**Unboxing and Teardown of a 450W MSI Gaming Laptop**

I'm excited to unbox and teardown this 450W MSI gaming laptop that I've been eyeing for quite some time. The laptop features a powerful NVIDIA GPU, a 64GB RAM, and a 512GB SSD, making it a great option for gamers on a budget.

As I take the laptop out of its box, I notice that it's packed with care, and all the cables and accessories are neatly bundled up. There's also a USB-C to HDMI adapter, which is a nice touch.

**Power Delivery and Thermal Paste**

First things first, let's check the power delivery on this system. The MSI gaming laptop has a 450W power supply, which should be sufficient for most modern games at high settings. Next, I want to see how thermal paste changes affect performance. I carefully apply a fresh new thermal paste to the CPU and GPU dies.

**Reassembling the System**

With my thermal paste in place, it's time to reassemble the system. I laboriously put everything back together, making sure all the screws are tightened securely. As I'm finishing up, I realize that I didn't reassemble it correctly, which might be a problem later on.

**Initial Testing**

I boot up the laptop and install a fresh copy of Windows 10 from scratch. It's clear that the seller had already installed Windows on this system, but I won't know for sure unless I test it thoroughly. With the system now running smoothly, I start my initial testing.

**GPU Temperatures and Performance**

First, I run some tests to see how the GPU temperatures are doing. The GPU is under 50 degrees Celsius at idle, which is impressive performance wise. When I start playing games at high settings (1080p, High), the frame times show that it's running stably.

**Games Testing**

Next, I test some popular games like Battlefield 5 and Cyberpunk. While Battlefield 5 runs smoothly at medium settings, Cyberpunk feels a bit sluggish below 60 frames per second. However, with Fidelity FX enabled, it starts to perform better.

**Last of Us and GTA V Performance**

Lastly, I try playing The Last of Us (1080p, Low) and GTA V (1080p, Low). The performance is still acceptable, although not ideal.

**Conclusion and Final Thoughts**

Overall, the MSI gaming laptop seems like a solid option for gamers on a budget. However, it's clear that this system is starting to show its age. Despite some initial issues with thermal paste application, I was able to resolve them.

To be honest, I'm somewhat disappointed in how things turned out. It would have been great if the thermal paste had a significant impact on performance and temperature readings. Nevertheless, I hope you found this teardown helpful and informative.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: ensay what you will about NSI but they do crack out obscene pre-builts that are frankly impressive  rate and MSI doesn't let boring things like practicality thermal limits or copyright law  get in the way of their eccentric experimentation and today's system is no different so let's check  it out today's video is sponsored by the Deep cool AK lineup of coolers a collection including the  ak-620 ak-500 and AK-47 different shapes and sizes that fit in many budgets and use cases  I've been using the ak-620 in my main system now for ages and not only does it look great  it also works very well and if you don't like the standard silver you can also get  them in Zero Dark if any of these deep cool coolers have peaked your interest check them  out using the link in the description below thanks deepcool for sponsoring today's videothank younow I was made aware of this MSI system on eBay by a patreon who also happens to have a tech YouTube  channel which I'll have Linked In the description below and not only that but they also contributed  a considerable amount of the asking price of this system so thank you very much Carrie I  really appreciate that and with that let's check out the system oh yes eBay Packagingoh this is actually it you know I'd say it's about as haphazardly packaged as you'd expect  but it seems fine but other than the system we have a power cable and that's about it cooloh it's so gross oh there seems to be bear stuck in what I can only imagine to be bot  juices on it okay well I've given it a minute and made peace with the fact that we did buy it off  eBay so pubes are kind of a given but putting that aside look at it it's like a like an MSI  version of a trash can Mac which apparently comes with an i7 in it it even seems to have the same  thermal design of having like a top fan that pulls air with the help of convection through the case  which is pretty exciting except the top vents on this one are all angular and gamery also dirty and  then back here underneath the dragon which the Mac Pro disappointingly doesn't have we've got pretty  good rear i o we've got a bunch of USB ports and even dual gigabit Ethernet and down here next to  the Pew we've got two USB C and two display ports and finally on the system's undercarriage we've  got a bunch of ventilation and this little knob is where you plug the power cable in now I'm hoping  that bit isn't the entire power supply but we'll figure that out once we open up the system but  on that note I just want to power up the system and make sure it works before I potentially break  it during the teardown because I can't imagine this is going to be easy to take apart anyway  let's quickly do that ew oh it's so sticky do you know what do you know what I need here  not valida because apparently I lost my velida gloves which is a travestyI will buy more at some point but I have to settle for these work gloves I don't know if  these are biohazard rated like the velida gloves but at least it's a baron so I guess now we just  it's not a good start is the power onoh that is that is really not a good sign it is very much plugged  in my initial diagnosis was not promising I don't think it works  but after spending a bit more time struggling with it I had an ideathe first thing I want to try is to just plug a monitor into it and see how it  responds I don't think it's going to make a big difference but let's see you never know  no way it actually turned on now look at that it works very good now let's tear it  apart but before the teardown I wanted to give it a quick wipe down with cleaning  liquor to cleanse it from its previous Life as a gaming system in a brothel so now comes the  fun part opening it up and figuring out how MSI screwed up the thermal solution thank youthen we should just be able to oh yeah that pops right outand that is actually metal that's pretty cool oh and then I think you  whoa you just pull the sides off oh do that and then you try and ignore all of the interesting  stuff that we're seeing while unplugging that little clip for the RGB oh that's not nice  oh that is fascinating so the first thing we see here is the graphics card and I think this is a  GTX 1060 which will give you a rough idea of when this system came out and what's interesting about  the cooling Solution on it is that it's passive you can see that there's no fans or anything going  on we've just got quite a not dense fin stack which here it is compared to a more normal GPU  cooler fin stack and then I'm guessing error just gets pulled through it by the fan in the  top of the system so I'm very interested to see the temperatures on this and next to that is a  slot for another graphics card which is pretty cool which funnily enough seems to also use an  mxm slot like that Alienware laptop I upgraded so you could get this MSI trash can Mac with two  graphics cards in it which is pretty terrifying and next to that mxm connector we've got an m.2  slot with nothing plugged in but you do have the option and then behind that GTX 1060 we have  of our Ram slots so it uses laptop RAM and there is actually an additional set of slots  behind that so you can drop four sticks of ram in here and then behind this rear i o is the  main motherboard this is our CPU Cooler which again is kind of passive because it doesn't  have a fan attached straight to it it's just got like a whole system-wide fan at the top as far as  I understand under this cooler we have an i7 7700 so we've got all these little motherboards around  the power supply in the center of the system this is quite a neat design MSI stole from Apple and  I think this is the point of the video where I jump to the Future because I'm going to go  test this now before I tear it down further but you'll just see the rest of the teardown processso I guess our first order of business in the future is to remove the graphics gunit doesn't feel like that did a whole lot so let's just undo screws until something happensfront bit of the bit of thick so I'm guessing I'm gonna have to remove this firstbut after undoing the screws removing that front bit proved challengingoh there we go wow that process was more dramatic than expected but I  got the front bit off and now we have cleaner access to the graphics cardsbut with the front bit out the way I wasn't out the woods yet I still couldn't get the  graphics board out so I decided next I needed to tackle ripping off the top of the case   oh oh yes that's quite a lot of Separation that's happening and I  think the last couple of screws that we need to undo are the ones up hereI mean can I take this off first oh there we go so this beauty is all of the active Cooling  and you can see it's it's just a huge blower fan and it had oh and it has a whole bunch of  little cables that come off it which means this dragon logo actually lights up that's something  you won't see on a Mac and in this is a much better top-down look at the layout of the case  so we've got the two kind of GPU bits over here that is the CPU bit of the motherboard and then  that middle part is the power supply it's just in a slot that's quite tight yeah there you go  do you have long hair I hope that's mine looking at this the system's kind of like a laptop hybrid  because we've got this mxm laptop GPU that they're adapting to the Dustbin system using a PCI Express  daughter board another weird thing about this GPU setup is that all of the screws that hold  the mxm board in place are underneath the cooler so we're gonna have to remove that first   yeah I can pull that off now and that's what our GPU heatsink looks like I love  that look of like aged heatsink copper it's always cool and then this is our  1060 with very dry thermal paste on it we definitely need to replace that   where you have to also undo this standoff  damn these are really stuck down there but either way there is our fully naked GPUthat that feels perfectly reasonable whoa look at thatoh that is a really stupid process holy louder so what happened there is you have these standoffs  that when the motherboard's mounted it actually is flush all the way here and you have to pull it  off like bend it out and then oh what a terrible process and then under there we have our CPU board  which also connects via pcie to the kind of main Hub in the bottom of the system but let's get  this cooler off and have a closer look  whoa that is remarkably dry thermal paste I'm  surprised nothing exploded so I'm definitely going to replace that but as you can see under that we  have our 7700 and then there is our power delivery and then the final thing before I put this back  together and do some gaming on it and see what thermal paste changes did this is the power supply  450 watt power supplies I'm really hoping they had higher end ones for slides systems even if  they are using laptop gpus and after that wishful thinking I laboriously reassembled the system  to test the effect of the fresh new thermal paste which went well oh I didn't reassemble  it correctly but that's later's problem first we need to have a look at the initial testingit's pretty clear that the seller installed a fresh copy of Windows on here  because we don't have a ridiculous MSI background and there's no bloatware on it I'm 100 sure it  didn't come from the factory like that so that's good now putting aside the the winetemperatures at least on the GPU initially are really good it's under 50 degrees Celsius  it's not being utilized very much but still you know that's really impressive performance wise it  is running well this is a 1080p High settings and as you can tell from the frame time graph which  was suggested by a viewer uh it's running stably the game the game feels nice and smooth but let's  move over to a game that doesn't regularly have systems running it basically at idlewow Battlefield 5 a 1080p medium settings is running very well and surprisingly for an MSI  pre-built despite a bunch of Battlefield having happened already we don't have temperatures that  are mimicking the center of the sun although the CPU is getting up there and it's pretty noisynow all the hardware is showing its age a little bit considering that this is 1080p low settings it  is still playable cyberpunk does have a tendency to feel a bit sluggish below 60 frames per second  but again very player and because AMD is not Nvidia we also have the option to turn on some  Fidelity FX and just like that with a little bit of fidelity FX going it's running better  although you can really tell the Fidelity effects ooh big accident uh but yeah there's  quite a lot of smearing and stuff happening in in especially in the very contrasty areasokay so a 1080p low settings Last of Us is running uh now the same with cyberpunk at 40  frames per second this game feels quite heavy heavier than like GTA 5 does at 40 frames per  second so it's it's not a great experience but it's it's running so the system still  works well and despite the higher noise the temperatures are better than I was expecting  but how much did the thermal paste application help and could I get the system running again  oh I didn't reassemble it correctly this ribbon cable came loose real easy so I think  that's the culprit let me plug it back in and see okay it's not turning on so maybe  it refuses to run with the outside panels off a few moments later okay attempt nine thousandwell the top bit lights up now that's good that's less good though so it clearly wasn't  one of the 800 ribbon cables being loose which meant I just had one idea left so I've swapped  over from the HDMI to Mini DisplayPort which is a long shot but let's see if that helps oh  think louder I I just broke the HDMI somehow but at least the DisplayPort  works so the repaste is a bit of a mixed bag we've got slightly lower temperatures on the  CPU but the GPU is slightly higher and it still is noisy so all that effort wasn't really worth  it which brings me to the end of a particularly frustrating teardown thank you very much Carrie  for helping out with the system and thank you everybody for watching bye-bye