Picked up this $1K MSI gaming laptop for $400

[FlyingPenguin]

I have been keeping an eye out for a 15" laptop to replace the beastly 4 year old 17" HP Envy laptop I'm currently using. I no longer need a big screen as, due to a happy byproduct of aging, my far sightedness has reversed itself in the past year due to early cataracts reshaping my eyes. Two years ago I could not even read a restaurant menu without reading glasses, and now I can read small print as well as I could 20 years ago, with no glasses or very weak readers. Yay cataracts?

Anyway, I always check laptop prices for deals when I'm in a store, for myself or for friends and family. I spotted this MSI Cyborg 15 gaming laptop at Sams: Core i7 12th Gen, 16GB RAM, 1TB Samsung (oem) SSD, RTX 4060 8GB mobile, with a gorgeous 1080p 144Hz display. The display model was on clearance for 60% off from $1k to $400: https://www.samsclub.com/ip/MSI-Cyborg- ... om=/search

Now I am not the kind of guy who usually takes a chance on floor models, but that was a damn good price. I stood there for 30 minutes meticulously checking it out. Display models usually get their keyboards abused by kids in most stores, but for some reason the laptops at Sams tend to be left alone. Plus gaming laptops tend to have VERY rugged keyboards, and this was no exception. The condition was actually immaculate, considering it had probably been on display for 6-8 months. There were no scratches, the keyboard was pristine. I ran some tests and everything seemed to be working fine. All I found was a fair amount of dust around the bottom intake vents.

I took a chance, and needless to say I did a clean Win11 Home install on it when I got it home to get rid of the bloatware, and then manually installed the latest NVidia and MSI drivers (BTW: MSI driver installers are shit: they all have different installation procedures, some with proper exe files, some with batch files that don't work. And some you just have to right click on every inf file and individually install them. C'mon MSI!).

Lovely laptop. Very light and relatively thin. It ran the Heaven DirectX11 benchmark handily at 190 FPS on high settings. Deep Rock Galactic easily maintains 100 FPS on high. I have globally capped the framerate at 90 FPS and everything I want to play on it runs at the full 90. I am very happy with it. I really don't need to game on my laptop, but as we're planning on doing more travelling it's nice to have the option. For a laptop, the keyboard feels real good.

Even at the $1K price, I would recommend it, even if you don't game and just need a high end laptop, considering prices are going to go way up. It's being discontinued, but Sams still has some for shipping. Amazon and Newegg are out of stock. The processor max boosts to 4GHz and it feels very snappy. Boot times are amazingly fast. It doesn't get as hot as I would have expected under gaming loads, probably due to the fact that the whole bottom of the laptop is vented (you're not going to want to game with it on your lap). When not gaming, it runs very cool even under heavy CPU loads. Like most of these modern laptops, it uses the integrated Intel video for the desktop, and only kicks in the 4060 when gaming.

FYI: MSI even has Win10 drivers on their website, despite the fact that this shipped with Win11. I downloaded them just in case. I was sorely tempted to install Win10 on it, but I decided to just slap Win11 25H2 in there, and once I removed all the advertising and phone home shit, and removed all the Microsoft Store apps, it runs like a champ (of course I installed OpenShell to get rid of the hideous Win11 Start menu). I used O&O ShutUp10++ and the Chris Titus utility.

https://www.msi.com/Laptop/Cyborg-15-A1 ... cification

https://www.msi.com/Laptop/Cyborg-15-A12VX/Gallery

[Executioner]

Wow nice deal or should I say steal!

[Losbot]

Nice grab!