MSI GL66 Gaming Laptop Review: Should You Buy It?

MSI Pulse GL66 Gaming Laptop Review: Should You Buy It?

What are we reviewing today it is going the msi pulse gl66 review this unit today because I’ve been using it quite a bit and as for normal, we're going to be looking at the design we're going to be looking at the specifications and then we're going to be looking at its performance and how well it did in the performance sector let's look at this unit a little bit closer and see what it has to offer okay


Most people think that a new gaming laptop is an expensive investment. The price can truly be prohibitive for most people looking to get one. Most top-rated games require high graphics, and because of this it can be difficult to game at affordable prices. One online retailer has made it a goal to provide everyone with laptops at the best prices available. With these affordable models, MSI tries its hardest to offer great products which allow all people to enjoy their favorite games.

Upgradeability on the MSI Pulse GL66

The MSI Pulse GL66 is designed for gamers who want a laptop that they can upgrade themselves. It has a modular design, which means that you can remove and replace the components easily.
The MSI Pulse GL66 is a great laptop for gamers with its great features and upgradeability. The laptop has a lot of room to upgrade, with two RAM slots and one storage drive slot. This gives gamers the ability to customize their laptop to their own needs and preferences.

• 15.6" 144Hz FHD 1080p 
• Display, Intel Core i7-11800H, 
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070, 16GB, 
• 512GB SSD, 
• Win10, Black (11UGK-001)

MSI GL66 Gaming Laptop prossesor intel core i7-11800H 8 core 

DESIGN

so design and in order to start off with the design i have to give creditor to a Belgian called and i hope I’m not butchering this Martin Verhoeven I hope I pronounced that right but anyway so Martin Verhoeven is a 3d digital sculptor who was helping msi with the 3d sculpting of this laptop so when you go to the website you can see that this is a gaming inspired laptop but is it we'll get to that when we get to our conclusion 

so let's look at the design it is kind of stealthy but not quite so it's got the aspects of gaming but it also has the aspects of something that is a little bit more clean a little bit more discreet it's not in your face gaming it is a little bit chunky especially on its thickness but that is because we have double the cores and double threads in the processor so cooling is obviously going to take a huge uh contributing factor to that so overall the measurements of the laptop is 35.9 centimeters by 25.9 centimeters by 2.3 centimeters so it's not huge but it's also not small 

so I will get to this in my conclusion again and this is why is it gaming is it not its weight is about 2.3 kilograms so again not too overweight but also not very carriable I can pick up the laptop and that actually is quite light the entire design is made out of a plastic compound except for the lid which i assume is some form of aluminum or some cool metal it does have some sleek aspects to it underneath the laptop you can see that it has quite a bit of cooling and it does show the cooling underneath and we're dealing with at least three heat pipes coming from the CPU and two coming from the GPU which I’ll show you in the overhead looking at the sides

MSI GL66 Gaming Laptop Gpu Geforce RTX 30 series 

we do have a usb type-c which is usb 3.2 gen one then we have two type a's which are usb 3.2 gen1 as well so obviously both the type c and the type a are the same generation so who have the same data transfer then we have one type a um which is a 2.0 obviously old 480 megs per second we do have an rj45 which is starting to lean more towards the gaming side of things and it does have wi-fi six but we'll get to that on specs uh the panel so we do have a 144hz which is a little bit more performance than anything but it's a 15.6 inch ips panel the keyboard is a full RGB well let's go through this it was very difficult because there's a program called hey lucky no it didn't work this is just a little snippet that i want to show you guys because you can control the RGB via voice command Scottish lucky mystic light green Irish hey look mystic light yellow Australian hey g'day there lucky little bugger mystic like yellow Afrikaans are you lucky mystic light green like the book four please hey but does it lucky can you make mystic light rainbow like bellies you but it worked your ticket okay because lucky has beaten every test we are going to its activating it's ready we're going to try test it in another language yellow Nani okay

Gaming Performance of MSI Pulse GL66

The MSI Pulse GL66 gaming laptop is designed for gamers who demand the best performance. Powered by a 11th Gen intel core i7 processor and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 graphics, it delivers smooth, fast gameplay. The 16GB of DDR4 memory and 512GB SSD provides plenty of storage for your games and other files.

MSI GL66 Gaming Laptop Cooling system 
it was great the battery life and this was really great which i think is a 53.5 watt hours so really great battery now from good to bad the camera hey the camera is a 720 pixel at 30 frames per second so not the best camera you can get but not the worst it's uh hdr or hd ready and it's resolution and it is a 0.9 megapixel so if you're trying to make that full screen again let me not tease it too much if you are using it for the purpose of having conference calls or just calling or skyping your grand your dad your mom whomever it will work and it'll work fine however if you were planning on using the streaming software to be able to stream in-game at the same time it is not a camera that I would use so let's talk about some of the features this has the intel graphics command sensor like the stealth 15m so I’m just going to run through that again if you want to see it in practice you can go look at the stealth 15m video but let's see or let's dive into the intel command center a little bit so you can see that you have the ability to record and save custom profiles and choose your resolution either 1080 720 you can stream save to disk and you can select where that's going to capture to there is also advanced settings like if you want to show your cursor change your frame rate your video bit rate and audio bit rate when changing to stream you just put in your stream key and once that's done you can literally hit live change your frame rate again and obviously depending on your stream you can change that bit rate okay so last on features that i will talk about and I should have done hey lucky here but anyway is the msi command center and now this is where I got a little bit confused because this this laptop screen to me gaming all the way but the command center wasn't the dragon uh the dragon command sensor it was the msi command sensor okay so we can firstly see that there's monitor for CPU GPU usage disk and memory there's also free up memory if you click that it'll free up some memory as well as some system information that you can see GPU temperatures and so on then

MSI GL66 Gaming Laptop Wifi 6 new wireless standard 

we have a user scenario where you can actually choose which performance level you want specifically or you can have extreme performance balance silent or super battery now this is where i got a little bit um no i don't want to call it upset but in a gaming laptop I’d like a little bit more RGB functionality a really cool function is the live update where you can literally just scan and update so one of the things where i did feel that msi did come up short was in the RGB settings which is gimmicky yes but some people do like to have it and maybe this isn't fitting with I am a gaming laptop or i can be a gaming laptop but i can also be something else but we only had a few functionalities when it came to RGB settings which was steady breathing cycle and color shift which was very limited in choice for me so performance

this laptop performed phenomenally well in performance i i really must say so I started off with ada64 where i stressed that the laptops everything except for the GPU for about 10 minutes now during those 10 minutes it hits 99 on one core but the average across all cores was 96 which is phenomenal and that was only at pretty much the start before the thermal started to act we hit an average of 80.9 during a full stress test on 864. so phenomenal performance under stress for 10 minutes which would have shown if there's anything to be concerned about in thermals which I believe honestly there isn't next I used superposition benchmark and it hit just over 13 000 as you see but the thing about superposition benchmark is it doesn't just use laptops uses full ball desktops and to hit a mark of 13 000 is a relatively good score for a gaming laptop so let's look at games another two crisis 2 and mass effect andromeda so one a little bit of an older game one of a very much recent uh recent game so both of these games let's look at crisis two were set to ultra-settings as well as on mass effect andromeda was set to ultra-settings now let's look at some of the gameplay of Crysis 2.

MSI GL66 Gaming Laptop ports

MSI GL66 Gaming Laptop display size 15.6'

now let's look at some of the gameplay from mass effect andromeda what was first contact called again no deadly force unless fired upon yeah said no one in the field ever how do we handle it just be ready if this goes south it usually does i got one left to go that's the last of them now we can see that both of these games were very smooth let's firstly take a look at some of the frame rates Crysis 2 was hitting 5960 because this is the this is a cap of the game so we can't actually get refresh rates higher than that but it was very steady on 5960 5960. on the game of mass effect andromeda we had we had refresh and we had fps all the way up to 144 dropping sometimes down to 89 but these obviously are relative to how much is going on in the game so really good performance but how did the components fare in crisis 2


we can see that the CPU hit a maximum of 69 degrees which is obviously really good I didn't really stress out the CPU that much but in andromeda we did hit 95 degrees so this is an indication that the game is a little bit more demanding on the CPU and the CPU had to work a little bit harder remembering that the max thermals for the CPU is 100 degrees but just like we saw in ada64 it didn't really stress out the CPU that much obviously it was working hard but the thermals are able to keep up with

it which is exactly what you're looking for now let's take a look at the thermals from the GPU in crisis the GPU hit 58.6 which means that this GPU was pretty much laughing at this game it really didn't stress it out whatsoever a little bit higher in mass effect andromeda where it hits 76.9 degrees but still quite a good and safe temperature for a mobile GPU wrapping up on performance both of these games again are high demanding and with the stress test and the benchmarking the cooling in conjunction with the CPU in conjunction with the 3060 really good gaming performance but it all matters on how everything's concluded okay guys time to conclude now i've tried to do this conclusion so many times in my head and that's because this laptop is sending me mixed signals on the one hand

                                           144Hz FHD 1080p Display

it's saying I’m a gaming laptop and does it have all the specs of a gaming laptop yes it's got a it's got a great CPU it's got a great GPU it's got dual channel ram it's got 140 4 hertz panel it's got everything but when you go into the computer it doesn't have dragon sensor now that's msi's gaming center this has msi center just the normal you know one that you would find on any normal msi laptop so i don't know if this is msi's way of saying that this is not for gaming or not maybe just for gaming so a little bit of confusion sets in there for me but let me get one thing straight this can game it games it games well the things that added to it is the battery life was really good and it was it was light it's not the lightest but it is fairly light




and it also is a compact size it's not this massive thing it just occupies your entire desk so i believe that this is being aimed at just your everyday person that wants the game but also wants to do work on a laptop without having to fork out what it costs to build a massive tower so in conclusion this laptop retails for one triple nine and now that is a hefty price to pay now can you get a 3060 cheaper yes can you get a 3060 cheaper with a 8 core 16 thread maybe I’ll need to check but do your homework but the one thing that really stood out for me on this laptop was its cooling i am very much about cooling and gaming for me is everything and the laptop performed phenomenally well when it came to cooling as you saw in the benchmarks as we saw in gaming the cooler boost 5 is a phenomenal design by msi is it loud it's obscenely loud it's annoyingly loud but that can be cancelled by earphones guys I really hope that you enjoyed this review Games you can play on this laptop MSI pulse GL66 series running some of the best games such as Battlefield 5, Fortnite and Civilization VI. Graphics you can play on this laptop The MSI Pulse GL66 gaming laptop is designed for gamers who demand the best performance.

Reviews 

This laptop has an 85W 3070 that performs similar if not worse than a high power 3060. The spec sheet for this model states that it has a 130W max 3070. I spoke with MSI support and the going theory is that there's a typo on the spec sheet. I will be returning this and replacing with a laptop with a higher performing 3070.
Edit: MSI has corrected the spec sheet and it now lists 3070 max 85W.
Beyond the mix up with the GPU max power, the build quality of the laptop is decent if not good. The keyboard feels nice enough to type on and the backlit keys look good. The screen is nothing to write home about but is adequate. No mux switch. The cooling is decent, although fans are of course loud - during combined stress test with looping fire strike extreme, in extreme performance mode in MSI center with fans on auto, the CPU rarely dropped below 4500Mhz and the GPU only throttled slightly at around 81-82C. Fans showed 50dB on an android sound meter app. The battery is on the small side, so I only saw about 3.5 hours of charge on battery saver and lower brightness / turning off keyboard backlight.
Changing my 1 star review to 3 stars because the laptop isn't terrible, I just don't appreciate being misled on such an important spec.

I wanted a screaming fast laptop and this one delivers! The 11th generation i7 chip really delivers. It can easily handle Zoom, databases, Office 365 all at the same time with no issues. Plus, the changing-cool keyboard is cool! I'm not a gamer, but I need a gamer-level machine for all that I do. Highly recommend the Pulse for the price and the features. It's much cheaper than the new Surface laptop and has a bigger display,.