'd be worth it if you liked the performance you saw in this video but that's gonna wrap it up for this one i really appreciate you watching i'd like to know what you think about this thing at that 500 price point in the comments below and like always thanks for watching youwhat's going on guys this eta prime back here again today we're going to be taking a look at this black friday special laptop that i recently picked up from my local walmart this is the msi and these were on sale for black friday and cyber monday for 499 and in this video we're going to see if it was worth picking up for that 500 price tag when it comes down to it this is not a high-end gaming laptop whatsoever this is more of a budget gaming laptop but i do think that it'll put out some decent performance and in this video we're going to be running some benchmarks testing out some of our favorite pc games we'll also throw some emulation at it and we're going to do a quick tear down just to see the upgradeability of this thing so it's known as the msi gf63 we have a 15.6 inch 1080p 60 hertz display nothing special here it is a matte display so we don't get much glare it actually looks pretty decent for a 1080p panel we've got a single zone red backlit led keyboard here we've got a decently sized track pad dual stereo speakers and this is powered by a 10th gen i5 it also comes with a 120 watt power supply when it comes to io over here on the left hand side we have a single usb 3.0 port moving over to the right hand side we do get gigabyte ethernet we have usb type-c two more usb 3.0 ports and two 3.5 millimeter audio jacks and something i actually really like about this unit here is the hdmi is located on the rear i don't see this much but i do love the way this is set up as for the specs on this unit for the cpu we have the intel i5 10500h 6 course 12 threads base clock 2.5 gigahertz with a max turbo up to 4.5 the gpu is the nvidia gtx 1650 max-q design this does draw less power and it's a bit less powerful than the regular 1650 but with an overclock we can kind of match that performance this comes with eight gigabytes of ddr4 right out of the box it's only using a single stick but we do have two dimms in here so we can easily upgrade all the way to 64. a 256 gigabyte m.2 ssd and they also send hardware to add a 2.5 inch drive so that's another easy upgrade there a 15.6 inch 60hz 1080p display ac wi-fi bluetooth 5.0 and this is running windows 10 out of the box but i've upgraded it to windows 11. as soon as i booted it up it asked me if i wanted to upgrade so yeah i'm actually super excited about testing a bunch of stuff out on this thing but before we move on any further with this review i do want to mention that this video is sponsored by simply nook and their all-new platinum snuck book we have the elite and the pro you can opt for a rtx 3060 or an rtx 3070 gpu and right now simply nook is offering 300 off the platinum snuck books the elite and the pro which makes it the lowest price that these workstations have ever been sold for this mobile workstation is based on intel's all-new x15 laptop platform which means we get that mechanical optical keyboard we've got a glass cover track pad and a full magnesium frame both of these portable workstations are powered by intel's tiger lake 11800h we have 8 cores and 16 threads there with a boost up to 4.6 gigahertz and when it comes to the gpus and the new platinum snucks you can opt for the pro model which contains the nvidia rtx 3060 and 6 gigabytes of gddr6 vram or the elite model with the rtx 3070 and 8 gigabytes of gddr6 vram these are customizable over on simply nook's website i will leave a link for this in the description we can opt for up to 64 gigabytes of ram and 16 terabytes of nvme m.2 storage they've also got onboard wi-fi 6 and a 2.5 gigabyte ethernet port built in so if you're in the market for a powerful mobile workstation that in your off time you can also play your favorite aaa games on i will leave a link to simply nook's website in the description and remember right now you can get 300 off the elite or the pro which is the lowest price that these workstations have ever been offered for all right back to the gf63 i did pull the bottom off just to show you here there is a slot for a 2.5 inch drive and they do send hardware we've got that m.2 ssd that is user upgradable we can always upgrade this if you need some more storage but i would personally probably just add a 2.5 inch ssd and as you can see we do have two ram slots i was actually worried that some of this ram would be soldered to the board but they've left it just like this it's only populated with a single eight gigabyte stick out of the box so if you wanted to bring this up to 16 it would be relatively cheap but i'm actually surprised to see the upgrade ability in this thing not bad at all for a 500 laptop we've got that 2.5 inch drive ssd and we can always add more ram jumping right into one of my new favorite games we have forza ryzen 5 1080p medium settings this is doing an amazing job we're at 73 fps on average and if you take a look at afterburner we're almost maxing out that eight gigs of ram so adding more ram would definitely help out i'm not sure if we've gained much fps with a game like this but we do have the option to overclock this max q 1650 which would definitely help out but i personally don't mind playing this at medium settings 1080p and it's gonna run it like this all day i mean it looks really good at these settings if you wanted to take this game up to ultra settings and lock it at 30 fps it's gonna run it just fine but personally i like playing at 60 so i did have to drop it down to medium so what i'm gonna do now is plug this into my game capture card that way we can get a better look at everything okay so i've had this up and running for a little while we're at four hours now i haven't run into any issues as you can see we have the i5 10 500 h six cores 12 threads we've got that eight gigabytes of ddr4 running at 29.33 but we have that extra dim so when you want to upgrade you can always do that and the gtx 1650 max-q design so with this we still get four gigabytes of vram it doesn't pull as much power as the regular gtx 1650 and it's a little less powerful overall but we always have the option to overclock and right here with the dragon center this comes built in we do have some profiles that we can choose from i'm gonna go with extreme performance but if we go into here we can actually set that core clock and overclock it basically automatically with dragon center to 160 megahertz and the vram an extra 500 megahertz we'll choose save here and another little option we have is the cooler boost but i'm going to tell you right now turning cooler boost on makes these fans go to 100 and this thing can get a bit loud when that cooler boost is on you don't have to worry about thermal throttling on the cpu or the gpu but it's pretty much unbearable because i mean this single fan here is sitting at a hundred percent when that cooler boost is on but the stock fan curve that they have here with the extreme performance mode actually does a pretty decent job keeping everything nice and cool so i'm gonna leave that off for these tests and one last thing i was actually interested to see if this max q was using gddr6 and it is in this laptop here i'm not sure if they do make a gddr5 version but it would make a difference in performance but luckily we've got ddr6 so the first thing i always like to do with these laptops is run some benchmarks and first one we have here is geekbench 5 single core 1145 multi 5068 definitely not as high as some of the newer ryzen chips with more cores but i think this is looking pretty decent for the price we paid next on the list we have 3d mark night raid with a 28 554 fire strike 8 375 and time spy 3539 i'd say for a 500 laptop these scores are looking pretty decent but we really need to see how this thing handles real world gaming so let's go ahead and test out some pc games and then we'll move over to some emulation and first up we have call of duty warzone 1080p with a mix of normal and medium settings we got an average of 65 fps out of this one i'd say it's definitely playable but you might want to just drop everything down to standard moving over to gta 5 1080p high settings average of 74 fps i knew that we'd have pretty good luck with this and if you wanted to get a little more out of it you could drop some of this stuff down to normal and if you just turn vsync on it'll run it at 60 all day i mean it's a great experience at 1080p on this machine marvel vs capcom infinite high settings 1080p we're at 60 i haven't noticed any dips and usually on some of these lower end laptops with a lot of particles on screen i do get some dips but this was at a constant 60. going into doom eternal i figured we'd have really good luck at 1080p high settings but unfortunately i did have to drop some of this stuff down to medium low i'm not exactly sure if there's a driver issue going on but i think we could get a bit better out of this and finally on the pc gaming side of things we have cyberpunk 2077 i mean this is just a harder game to run i dropped it down to 900p low we're still at 100 resolution scale and if we dropped it down to around 70 resolution scale or 720p we can run this at an average of around 63fps now it's time to move over to my favorite part and that's emulation this machine handles emulation really well first up ps2 using pc sx2 1440p opengl back end we didn't have to use directx 11 gran turismo 4 running perfectly fine here's wii u using the simu emulator we have breath of the wild 1080p vulcan back in 30 fps if you want to get 60 out of it drop it down to 720p and you're golden but i personally like running it with this higher resolution i just think it looks a lot better and finally some playstation 3 emulation using rpcs3 vulcan back in and out of the box this is set at 720p but as you can see we are locked at 60. there's a chance that this would run at 1080p and i know that some games that ran at a native 30 on the ps3 will do that another thing i always monitor while doing my testing are cpu temps and even though we have a single fan cooler in this it did way better than i thought it would at idle we averaged 41 degrees celsius average gaming and emulation 72 and in a 10 minute cinebench r23 test we did hit 91 degrees celsius but keep in mind i mean that's maxing out all six cores and 12 threads for 10 minutes straight games aren't going to do that this is with the stock fan curve and when that cpu hits around 85 degrees celsius this does kick up to 100 percent but while gaming it was very bearable but if you want to keep these temps a lot lower and you don't mind this fan going at 100 you can enable that cooler boost in the dragon center now that's really gonna help out but it does get really loud so in the end i personally think that this was worth 499 dollars and we also have some upgradeability we can do that ram we can change the ssd and we can add a 2.5 inch drive it would have been really nice if this was an 11th gen cpu but we're working with that 10th gen and those 6 cores and 12 threads actually do a really good job with gaming and emulation as you saw in this video and for 499 dollars if you're able to pick one of these up on a black friday or cyber monday deal i'd say it'd be worth it if you liked the performance you saw in this video but that's gonna wrap it up for this one i really appreciate you watching i'd like to know what you think about this thing at that 500 price point in the comments below and like always thanks for watching you\n"