MSI GS43VR Phantom Pro Review

Performance Analysis

First up are the all-important game benchmarks and the GS43VR Phantom Pro wowed us with frame rates vastly superior to the GTX 970M and in a different league to the GTX 965M. In fact, performance wasn't far off two GTX 970M's in SLI, which we've seen in a couple of laptops - an amazing feat from a 1.6kg 14in laptop. It managed a minimum frame rate of 69fps in Battlefield 4 at the ultra detail level, with an average of 83fps.

Crysis 3 was a similar story, with a minimum and average of 64fps and 71fps - again not far away from GTX 970M SLI and vastly superior to the GTX 970M. For reference, a GTX 960 only managed a minimum of 40fps here and the GTC 1060 in the GS43VR Phantom Pro is performing better than a desktop GTX 970 - a huge amount of performance from any laptop.


However, under sustained load in Unigine Valley, which dishes out plenty to for the GPU to do over a 5-10 minute benchmark, we noticed that the GPU would regularly top 80°C or more, even with the fan set to maximum in the included software. As a result, we're fairly sure it's throttling as the Unigine Valley result of 3112 is only a little faster than a desktop GTX 960, which would otherwise be battered by the might of the GTX 1060. This is a shame as it means that longer gaming sessions under heavy loads may see performance suffer, although given the native resolution, seeing the minimum frame rate drop from 70fps to 50fps may not even be noticeable.


There was a slightly slower set of numbers coming from the Core i7-6700HQ than we've seen with other laptops sporting the same CPU as well. For instance, the Aorus X3 PLUS V5 managed to complete the PCMark 8 4K Video Editing test in 132 seconds compared to 149 for the MSI. It was two seconds slower in the Photo editing test and noticeably slower in Terragen 3 too - again this could be down throttling.

Noise-wise at low and medium loads, the GS43VR Phantom Pro does a good job of keeping noise to a minimum and there's very little heat emanating from the chassis too. Ramping things up does see the fans become quite loud and there's a fair amount of heat at the top rear of the chassis and underside too.

Storage performance was fantastic, as expected with an SM951 at the helm, with a read speed of 2,254MB/sec in CrystalDiskMark and a chart-topping result in the PCMark 8 Battlefield 3 Storage Test too. We're not entirely sure about the Photoshop storage test - the result was much slower than several other laptops we've seen, but this appears to be down to the use of RAID, which seems to boost the scores here.

Finally, we come to battery life, and we were suitably impressed here too. The GS43VR Phantom Pro managed over an hour in Unigine Valley's 3D benchmark while perhaps more importantly from a battery life point of view, PCMark 8's conventional battery test puts the GS43VR Phantom Pro at lasting nearly 4 hours of typical tasks from web browsing to dealing with word processing, meaning that as a portable gaming machine, the GS43VR Phantom Pro is hard to beat.

Conclusion

There's a lot to consider with the GS43VR Phantom Pro and sadly it isn't all rosy. The throttling issues are a shame and possibly even avoidable if MSI had used larger vents for the intake fans. However, this may or may not be an issue depending on the games you play - during repeated testing in Crysis 3 and Battlefield 4, we didn't see any issues, but under sustained heavy load in Unigine Valley the result was much lower than expected. The CPU results were a tad slow too.

On the plus side, though, not only is the GS43VR Phantom Pro cheaper than other 14in gaming units we've seen, but its screen offers solid performance and good brightness, its storage is lightening fast and its low weight and generous battery life (for a gaming laptop) mean that it's far more flexible and portable than we'd been expecting. Considering that even when the slow downs did occur you're still getting better than GTX 960 level performance, the GS43VR Phantom Pro is a fantastic 14in gaming laptop that's otherwise very well rounded. Despite the mentioned issues, we'd still buy it if we had £1,500 to spend on a portable gaming system, although we'd probably want to wait for the competition to show its hand before splashing any cash.