MSI Vector 17 HX (2024)

Verdict

It might not have the greatest screen or the most style, but the MSI Vector 17 HX (2024) gaming laptop gives you a great gaming spec for the money without any serious compromises.

Introduction

In the last six months I’ve seen a range of gaming laptops with the key selling point of a bigger screen, different display technology or a new form factor. It almost makes the latest MSI Vector 17 HX feel refreshingly straightforward.

Sure, this 17-inch laptop has its share of killer features, from its cooling system to its AI-driven systems management, but more than anything it’s focused on giving you the maximum gaming performance for your budget.

Simply put, there’s just no pussyfooting with the new Vector 17. It’s big, it’s bulky and it gets obnoxiously loud. It’s all about the frame rates, not the design finesse. But if you’re looking for smooth gameplay at high detail settings, it promises to push things as far as possible on whatever spec you can afford, potentially offering you better value than some of its more refined and elegant rivals.

Design and keyboard

• Big and bulky design with plenty of cooling
• Impressive connectivity, including Ethernet and Wi-Fi 7
• Large keyboard with a clicky action and per-key RGB lighting

MSI’s latest is what I might describe in technical terms as a bit of a chunky monkey. The 380x298mm footprint is going to cover a healthy chunk of any desktop, and it’s nearly 3cm thick in places.

Carry the 3kg chassis and 592g power supply in a backpack and your spine and shoulders aren’t going to thank you for it. Bar the aluminium lid, the construction is heavy on the plastic.

Yet there are some nice touches here and there, including a scalloped mid-section at the rear of the unit, a subtle colour effect on the hinges and the big rubberized spacers at the bottom that work to keep the body still on the desk while also allowing room for the vents to do their work.

The power, 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet and HDMI ports are all out of the way at the rear, keeping both sides clear if you’re plugged into a desktop setup, and there’s also a USB 3.2 Gen 2 port there with DisplayPort support, giving you the option of dual or even triple-screen output while you’re there.

There’s still more connectivity on either side, with USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C and Type-A ports on the right, plus a single USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type A. On the left-hand side, you’ll find a full-sized SD card slot, a headset jack and a Thunderbolt 4 port. On top of all that, the MSI Vector 17 HX is one of the few gaming laptops we’ve tested with built-in Wi-Fi 7, not to mention Bluetooth 5.4.

The thickness of the chassis means that your hands sit at an elevated position while you’re typing, but the palm rests are big enough to give you plenty of support. The keyboard, meanwhile, feels huge, stretching most of the way across the surface of the laptop, with the main QWERTY layout taking most of that space and the numeric pad somewhat squeezed into a small section on the right-hand side.

This means there’s plenty of room and no need to cramp the Shift and Ctrl keys, cursor keys or spacebar, though I found the position of the Function shift on the right slightly awkward.

To balance this, I rather like the fully transparent style of the WASD keycaps, which allow more of the RGB backlighting to shine through. There’s a similar trick on the cursors, with their oversized, semi-opaque legends.

As for the feel of the keyboard, it’s very good indeed, with ample travel and some good, tactile feedback when you tap down on the key and then release. It’s quick and responsive for gaming, but also great to type on. And while the touchpad isn’t as roomy as some plus-sized touchpads we’ve seen recently, it’s smooth, accurate and well-behaved, partly because palms and trailing thumbs aren’t constantly coming into contact with the surface. You’ll still want a mouse for serious gaming, but it’s fine for navigating Windows when you’re not.

Gaming laptops tend to lag behind business and mainstream consumer laptops on sustainability, and MSI makes no specific claims about this big, power-hungry system. That said, the packaging is almost completely recyclable cardboard, with no plastic foam inserts in sight.

Screen and sound

• IPS screen with 1600p resolution
• No HDR support, but you can still expect vibrant colours
• Basic 2W audio system has a surprise or two in store

I’ve been spoilt by a run of gaming laptops with superb OLED and Mini LED screens, so it says a lot that the IPS screen on the Vector 17 didn’t hit me as a huge drop down in quality.

In fact, performance tests with a colorimeter show that this is a good screen, covering 99.7% of the sRGB gamut and 98.5% of DCI-P3, with a maximum brightness of 492.7 nits.

The 2560 x 1600p resolution looks pin-sharp, and you get fantastic levels of detail. The biggest issue with it is that black levels are too high, meaning a significantly lower contrast ratio than on the OLED and Mini LED competition, though in day-to-day use blacks still look pretty dark and contrast levels look surprisingly decent. Colour accuracy isn’t brilliant, with an average Delta E of 3.34, but that’s still good enough for anything bar colour-critical photo and video work.

Subjectively, the display works well across a range of entertainment. It’s bright and punchy when watching 4K video, and while there’s no HDR support as such, videos still pop with colour. It’s a similar story with games, and the 240Hz refresh rate gives you scope for higher frame rates in older, less demanding titles or eSports games.

There’s more good news on the audio front. The MSI Vector 17 HX has two 2W speakers and no fancy branded audio tech, yet it still produces a surprisingly big sound with decent stereo imaging, excellent clarity and enough boom and thunder to bring your games to life. For really accurate positioning you’ll still want a good pair of headphones, but for casual gaming or watching Netflix that won’t be a necessity at all.

Performance

• Core i9 promises impressive levels of performance
• RTX 4070 CPU is a cost-conscious compromise
• Cooling system maintains high performance

With an Intel Core i9-14900HX and 32GB of DDR5 RAM there’s no way that the MSI Vector 17 HX was ever going to be slow, and so it proves with scores across the general performance and productivity benchmarks that rival the fastest PCs around.

In fact, the MSI posted faster results in Geekbench 6 and PC Mark 10 than the Razer Blade 16, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 and the Acer Predator Helios 18 – all phenomenally speedy laptops. It repeated the same trick in Cinebench R23’s multi-core tests, and posted the highest scores I’ve seen in Blender’s CPU rendering benchmarks. Whatever you want to do with a laptop, this thing is fast enough to do it.

However, there’s a slight imbalance here when it comes to gaming, as my test model splashes out on Intel’s fastest CPU, but reins things back a bit on the GPU by going for Nvidia’s RTX 4070. This is still a powerful GPU, capable of running Returnal at 95fps at Ultra settings and a QHD resolution, or Cyberpunk 2077 at 53fps at Ultra settings and QHD.

There’s not enough power to run AAA titles at QHD or native resolutions with ray tracing effects maxed out – you’re looking at just 23.33fps at 1600p or 26.34fps at QHD. However, DLSS 3 can do a lot to help there, taking Cyberpunk 2077 to 54fps at RT Ultra settings at 1600p or 73.5fps if you enable frame generation.

You can buy the MSI Vector 17 HX with an RTX 4080 with 12GB of GDDR6 RAM for an extra £500, and if I were going to compromise on the CPU or GPU when buying a gaming laptop, I’d take the hit on the former every time. However, there’s no doubt that this machine is pushing the RTX 4070 about as far as it can go, and that it’s going to be fast enough for many gamers, especially with DLSS 3 turned on.

These are good figures for a laptop of this spec, but they come with an audible downside. At default settings this is a noisy laptop running anything beyond the most basic productivity apps, and when you start gaming, it just gets noisier. At peaks I measured sound levels of over 58dBA; that’s what I’d expect from a desktop PC, or even a desk fan running at top speed rather than a gaming laptop. Family members coming into the room commented on it, and they’re used to hearing high-performance gaming laptops in action. You might want to plug some headphones in just to drown the racket out.

The MSI Vector 17 uses a 1TB Samsung SSD for storage, and it’s pretty speedy reaching sequential read/write speeds of 7094MB/sec and 5210.05MB/sec in our tests. It’ll easily keep up with modern games, and you won’t be left with long loading times either.

Software

• Minimal presence of trial software and bloatware
• MSI Centre provides useful system tools, but could be better organised

MSI hasn’t gone crazy with bloatware on the Vector 17 HX and what apps are installed are usually specific to the hardware. There is a trial of Norton 360 for Gamers which keeps flashing up irritating prompts to sign in, plus SteelSeries GG, which only really makes sense if you’re using SteelSeries peripherals.

Otherwise, the key tool that MSI provides is its MSI Centre utility. This covers lighting, a range of performance scenarios, diagnostics, battery care and more, though it’s not always easy to find specific features within the app’s different component parts. For instance, I spent ages trying to find a way to force the battery to charge to 100% for testing, and in the end I found the relevant settings under System Diagnosis rather than General Settings or User Scenario.

User Scenario is where you’ll find the main performance management features, with a choice of four main profiles plus the default AI Smart Auto profile, which apparently uses AI to work out what you’re doing and apply the correct clock and fan speeds and power settings automatically. It’s effective but, as noted above, noisy, so you might want to switch down to the Silent setting if you’re sticking to mainstream productivity apps for the next few hours. Extreme performance mode can be good for a few extra FPS in some games, but you’ll have to live with high noise levels while it’s turned on. Generally speaking, I’m not sure it’s worth it.

Battery life

• 90Whr battery provides stamina, but this is a power-hungry machine
• 330W adapter should be good for a rapid recharge

This kind of specification takes its toll on battery life, so it’s no surprise that the MSI Vector 17 HX delivers a fairly woeful performance when it comes to battery benchmarks. Even with a 90Whr battery, it survived just under two and a half hours in the PC Mark 10 Modern Office battery test.

In actual use, I was lucky to get more than a couple of hours of light use away from the mains, especially with the brightness pushed up past the halfway mark. On the positive side, the massive 330W adaptor gets it charged back up relatively fast. Even a 30-minute recharge was enough to see it reach 29%.

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