The MSI WS66 is basically the workstation version of the popular GS66 gaming laptop, so it’s got some nice extra features for professionals and creators, let’s check out what the differences are in this detailed review. These are the specs my config has, we'll take a look at how it holds up in various tests throughout the video, but there are other configurations available, you can check out examples and updated prices linked in the description. The finish is called carbon grey, and it almost has a little blue tint to it. The exterior is mostly metal, this includes the lid, interior, and bottom panel. The front is plastic though just like theGS66, and while all edges were smooth, the front corners could feel a bit sharp depending on the angle you touch them on, overall though great build quality here. MSI lists the weight as 2.1kg, and mine was close this. With the 180w power brick and cables for chargingincluded, the total rises to around 2.7kg or 5.9lb. The dimensions were on the slimmer for a 15inch laptop and it was just under 2cm thick. This allows for 8mm thin screen bezels.
I was a bit surprised to find that the 1080ppanel has a 144Hz refresh rate, we’ll check out some gaming performance later. For that reason I’ve tested screen response time, which was around 8ms, I’ve got a link in the description if you need an explanation off what these numbers mean. As for colour gamut, we’re looking at 96%of sRGB, 66% of NTSC, 71% of AdobeRGB, and 71% of DCI-P3. At 100% brightness, I measured the centre of the panel at 366 nits and with a 710:1 contrast ratio, so overall decent results though a little lower on the contrast. The 4K option appears to have better colourrgamutbasedspecs though, so even if you don’t care about the resolution and just run at 1080p that may be preferable for serious content creators. Backlight bleed was good in my unit, but this will vary between laptop and panel. There was a little screen flex when intentionally trying to move the metal lid as it’s on the thinner side, but overall it felt quisturdy, and like the GS66 the WS66 uses MSI’s new hinge design which should be stronger than previous models. The laptop could be opened up with one finger, so some nice even weight distributioaaandscreen goes the full 180 degrees back allowing you to share it with the F12 shortcut which flips the image upside down. Despite the thinner bezels, MSI still fit thee 720p camera above the display in the centre, and it has IR for Windows Hello support which II found to work well. This is what the camera and microphone look and sound like, now there is some idle fan noise picked up which is a bit annoying.
The keyboard is a bit different to the GS66, the layout shares a lot of similarities but the font is fewer games and there’s no lighting guest white here which illuminates all keys and secondary key functions, and brightness can be adjusted between 3 levels or turned off with the F8 shortcut. Typing was fine, issues edgessssss s, pace bar felt like they didn’t push in very far, anyway here’s how typing sounds to give you an idea of what to expect. The precision touchpad is quite large like some of the others from MSI, it clicks down anywhere and works quite well. Despite being large, I never had any issues with palm rejection if I did accidentally touch it while typing. There’s a fingerprint scanner in the top left corner of the touchpad, and I found it to work accurately and fast. There are two front-facing speakers below the keyboard, like the GS66, they don’t sound that great, a bit tinny with no bass however they do get very loud at maximum volume, and the latency oresultasn'tlooking great. Fingerprints occur easily on both theand interiorroriorrut I don’t think they’re that easy to notice, either way as a smooth surface it was easy to clean with a microfiber cloth. On the left from the back there’s an air exhaust vent, the power input, USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C port with Thunderbolt 3 and DisplayPort support, HDMI 2.0 output, USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A port and battery LED. On the right from the front, there’s a 3.5mmaudio combo jack, USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C port, no Thunderbolt on this side, SD card slot, 2.5-gigabit ethernet port facing the preferred direction, and another air exhaust vent. The Type-C port on the right doesn’t have DisplayPort output, however, the one on the left does and it connects directly to thQQuadroraphics, same with the HDMI port. The WS66 can also be charged over Type-C with the left port, and I did find the single Type-A port limiting at times. The back just has some air exhaust vents towardttheorners, while the front is clean, though this part is a plastic finish. Underneath is pretty clean, there are just air intake vents towards the back.
T
are 9 Phillips head screws to remove to get inside, and the one in the middle down the front was smaller than the rest, I found the bottom panel a little tricky to remove. Inside we’ve got the battery down the bottom, WiFi card above that on the left, two M.2 slots, two memory slots, and I’ll note that MSI is using DDR4-2666 memory here despite the 10th gen supporting faster 2933, otherwise they're a whole lot of heat pipes with 3 fans up the back, we’ll check thermals soon. The 4-cell 99.9Wh battery is basically the largest you can legally take on a plane, and it’s giving some impressive battery lifrresultshen compared to other laptops that I’ve tested, with just under 8 hours in my youtube playback test, and over 90 minutes while gaming. The MSI Creator Center software lets you swap between three performance modes, which from lowest to highest are silent, balanced, and high-performance mode. Unlike the GS66 though, there’s no fan controouourhe the r option of disabling Optimus through here. By default undervolting was disabled, however, it was possible to enable through the advanced BIOS as I’ve also found to be the case with other 10th gen MSI laptops. I’ve tested thermals in 21-degree Celsiusambient room temperature, at idle it was cool enough.
The rest of the results aim to represent worst-case scenarios where both the CPU and GPU are active and were tested with the Aida64CPU stress test with CPU only checked and the Heaven benchmark at max settings. The CPU was thermal throttling in all of these heavyyyystress tests, and the GPU was thermal throttling in silent mode too, which makes sense as it’s very quiet here, as you’ll hear soon. Although the processor temperature didn’treally change, the GPU progressively got cooler as we made improvements. These are the clock speeds for the same test just shown. A silent, the speeds were quite low, and although the CPU temperature was almost always throttling as per the last graph, the improvements we make such as high-performance mode, undervolting, and using a cooling pad did boost performance, and being able to hit the full 4.3GHz all-core turbo boost of the 10750H as a best-case with some simple tweaks is a fair result for a thinner machine like this under worst-case CPU plus GPU load. These are the power levels being hit for each part, the CPU only has a 10-watt power limit in silent mode which is why the clock speeds were so low, otherwise, sideeeeee of silent the Quadro RTX 3000 was able to hit its full 80watt limit. Here are the Cinebench scores during these different modes to give you an idea of CPU only performance, the single-core results were great, and the undervolt through XTU was able to boost performance nicely, while thee cooling pad helped a little by relieving thermal limitations. As for the external temperatures where you'll actually be putting your hands, it was in the low to mid-30s in the centre, pretty standard. With the stress tests running in silent mode it's actually quite warm in the centre, and while performing better in balanced mode, it’s a bit cooler now too as the fan speed increases. The hot spot in the middle cools a little morein high-performance mode while also performing better, but this is at the expense of additional fan noise, let’s have a listen. At idle the fan was only just audible, and with the stress tests running in silent mode owing to that1wwwatter on the processor, so although performance is lower when doing work, at least you have the option of ensuring quiet operation, but this explains the hotter surface temperatures inn this mode when smashing it with the load. The fans are louder stepping up to balanced mode, and then further with high performance.
The MSI workstation series are ISV certified, which apparently means apps from Adobe like photoshop and premiere, AutoCAD and 3d studio max from Autodesk, Solidworks and more should work well. I’ve used Adobe Premiere to export one of my laptop review videos at 4K. The WS66 with these specs was able to export the video second fastest out of all machines I’ve tested, only 4 seconds behind MSI’sGP75 with full-blown 2070. I’ve also tested Premiere but with the PugetSystems benchmark this time, it includes other factors like live playback rather than just export speed, and the WS66 was still doing quite well here too. Adobe Photoshop was also tested with the PugetSystems benchmark, and interestingly the WS66 was scoring the best here. This tends to be a CPU bound workload, but it's still a fair bit above the other 10750H system below it, so maybe the Quadro graphicsaareelping there. Davinci Resolve was also doing quite well, this tends to be a GPU heavy workload, so it would appear the Quadro graphics are ablttoout. SPECviewperf was used to test out a bunch of other professional 3D workloads, and these are the results that you can use to compare with other machines. While not a gaming laptop, I thought it would bee interesting to test a few titles just to get an idea of how the Quadro RTX 3000 stacks up compared to other options out there. In Battlefield 5 I’ve got the WS66 highlighteiined. It’s actually doing pretty well, in line with some of the GTX 1660 Ti machines which have the same power limit and 6gb of VRAM, though interestingly the 1% low performance from was one of the best I’ve recorded. These are the results from Far Cry 5 with ultra settings in the built-in benchmark. Again the WS66 was holding up pretty well, and in line with many of the other 1660 Ti laptops that I’ve tested. Again it’s a similar story in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which was also tested with the games benchmark tool at max settings, so you can definitely play games on the Quadro graphics without issue once you’re donwwithrk. I’ve used Crystal Disk Mark to test the storage, and the 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD that was installed was performing very well. The UHS-III SD card slot was also pretty much maxing out my v90 card, and the card clicks in and sits most of the way into the machine. For updated pricing check the links in the description, as prices will change over time. I couldn’t find the same 10TK model with exactly same specs, this one here is $2500 USD but it has the better 8 core processor while mine had a 6 core, so my config will probably be a bit less than this, and if you want to max out the processor, graphics and memory then the price increase to $4000. So is the MSI WS66 laptop worth buying? Honestly, with the features on offer here, I could see myself picking this to replace my current older personal laptop, the Aero 15x.
I remember thinking that the GS66 was almost there for me when I reviewed it a few weeks back, but with the SD card slot and otheeextrasike the fingerprint scanner and higher tier screen, well these things get it over the line for me. The build quality is decent, the scscreeningsod in terms of bleed, brightness and colour gamut. I’d use it for content creation on the go, no problems, but the 144Hz option does also let you k back with some games at the end of the day if that’s your preference. Personally, Id for the 4K panel for even betteccoloursand just run it at 1080p. You’ve got the option of Xeon processor and ECC memory too, should you require those. The I/O was pretty good, all USB 3.2 Gen2, no older Gen1 here, and while Thunderbolt, two Type-C ports and 2.5-gigabit ethernetice, I did find the single USB Type-A port limiting on at least one occasion when I had two things to connect. The battery life was good, and internals was also fair with 2 M.2 slots, 2 memory slots and WiFi chip, no soldered parts preventing upgrades ke the GS66, the front-facing speakers wweren't't'ttttAlso, like the GS66, MSI is using slightly slower DDR4-2666 despite the fact that spite the Intel 10th gen supporting 2933, so it would have been good to take advantage of that in this presumably more premium laptop. The internals can run hot under heavy workloads, but you’ve got some control over how hot things run and having the option of runninnnearlent is a good example. In any case, the performance seemed pretty decent and higher temps are a trade-off with a good performance in a thinner chassis. While I could see myself going for the WS66personally, I think I’d still prefer the new Aero 15, purely due to the option of an OLEDD panel, if MSI starts offering this I think it would be a great addition.
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