 How far should you go when making a budget gaming laptop? MSI's Sword 17 comes powered by Alder Lake processors and RTX 30 series graphics, but has the manufacturer cut too many corners in order to get to such a low price point. Keep on watching to find out. On the outside, the Sword 17 is an eye catcher. We don't see many white gaming laptops, so we salute MSI for its boldness. Still, the panel is black as well as the bezels, giving stormtroopers a run for their money. The laptop is entirely made from plastic, but there's no flex from both the lid or the base, thanks to a metal frame on the inside. The laptop is pretty portable for a 17 inch machine, weighing only 2.6 kilograms and having a profile of 25.2 millimeters. Due to its bigger stature, the lid opens with one hand, showing off a full-sized keyboard and a blue backlight, which perfectly matches the white paint job. The keys could have used a bit more spacing between them, as there's a lot of spare room on the base. The keyboard has long key travel, but the feedback is a bit too soft for our liking. The touchpad's also small considering the amount of space that's available. Size isn't everything though, as the surface is smooth and the pad is responsive. Going to the sides, the right keeps a LAN port, an HDMI 2.0 port, one USB type C 3.2 generation 1 port, one full-sized 5 gigabit USB port, and a 3.5 millimeters audio jack. Turn the laptop over and you get two full-sized USB ports, one 2.0 port, and one 5 gigabit port. There's only one display option, a full HD 144 hertz IPS panel. It's a fine display for a budget gaming laptop, with 260 nits of peak brightness and great uniformity. It covers 53% of the sRGB so while the large screen hardware can definitely be used for rendering videos, you'd have to sacrifice color grading. The accuracy of the display doesn't improve much, even with our design gaming profile, which lowers the Delta E value from 4.9 to 3.7. For example, we'd consider a good result anything around 2.0 or lower, since the human eye can't see a difference below 1.0. This is good to have if you're a professional and work with clients that really value their brands and recognition. We'll leave links to our profiles in the description below. The speakers could have been moved to the front, but then you'd have to rearrange the internals, which adds to the price, so sticking them on the bottom is the more budget conscious choice. The sound coming off of the stereo setup comes with okay quality, while the lows and highs show some deviations. On the other hand, the mids are clear. Only 2 per 100 people watching this video are subscribers. If you decide to just start following us, we'll be able to reinvest more in our laboratory thus making even more helpful videos for you. Thank you, you're awesome! In terms of CPU horsepower, you're left with the Core i5-12500H and Core i7-12700H, which are fantastic options to have. We tested the Core i7, which doesn't perform as well as some competitors, like the Dell G15-5520. On the GPU end, you've got the RTX 2050, RTX 3050, 3050 Ti, and RTX 3060. We tested the 3050 Ti, which has a 60W power limit. Yes, it does sound low, but the GPU manages to run modern games at good settings and frame rates. The GPU maintains the 60W power limit for more than 30 minutes while reaching clock speeds as high as 1723MHz. The Core i7-12700H does well in the stress test, maintaining sub 3GHz clock speeds on the PCORs and a 79W TDP in long runs. This is thanks to the cooling setup, which has two heat pipes for the CPU and two pipes for the GPU, for a total of four. In terms of comfort, even with a larger chassis, some heat manages to make its way onto the keyboard. At the peak of the stress test, the base reaches 54 degrees Celsius, which might make your palm sweaty. Noise can be a problem if you want max performance, however, that comes with the territory. As for the efficiency of the components, they don't go easy on the 53.5Wh battery, lasting for 4 hours and 3 minutes of web browsing, or 4 hours and 1 minute of video playback. The upgradeability is there, but why isn't there a second SSD slot with so much space on the board? At least you can get as much DDR4 RAM as you want, with two Sodom slots for up to 64GB. We'll leave our teardown video linked down below, which also shows how to take the battery in cooling out. The MSI Sword 17 cuts a bit too many corners. While that may help with lowering the price point, the sacrifices might turn away potential consumers, with Lenovo and Acer being totally open to offering the Nitro 5 and the IdeaPad Gaming 3i. For more information about the MSI Sword 17, check out our written review. You can find it in the video description.