 The essence of a budget gaming device seems to be gone, at least for 2023, as even the Katana 15 from MSI now charges around $1200 for a Core i7-13620H and an RTX 4050. But is it worth it? We'll tell you in a minute. The new Katana 15 retains the same plastic chassis as last year's Katana GF66, which shows some weak points in the lid and the base. On the other hand, it's one of the lighter 15.6 inch gaming laptops, with a weight of 2.25 kg and a 24.9 mm profile. Getting to the base we see that the keyboard has some new keycaps, especially on the WASD, arrow and power buttons, which are transparent, so the 4-zone RGB backlight illuminates them very well. Typing on it feels good thanks to the long key travel and clicky feedback. The touchpad is well sized, however, there is a touch of latency in the tracking. For ports, you lack Thunderbolt support, while also offering a USB Type-A 2.0 port, which is slow and best left for a mouse. On the left side, there's the 2.0 port as well as one more USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 1 port. As for the right, there's a LAN port, an HDMI 2.1 FRL connector for up to an 8K 60 Hz output, one USB Type-C 3.2 Gen 1 port, another USB Type-A port, and a 3.5 mm audio jack. Being a more budget model, the Katana 15 offers an entry level full HD IPS panel with a 144 Hz refresh rate. Despite that, the pixel response time is a bit slow, so there could still be some ghosting and fast-paced games. However, we'd still say that the display is good for gaming and media consumption, as the viewing angles are comfortable. The max brightness of 238 nits is low, but that's common in this space. The colors on it also look a bit dull, due to the 53% sRGB coverage. They get a bit more accurate with our design and gaming profile. The profile can also help with games, when in a darker environment, or when watching dark scenes in movies. It makes it so everything is a bit more visible, so you can react faster and see everything. We're putting a link to the whole bundle in the description below. The audio on the laptop is decent as well. However, while the quality is there, there are deviations across the entire frequency range. Volume-wise, the laptop can get pretty loud, which is important, considering many others skip out on the volume. 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. We'd classify the Core i7-13620H as performing between the Ryzen 7 6800H and the Core i7-12700H, as it doesn't exactly get on the level of the 14-core CPU, but still scores higher than the popular AMD chip. Testing the 105W RTX 4050 was pretty fun, as the GPU performs closely to the 140W RTX 3060 from last year. The card delivers a very good 1080p gaming experience while being able to handle some titles, even at 1440p. The Katana 15 in this configuration delivers 70fps in Borderlands 3, utilizing the badass settings preset, which always gets a little laugh out of us. Thanks, I'll pre-order your Tombstone just in case. Now, those jerks who tried to murder you are the children of the vault, a bandit cult who followed their creepy leaders with blind devotion, which reminds me, if you're going to obey my every second call, you'll need an Echo device. Moving over to something more tactical and picturesque, Ghost Recon Wildlands gives you a whole open world to explore. It runs at 61fps on the Ultra preset, so you're good to go at 1080p. Lastly, here's Shadow of the Tomb Raider with 80fps on the highest preset. At 1080p, there isn't a game that will give you issues, except maybe for the occasional unoptimized mess like Metro Exodus. The cooling setup of the Katana 15 looks very good, with six heat pipes, four of which are dedicated to the CPU and GPU, while the last two are solely for the VRMs and GPU memory. It helps the Core i7 boost up to 113W and 4.23GHz on the PCORs in the stress test, albeit it maintained that for only around 10 seconds. In long runs like a game or a video render, the CPU runs at 50W and has a PCOR speed of 2.50GHz. The RTX 4050 isn't able to hit its 105W power target, instead running at 85W. It still managed to maintain a 2,500MHz speed for more than 30 minutes, which is really good. This however also means that the cooling runs rampant as the fans are louder. The plastic chassis isn't that well insulated, so there's some excess heat warming up the keyboard, reaching sub-50 degrees temperatures. Most gaming laptops don't go easy on their batteries, and the situation with the Katana 15 isn't looking very good too. With a 53.5Wh battery pack, it lasts for 6 hours and 32 minutes of web browsing or 5 hours of video playback. On the inside, the two Sodium slots for DDR5 memory are stacked over each other. The M.2 PCIe Gen4 slots are stacked as well, so there's definitely space for a larger battery pack. If you want to check out how to upgrade the Katana 15, our teardown video is right for you. We'll have it linked down below or in the pop-up corner right here. The MSI Katana 15's price tag will put off certain consumers, especially since the performance that it delivers is akin to many laptops from last year. For example, the Asus TUF Gaming A15 from 2022 has pretty much the same display, while the Ryzen 7 6800H and RTX 3060 combo is really competitive while being much more efficient. For more information about the MSI Katana 15, you can read our written review over on our website.