 Ever since the first stealth series from MSI was released, the laptop world was baffled and headed towards change. We started seeing a lot of thin and light gaming notebooks, which became better and better as time passed. This is also valid for the GS6 Stealth Series. Last year, the design got better, and it looked sleek and stylish, rather than aggressively gamerish. Then we fast forward to today. And the GS66 Stealth Series looks like an industrial package, cut from a block of metal. Generally, it packs beast hardware. We are talking about up to Core i9 10980HK and an RTX 2080 Super Max-Q. So the performance it offers should be great. Also, the display options start from 144Hz and go to 240Hz and 300Hz, all of which are IPS panels. Everything seems great, but last year there were some issues with the GS65 Stealth, including difficult upgradeability and poor thermals. We really hope that MSI has worked on that, and surely, you'll know at the end of this review. Inside the package, you will find a 230W power brick, unless you get the RTX 2060 version, which comes with a 180W adapter. First, let's start with the design. It is an all-metal body with a pretty boxy look. Honestly, we really like it as it makes for a very compact device. This incognito style notebook has a profile that goes from 18.3 to 19.8mm and weighs 2.10kg, marking a slight increase in both height and weight, compared to last year. And further down below, you will find the enormous touch pad. Actually, its height is not that impressive, but the width is quite big. Its surface is glass, which provides very good gliding, while the response is on point, especially with the higher refresh rate displays. On the downside, we notice that when you press the area between the touch pad and the space bar, it sometimes registers clicks. Keep in mind it might very well be an issue with our unit, so there's no need to panic. And on the bottom panel, you'll see the huge ventilation grill only, because the speakers are actually firing towards yourself. As for the exhaust it happens through a total of four vents. Two on the back, and one on each side. On the left, you get the power plug, a Thunderbolt 3 connector, an HDMI connector, and a USB Type A 3.2 second generation port. Switch sides, and you'll see an RJ45 connector, two USB Type A 3.2 second generation ports, a USB Type C 3.2 second generation port, and an audio jack. We will show you how to open the MSI GS66 Stealth and what's inside of it. In order to get inside of this notebook, there are nine Philips head screws you need to undo. Keep in mind that one of them has a factory seal, which may or may not void your warranty. Here, we see a huge improvement over last year's GS65 Stealth. Finally, the motherboard is placed the right side up, so you can see the cooling and upgrade everything you need without the need of removing the entire board. Here, the cooling solution consists of seven heat pipes. Three of them are cooling only the processor, and three are cooling the GPU. One of the latter is pretty thick and connects to two heat sinks. By the way, the amount of heat sinks here is four. The fans are three, and as you can see, the VRMs and the graphics memory are also cooled by some metal brackets and a heat pipe. In terms of upgradeability, there are two RAM Sodom slots, supporting up to 64 gigabytes of DDR4 memory. And for storage, you get two M.2 PCI-EX4 slots with RAID support, and one of them can fit M.2 SATA drives as well. Thankfully, the battery here is huge. Actually, it is the maximum allowed on airplanes 99.9 watt hours. Our sample of the MSI GS66 Stealth comes with a 240 Hz Full HD IPS panel, with model number SHARP LQ156M1JW03 SHP14C5. Its diagonal is 15.6 inches, 39.62 centimeters, and the resolution 1920 by 1080. Expectedly, the screen ratio is 16 to 9, the pixel density 141 pixels per inch, their pitch 0.18 by 0.18 millimeters. The screen can be considered retina when viewed from at least 60 centimeters, 24 inches, from this distance, the average human eye can't see the individual pixels and is excellent for a laptop. It has comfortable viewing angles. We have provided images at 45 degrees to evaluate quality. This laptop is equipped with an MSI True Color app, which offers five presets of display settings, gamer, anti-blue, sRGB, office, and movie. Additionally, the software has a calibration option, which supports X-Rite i1 Display Pro, SpectroCal C3, and SpectroCal C6. In the illustration below you can see how the display performs from a uniformity perspective. The illustration below shows how matters are for operational brightness levels, approximately 140 nits, in this particular case at 44% brightness, white level equals 141 candelas per square meter, black level equals 0.13. The use of D2000 over 4.0 should not occur, and this parameter is one of the first you should check if you intend to use the laptop for color-sensitive work, a maximum tolerance of 2.0. The contrast ratio is good, 1040 by 1. To make sure we are on the same page, we would like to give you a little introduction to the sRGB color gamut and the Adobe RGB. To start, there's the CIE 1976 uniform chromaticity diagram that represents the visible spectrum of colors by the human eye, giving you a better perception of the color gamut coverage and the color accuracy. Inside the black triangle, you will see the standard color gamut sRGB that is being used by millions of people in HDTV and on the web. As for the Adobe RGB, this is used in professional cameras, monitors, etc. for printing. Basically, colors inside the black triangle are used by everyone, and this is the essential part of the color quality and color accuracy of a mainstream notebook. Still, we've included other color spaces like the famous DCI P3 standard used by movie studios, as well as the digital UHD Rec 2020 standard. Rec 2020, however, is still a thing of the future, and it's difficult for today's displays to cover that well. We've also included the so-called Michael pointer gamut, or pointers gamut, which represents the colors that naturally occur around us every day. The yellow dotted line shows MSI GS66 stealth's color gamut coverage. Its display covers 95% of the sRGB, ITURBT709, WebHDTV standard, in CIE 1976. In addition to the default presets, we created more profiles. You can see a comparison between our profile and the sRGB preset. Our design and gaming profile delivers optimal color temperature, 6500 kelvin, at 140 nits luminance and sRGB gamma mode. We tested the accuracy of the display with 24 commonly used colors like light and dark human skin, blue sky, green grass, orange, etc. You can check out the results at factory condition and also with the design and gaming profile. Below you can compare the scores of MSI GS66 stealth with the default settings, left and with the gaming and web design profile, right. The next figure shows how well the display is able to reproduce really dark parts of an image, which is essential when watching movies or playing games in low ambient light. The left side of the image represents the display with stock settings, while the right one is with the gaming and web design profile activated. On the horizontal axis, you will find the gray scale, and on the vertical axis the luminance of the display. In the two graphs below you can easily check for yourself how your display handles the darkest nuances, but keep in mind that this also depends on the settings of your current display, the calibration, the viewing angle, and the surrounding light conditions. We test the reaction time of the pixels with the usual black to white and white to black method from 10% to 90% and vice versa. We recorded fall time plus rise time equals 10 milliseconds. And with the 240 Hz refresh rate this screen is superb for gaming purposes. Pulse width modulation, PWM, is an easy way to control monitor brightness. When you lower the brightness, the light intensity of the backlight is not lowered, but instead turned off and on by the electronics, with a frequency indistinguishable to the human eye. In these light impulses, the light no light time ratio varies, while brightness remains unchanged, which is harmful to your eyes. You can read more about that in our dedicated article on PWM, MSIGS 66 Steltz display is PWM 3 above 71 nits. The backlight uses PWM below 20% brightness, and it has a high enough frequency, so it doesn't introduce an excessive strain to the eyes in this aspect. Installing our health guard profile not only eliminates PWM, but also reduces the harmful blue light emissions, while keeping the colors of the screen perceptually accurate. If you're not familiar with the blue light, the TLDR version is emissions that negatively affect your eyes, skin, and your whole body. You can find more information about that in our dedicated article on blue light. MSIGS 66 Steltz IPS panel has a full HD resolution, comfortable viewing angles, and a good contrast ratio. Moreover, it sports a wide color coverage with 95% of the sRGB gamut, and its backlight doesn't flicker at luminance levels above 71 nits, below that, the frequency is very high, which is good. Using the sRGB preset not only provides you wide color coverage, but also accurate color representation. Combined with the 240 Hz refresh rate and quick pixel response times, this device is great for gaming, professional work, and retail purposes. Now, we conduct the battery tests with Windows Better Performance setting turned on, screen brightness adjusted to 120 nits, and all other programs turned off, except for the one we are testing the notebook with. This notebook's huge 99.9 watt battery offers 6 hours and 58 minutes of web browsing, and 7 hours and 42 minutes of video playback. This device is sold with processors part of the Komet Lake H family. Here you can see an approximate comparison between the CPUs that can be found in the MSIGS 66 Steltz 10SG 10SF models on the market. This way you can decide for yourself which MSIGS 66 Steltz is the best bang for your buck. In terms of graphics, you can get the GeForce RTX 2060, RTX 2070 MaxQ, RTX 2070 Super MaxQ, and the RTX 2080 Super MaxQ. Here you can see an approximate comparison between the GPUs that can be found in the MSIGS 66 Steltz. This way you can decide for yourself which MSIGS 66 Steltz was the best bang for your buck. Checkpoint that's the entry. Vehicles on the move. Patrol vehicle. Contractors. Security. Good targets. No Russian military presence. Call it in CIA. Blue Viking 5. This is Echo 3-1. Troops in the open south gate. You are cleared hot. Roger 3-1. Target acquired. Weapons free in 5 seconds. 5 seconds. Much obliged, Viking. We'll take it from here. Clear. Force up. Since someone was pulling the fire, there was a Mariahawk in this chemical ship. On our side, boys, stay frosty. Double doors on the corner lead out. Stay sharp. We're blind on this breach. We need to secure the gas before they move it. Extrins not close. Guns are down. Eyes below. Good. We're inside. It's a long drop. First blood and it's not us. Wonderful. In this test we use 100% on the CPU cores, monitoring their frequencies and chip temperature. The first column shows a computer's reaction to a short load, 2-10 seconds. The second column simulates a serious task, between 15 and 30 seconds. And the third column is a good indicator of how good the laptop is for long loads, such as video rendering. Interestingly, only one of the three fans spins when there is only CPU load applied. This greatly reduces the efficiency of the cooling, which is reflected on the results we got. If we have to be honest, despite the quite high temperatures of the RTX 2070 Max-Q, it appears to work pretty well, especially compared to the Legion Y740-17. Well, the Predator Helios 300-17 2019, with its turbo mode, annihilates what we got here, but it was significantly louder as well. By the way, this unit has an 80 watt version of this GPU. Well, the fans are clearly spinning up during gaming. But this is not what worries us. Instead, we were more baffled by the temperatures on the bottom panel, which don't seem to be improved over last year's notebook. Keep the GS66 stealth away from your legs. From the design to the inside, the GS66 stealth is miles ahead of its predecessor. Not only it looks better, in our view, but it is sturdier and offers upgrade options that are far easier to access. Also, the 99.9 watt battery lasts for almost 7 hours of web browsing and 40 minutes more of video playback. You can definitely bring your gaming machine to class, a seminar, or just at the coffee shop. One of the best features of this device is the display. MSI GS66 stealth's IPS panel, Sharp LQ156M1JW03 SHP14C5 has a full HD resolution, comfortable viewing angles, and a good contrast ratio. Moreover, it sports a wide color coverage with 95% of the sRGB gamut, and its backlight doesn't flicker at luminance levels above 71 nits. Below that, the frequency is very high, which is good. Using the sRGB preset not only provides you wide color coverage, but also accurate color representation. Combined with the 240 Hz refresh rate and quick pixel response times, this device is great for gaming, professional work, and retail purposes. Not many displays feature calibration software embedded into their gamer-centric apps. And we really appreciate it. This, combined with the capable hardware that spans to Core i9-10980HK, an RTX 2080 Super Max-Q, and that can fit 64 GB of DDR4 memory and 2M2 drives, are something that not only gamers will like. Content creators, 3D designers, and architects might find using this machine a piece of cake. Also, it has Wi-Fi 6 support, as well as a Thunderbolt 3 port. Sadly, it lacks an SD card slot in any form, and the keyboard isn't the best for typing and gaming. Nevertheless, you can enjoy per-key RGB backlighting, so you get 50 points of coolness more than your non-RGB friends. So once again, another year has passed and MSI has left another small, or not so small, issue to be solved. Once they fix the external temperatures of their stealth series, we would definitely be recommending them. Until then, please use a cooling pad. Also, you can check the Lenovo Legion 715, which is a very decent machine, as well.