MSI Pulse GL66 (2022) Review

The MSI Pulse GL66 (2022) is one of the most emerging gaming laptops that looks great. Not only this, the laptop is powerful enough to let you play the latest games, stream movies, and do work. The laptop has NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3000-series GPUs. These GPUs use NVIDIA’s 2nd generation RTX architecture, which has great ray tracing capabilities, and NVIDIA’s DLSS resolution upscaling tech to provide superfast frame rates. Know More!

MSI Pulse GL66 (2022) Specs

PROS:

• Ultra-vivid hues on the screen
• Superb picture quality
• Incredible processing speed

CONS:

• Low runtime despite large battery capacity.
• Overall graphics processing unit’s gaming performance is not good.

Design

The MSI Pulse GS66 looks like a classic gaming laptop, which is both a good and a bad thing. It’s a bit too big to be ultraportable, and the materials aren’t that high-end. The case is mostly made of plastic. But the lid is made of metal, a feature that is becoming more common in mid-range gaming laptops. It doesn’t have an interesting design like the Asus Zephyrus G14, and the Legions from Lenovo look a little bit better to us. But it works fine if you don’t spend too much time thinking about how your PC looks and feels.

The MSI Pulse GS66 also has large holes on the bottom that let air flow through. Without taking off the bottom cover, you can see the copper pipes that move heat away from the internals and even read what the SSD is called. Storage changes should be pretty easy.

If you want to update later, there is a spare M2 spot for an extra SSD drive, and the screws on the case sides are all standard. MSI knows that some of you will want to open this. Our Pulse GL66, on the other hand, has a 1TB SSD, so we’re good to go.

Screen

For a long time, even the best PCs for games had 1080p screens. 4K screens away didn’t seem very useful because they didn’t have nearly enough power to run demanding games at 60 fps at that resolution. This deadlock has finally been broken, and computers with screens like 1600 p and 1440 p are becoming more common.

But colour is the most important thing here. The MSI Pulse GL66 comes close to meeting the DCI P3 standard, which is what Apple tries to do with its best MacBooks. Since this screen is matte, the colours might not jump out at you as much as they do on a MacBook Pro. But when you really look at how red those reds are, you can’t help but be amazed.

The hinge also lets the screen fold almost all the way back. That’s good for lazy bean bag games, but you’ll want to make sure your pyjamas don’t cover up too many of the vents on the bottom. The rest is pretty normal.

Performance

At least with the specs MSI sent us, the MSI Pulse GS66 is a true game monster. It can be used with the RTX 3060 and RTX 3070 video cards from Nvidia. Ours has the second one. An RTX 3060 seems to be the best choice for a laptop like this that isn’t as well equipped.

Last year’s version of this design was also sold with the RTX 3050 Ti, which is a relatively low-end card and might not make the best use of this 2022 series’ next-generation CPU power. We’d want the RTX 3070 card in the MSI Pulse GS66, but we might not be able to buy it.

This card is a bit of a monster, but MSI only uses the mid-grade version of it. Graphics cards for laptops fall into classes based on how much power the laptop can get out of them. On the low end, there are 85W cards; 95W cards are in the middle, and 130W cards are the most powerful. MSI says that the card can handle up to 100 watts.

Battery

The batteries in most gaming computers don’t last very long. You can only get a full day’s work from a charge if you buy one with an AMD CPU, which slows down greatly when running on power.

The MSI Pulse GL66 has an Intel CPU, so even though it has a 90-watt battery inside, its power life isn’t that great. After using the MSI Pulse GS66 to watch videos from YouTube and write articles, it lasted almost exactly four hours each time.

There is a full-size HDMI port, but it can only send 4K at 60 Hz, which tells us it’s not an HDMI 2.1 port. You only get one USB-C port, and it’s not a super-fast Thunderbolt 4 port. Instead, it’s a poor USB 3.2 Gen 1 port, which is only an eighth as fast as the potential maximum speed.

Price

The MSI Pulse GL66 is a good gaming laptop for the price, and it did well in our tests of its efficiency. At a starting price of $1,599, it’s a good choice for games, but if you have more money, there may be better options on the market. But at its current price, the Pulse GL66 is a pretty good deal. This is something we were happy to see MSI fix for the model we reviewed last year in our MSI Pulse GL66 review.