You’ll already be familiar with MSI and its range of amazing PC gaming products, but the Taiwanese firm has something new up its sleeve - super powerful gaming laptops powered by the latest AMD Ryzen™ 9 processor.
The latest AMD Ryzen chips are storming ahead in benchmarks and real-world gaming, and when backed by plenty of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce RTX GPU they make MSI’s laptops into potent gaming machines. The AMD Ryzen™ 9 8945HS processors are the first to contain an XDNA AI accelerator for a performance figure of up to 39TOPS across the chip. Combine this with the firepower of Zen 4 cores and a maximum boost speed of 5.2GHz, and you get a lot of processing power for gaming and more.
Zen 4, the architecture at the heart of the new MSI laptops, offers some intriguing performance features. They’re a major upgrade over the generation before, and thanks to their excellent performance per Watt of power are the ideal chips for a gaming laptop. AMD’s figures also show the XDNA NPU helping complete AI workloads faster than the competition and using less power. New features in Windows such as Copilot and the Windows Studio Effects take less time to process thanks to the AMD chips.
Despite being excellent PCs for all kinds of tasks - a powerful CPU and GPU combination is perfect for all kinds of content creation, video editing and other creative work - it’s gaming that MSI’s new laptops are most tightly focused on. MSI responded to feedback from users asking when it would release some AMD-equipped gear, and it’s risen to the challenge with relish.
The new Katana A15 is the latest wallet-friendly model, offering up to an AMD Ryzen™ 9 8945H processor, 16GB of DDR5 RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 GPU. This combo will net you as much as 169FPS when playing Modern Warfare 3 at 1080p, enough to outstrip the built-in IPS screen’s 144Hz refresh rate. Luckily, there's a full-size HDMI 2.1 port on the MSI Katana A15, so you can attach an external monitor to really make the most of the GPU’s fearsome framerates. The MUX switch, which lets you decide whether to use the Nvidia chip or the AMD Ryzen’s iGPU, can help prolong battery life if you’re not going gaming.
Elsewhere on the Katana A15 you’ll find dual-band Wi-Fi 6E, USB Type-C, and a four-zone RGB backlit keyboard. There's a 1TB SSD inside to store your game library too, and MSI’s Cooler Boost 5 technology - a clever amalgam of heatpipes and fans - to suck heat away from your components and keep them working at peak efficiency.
If that sounds intriguing, but you’d like even more performance, then check out the MSI Raider. It’s built around the mighty AMD Ryzen™ 9 7945HX3D processor and the Nvidia RTX 4090 GPU, two of the best laptop chips money can buy, with MSI Overboost technology to allow it to reach up to 250W total power. It’s topped off with a gigantic (for a laptop) 18in IPS screen with a 240Hz refresh rate and an HDMI port for an external monitor, allowing you to pour all that processing power into your gaming and working life.
The Raider, with its iconic RGB light bar, has always been MSI’s best gaming laptop, and the current model is no exception. With 16 full-speed cores from the AMD Ryzen™ processor, you have no excuse not to be feeding that enormous GPU chip with frame after perfectly set-up frame for silky smooth visuals. All this comes backed by DDR 5 RAM, a PCIe Gen 5 SSD, and Wi-Fi 7, offering fast transfers and plenty of bandwidth to get your data where it needs to be. It’s also surrounded by five USB 3.2 ports, allowing you to connect it up to all manner of gaming (or more serious) peripherals.
These new laptops from MSI, with their powerful and efficient AMD Ryzen™ processors, don’t only offer excellent gaming performance, but they’re an ideal choice for all kinds of PC tasks. From graphic design, video editing, or running an AI chatbot, MSI has the definitive answer to the question ‘What PC do I need?’
