MSI Vector 17 HX (2024) review

pcgamer.com:

At face value there's not an awful lot of difference between this Vector 17 HX laptop and its predecessor, the Vector GP68 HX. The chassis is the same, as is the 17-inch 2560 x 1600 IPS 240 Hz screen. Both can be configured with up to an Intel Core i9 CPU and an Nvidia RTX 4080 GPU. Even the keyboard, ports, and battery have all been re-used.

But what is new lies at the very heart of the Vector 17's strength and weakness: Intel's 14th Gen Core processor. In this A14VGG variant, we have a Core i9 14900HX, the most powerful Raptor Lake Refresh chip you can jam into a laptop. It's essentially an Intel Core i9 14900K but with lower power limits.

Where the desktop version has base and max Turbo power limits of 125 and 253 W, respectively, the laptop-ified chip is capped at 55 and 157 W. To comply with these limits, the peak and base clock speeds are all a lot lower, but the rest is unchanged: You're still getting eight P-cores, 16 E-cores, and 32 threads in total.

It's an immensely capable CPU but all that performance creates a wee problem and it's heat. I'm getting ahead of myself, though, so we'll come back to this issue shortly.

CPU: Intel Core i9 14900HX
GPU: Nvidia RTX 4070
Memory: 32GB DDR5-5600
Storage: 1TB NVMe SSD
Screen size: 17-inch IPS
Resolution: 2560 x 1600
Refresh rate: 240 Hz
Battery: 90 Whr
Dimensions: 38 x 29.8 x 2.4 — 3.0 cm
Weight: 3 kg (6.6 lbs)
Price: $2,299 | £2,399

Handling the graphics duties is an RTX 4070, with 4,608 shaders, a boost clock of 2,175 MHz, and 8GB of VRAM. Nvidia's laptop GPUs can be configured across a range of power limits (35 to 115 W) but MSI has set the maximum value for this model to 140 W.

However, the GPU clock speed and subsequent performance you see in games is ultimately limited by the fact that MSI has capped the combination CPU+GPU to 215 W. So if you wanted to have the RTX 4070 running at full power, you'd only have 75 W left over for the CPU.

This limit is 20 W greater than in the previous Vector GP68 HX model,