Black Friday sales haven’t quite reached fever pitch yet, but we’re already seeing plenty to wet the whistle. One such decent deal is this MSI GF65 Thin 10UE-213 gaming laptop, listed over at Best Buy, for $849.99. For that, you get your hands on an the elusive RTX 3060 GPU, an Intel Core i5 10500 processor, and a 144Hz, 1080p panel.
I’m very familiar with this chassis and model of laptop, as I reviewed the RTX 2060 version of it back in 2020, which you can read up on in my MSI GF65 Thin 9SEXR review. A few of the key specifications have changed with this 10UE model, however, and for the better.
For starters, the Nvidia RTX 2060 has been replaced with the newer and more powerful Nvidia RTX 3060 mobile GPU. That means the full benefits of the Ampere architecture; new RT Cores; and full RTX suite, including DLSS. That’s potentially a big boon for this laptop’s performance, too, as DLSS can really help push your frame rate higher in compatible games.
This model also comes with a 144Hz 1080p screen, which should allow you to juice that GPU for all it’s got in the latest games.
As for the CPU, we’re talking Intel’s 10th generation Core architecture, specifically a Core i5 10500H. There are more recent 11th Gen chips, and on desktop even 12th Gen chips, but this is still a six-core processor with a palatable 4.5GHz boost clock, so plenty for our gaming needs alongside that RTX 3060 GPU.
That’s hooked up to a single stick of 8GB DDR4-3200 memory, which is probably the most problematic part of this laptop, I’ll admit.
The storage on the MSI GF65 Thin 10UE-213 has actually doubled over the laptop I looked at in 2020, going from 256GB to 512GB. Now, that’s still not an amazing amount of storage for modern day gaming, but there is a silver lining for both SSD and memory.
This laptop is very easily upgraded, and that makes adding more RAM, or another M.2 SSD, a breeze. The chassis is quite spacious, so you don’t have to worry too much about fiddly parts flying everywhere, although that said please do be careful if you try this. There’s actually a spare M.2 slot available right out of the box, too, so you can transfer your OS or files over to another drive with ease if you do make a change, or just double up.
That’s the thing with this gaming laptop, and the reason I wanted to highlight this find over at Best Buy. It’s a great starting point with enough flexibility to allow for smart upgrades down the line. That means if you’re a little tight on budget and can only stretch this far, you could hit buy now and upgrade one piece at a time when you’re able to.
In the end, you’ll have a really respectable gaming laptop with some of the latest chips powering it. Not too bad, in my books.
https://www.pcgamer.com/this-rtx-3060-msi-gaming-laptop-is-a-smart-penny-saver-purchase-at-dollar84999/
