I ve Waited 15 Years For This Laptop

I have a dream. A dream where I own a powerful laptop capable of handling everything I throw at it. From work, gaming, video editing, and everything in between. Something strong enough that it could replace my whole desktop. It can dock to all my displays and peripherals and take over entirely. But for me, this dream relies on one key thing. I only want to plug in one cable. Look, owning a laptop powerful enough to replace people's desktops, that's not new. But I've been put off by that idea for one simple, if petty, reason. I hate plugging in a bunch of cables every time you dock your laptop. Those gaming laptops draw tons of power, so they need huge power bricks to keep them afloat. A dock simply couldn't keep them charged under load. And that means I'm plugging in at least two cables every time I dock, which is just super annoying. Worse still, if you wanted to run more than one 4K or high refresh rate screen, due to current dock limitations, your monitor has to degrade the quality like crazy for it to work. However, after years of patient waiting and biding my time, the tides may finally be turning. There's new fancy technology on the street. Thunderbolt 5, maybe you've heard of it. It does all sorts of crazy new stuff with its improved specs, but the two things I care about are simple. It charges twice as fast and has enough data to natively handle even the 4K-est of monitors. Or so they say. It almost sounds too good to be true. This is a dream I've been waiting decades for. And now, finally, it may be possible. All I need to do is find a laptop that can do it all. The requirements were fairly simple. If it's going to handle not just office work, but also gaming, editing, and so on, I would need a proper gaming laptop with a 1440p display, a solid GPU, and a CPU. I don't want to completely break the bank, so the goal is to land between $1,500 and $2,000. Since the goal is to have this docked most of the time, we're going to be doing things at 1440p and even 4K. That means a graphics card with plenty of VRAM, and lastly, at least one Thunderbolt 5 port to make all of it happen. With that criteria, you'd think I'd have a huge range of options, but you'd be surprised how much that whittles things down. First, since the laptop is supposed to do everything, that includes productivity and 3D work. AMD's GPUs still struggle super hard with anything 3D, even to this day, which unfortunately means AMD graphics cards are out. Thunderbolt 5 is relatively new, so most any laptop that has it is going to have a 50 series GPU. There are some 40 series that came out at the end of the cycle, but they pretty much only cover the super expensive stuff, like over $3,000 expensive, so that's no good. Okay, so a 50 series graphics card, but which one? We can pretty quickly rule out anything 50, 80, and above, since all start at $2,800 minimum, unless you find them on a wicked sale. Then DM me. I can't just cheap out here either though, because I still have that VRAM requirement. After all, it would be pretty stupid to go through all this trouble, dock to a 4K monitor, then have the GPU face a midlife crisis because it runs out of VRAM in two seconds flat. This is where we run into a big problem. From my research, we're going to need at least 12 gigabytes of VRAM, but even the RTX 5070 is only a piddly gigabytes. Thanks Nvidia. But every Thunderbolt 5 laptop with a 5070 Ti starts at $2,500. That's over my budget. I think you see the problem now. I dug and dug and dug, hoping for some sort of clever way to square this circle, but I just couldn't find anything. Until eventually, when applying what must have been 30 filters at once, I stumbled upon this. A laptop with Thunderbolt 5, an RTX 5070, 1440p screen, everything on the list for only $2,000. And what's more, there was a used like new listing for $1,700. Is this it? Was this too good to be true? I refreshed the page a few times to make sure it wasn't a pricing error, and it wasn't. So with this, the first step in my dream just might be complete. I might have found the do-everything laptop. I just needed to get it, see if there was some sort of catch, as well as see if Thunderbolt 5 really does live up to the vision. There was fantastic news just around the corner because once they found out we were wanting to do this experiment, MSI ended up sending us one for free. And if you know me, you know I'm not turning down saving $1,700. Plus this video isn't sponsored in any way, so if I hate it, I can talk all the trash I want. Fast forward about a week, and my potential dream had arrived. One unboxing later, I set it up at my Ryder Tyson's desk for testing. After all, he's the gamer of the bunch. But before we set this laptop up, I need to tell you about these printers from today's sponsor, for printing your perfect color-graded photos. One for your desk, and one for on the go. This one is called the Pearl N200 Pro. It's an instant portable printer that connects to your phone wirelessly via Bluetooth. Setup is super simple. You just pop in a ribbon cartridge, photo paper, connect it to your phone, and you're good to go in under a minute. It prints out three-inch photos and comes with adhesive backing. It can even connect up to three devices, so you and your family or your friends can queue up the printer from their own phones during your holiday trips. The app also comes with an insta pic mode that has a bunch of different classic camera filters. You can customize it, and the colors come out gorgeous every time. It even has lamination, so the colors don't fade, smudge, or run if they happen to get caught in a little rain, or your toddler's sticky hands happen to get on it. But if a smaller printer doesn't cut it for you, then don't worry. There's a bigger printer for those bigger moments, the Lian Amber. Even though this photo printer is bigger and prints up to six-inch photos, it still has a super small footprint and can fit almost anywhere on your desk. The setup is just as easy and simple as the N200. You can swap out the regular six-inch paper for the square three-inch photo paper, and with the app, you can print multiple photos in one using the collage feature. If you love having physical photos to keep or give out to your family and friends, you can grab these printers using the link in the description below. Naturally, it comes pre-installed with Windows and all sorts of MSI software, so that process didn't take very long. But the unboxing experience of the OS itself didn't leave me a fantastic impression. MSI's Windows image comes loaded with not just their own software, but all sorts of third-party software. Sorry to say it, MSI, but I am not using Norton, no matter how much you beg. Five minutes of debloating later and all the pieces were in motion. It was time to put this bad boy to the test. Immediately, its performance in regular browsing applications was a lot better than most of the laptops we've tested on this channel, which of course makes sense. It costs several hundred dollars more than those laptops and weighs almost twice as much, but still a good start. I didn't really have any doubt in that though. It was the higher end I wanted to see stick the landing. There were three big boxes I needed checked for this dream to finally come to fruition. Does Thunderbolt 5 have the ability to dock multiple 4k monitors without degrading the image quality? Does this laptop have the horsepower and specs to crank out some serious gaming and productivity? And is Thunderbolt 5 able to keep the laptop charged while it's at that heavy load? The good news is the first box was easy to test. Now I know what you might be thinking. You might have a laptop you use that's able to do the same thing without the Thunderbolt 5 tech. But the key phrase here is without degrading the image quality. Most cheaper, less sophisticated docks are able to connect to plenty of monitors, but they do so through a term you've probably seen before. Display link. The problem with display link is that it has to make do while constantly biting off more than it can chew. Since its connection isn't actually fast enough to handle all the video data to the monitor, it does a pro gamer move called using software and your GPU to heavily compress the video stream and then send that degraded version to the monitor. The result is you do get video on your monitors with a single cable, but everything looks noticeably worse. Watch what happens when we even scroll up and down on this web page using display link. Even that is enough to turn everything into a garbled jpeg looking mess. That's no good. But Thunderbolt 5 has enough throughput built into it that it simply shoots all the raw uncompressed video straight to the monitor. No software, no CPU compression, just straight video. Yes, that's one checkbox out of the way. Unfortunately, there is also bad news. Before we even got to the next checkbox, we ran into a problem. Things started acting up. Sometimes the laptop was just stopped charging entirely, even though it was plugged in. If I unplugged and replugged the USB-C port, then it'd start charging. But eventually, we'd be right back to square one. Was it already happening? Was my dream crumbling before my very eyes? Things weren't adding up though. It wasn't doing this before, so I don't think it was a hardware limitation. That leaves only one option. Drivers. It's always drivers, isn't it? Thankfully, there's one piece of pre-installed MSI bloat I actually left intact. MSI Center. I didn't keep it for its bad hardware monitor or its stupid MSI AI engine feature, but because it has a single page to check and install all your specific laptop's drivers. It does have some other useful stuff, like quick toggling some key settings or RGB, but I'm really just here for the drivers. Sure enough, with only a couple clicks, I got them all installed, and suddenly, the charging issue went away. So all is solved, right? So why am I not moving on to the next point? Oh yeah, because all was not solved. Sure, the charging problem was gone, but more arose from its ashes. Windows instability, fluctuating performance, Windows passwords losing their minds for no reason. Basically, every day we came into work, something new was wrong. This, folks, is where we discover an oft-forgotten truth of any Windows laptop. The Windows install they come with sucks. 90% of the time, whatever manufacturer made the laptop has an OS template they use for their installs. So you buy a laptop from MSI, and they install Windows plus MSI stuff. But they're not specific. They aren't selecting this model number in a dropdown. So not only is your install coming with all sorts of bloat, but the drivers are filled with tiny little conflicts or incompatibilities, or who knows what. The solution is simple, and the lesson I am now thoroughly convinced of. If you buy a Windows laptop, just immediately reinstall Windows Fresh. It's annoying, but it's gonna save you loads of time and troubleshooting. So exactly one fresh Windows install later, wouldn't you know it, everything was working smooth as butter. The laptop was charging, the passwords were working, nothing was crashing, and the world was right once again. Finally, testing my dream could begin in earnest. Let's bring back up the boxes. We've already taken care of one. Up next is this one. Is this laptop even capable of real performance, of true gaming and productivity? Now, I could have benchmarked a bunch of games on the laptop's native screen and done a bunch of analysis on those results. But let's be honest, there are more science-y channels out there that have benchmarked thousands of games and pass-marked tests on this laptop. If that's all I needed, I'd just go watch those videos. Instead, I wanted to see how gaming could fare on an external display. A 1440p monitor is actually slightly lower resolution than this laptop screen, so it'd perform even better. And then, obviously, a 4k monitor would put it to its limits. So we did just that. We docked it to both monitors and ran some tests. At 1440p, obviously, lighter games like Stardew Valley, Slay the Spire ran like a dream. The fps would go just as high as you could imagine. But what about big boy AAA games? We ran through a chunk of them, and honestly, the laptop performed pretty darn well. Rivals ran at a full high settings, no frame jam at around 60 fps. Once we bumped the settings to a more reasonable medium, it was hitting all the way to 120. For a much prettier game, I booted up the much prettier Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, and at medium settings, it was cranking an impressive 80 plus fps, even with OBS running. Without OBS, it was chilling at 90. That's exactly what I like to see. The dream is taking form. What about 4k, though? Can this tiny thing really handle 9 million pixels? Well, yes and no. First, there wasn't really any game we threw at it that it couldn't handle to some extent. It really just came down to performance and trade-offs. Again, simpler games like Slay the Spire are obviously immune. But for games like Final Fantasy, even lowering the settings to medium is going to net you around 45 fps, which is workable and impressive for a laptop. I kind of thought it would do worse than that, honestly. And once you lower it to actual low settings, the laptop hovers around 60. Very playable. Look at that. AAA 4k, 60 fps gaming from a laptop. Rivals was pretty much the same. You had to tune the settings down to low to get past 60 fps. Though again, it's worth mentioning that what you're seeing is with OBS running at the same time. When we tested without recording, you can add 10 fps or so to all these numbers. Overall, I'm impressed. This is managing pretty much exactly what I was hoping for. Excellent performance, over 100 fps on a 1440p monitor, and managing 60 fps at 4k. There's one more thing, which left us to the last biggest hurdle before the dream is a reality. Sure, the Thunderbolt 5 dock keeps this thing charged when it's conserving power and using its integrated GPU. But what about when you set it loose and when it's using the 5070ti and the fans are spinning like crazy? That's a lot of power. And I'm just not certain a USB-C's power delivery can keep up. This is the make it or break it moment because the whole point is doing everything through one cable. I know it sounds petty, but if I have to plug in both the Thunderbolt cable and this power brick around back every time I dock and undock, well, the dream is pretty much dead. I mean, have you seen this thing? It's like two pounds. So for the final time, we got to testing. I really wanted to push this thing to its limits, so we booted up a bunch of games at 4k while also downloading other games and OBS running. The fans were spinning, the GPU was getting hot, all the while I was watching the battery level, watching, sweating, worrying. I'm too close for this to fail now. But much to my dismay, the battery percent started going down. After almost exactly one hour of gaming and downloading and recording, we'd lost 10% battery. Now, technically, that means we could get 10 hours of straight max performance through one cable, which isn't terrible. But that's not the dream. It was over. So close, yet so far. But then I noticed something. Once the battery hit 90%, it stopped going down. It stayed there. We played for another 30 minutes, nothing. What's going on? Well, as it turns out, MSI has a built-in feature to help prolong your battery life, where if you start charging it above 90%, it doesn't charge until you get to 90%. Keeping a battery charged at full capacity is bad for its lifespan after all. So maybe all that loss was just that feature and nothing more. Filled with hope, or maybe it was just desperation. We tried once more, this time starting at 89%. We swapped to Final Fantasy to really push its limits, last chance it was now or never. And as the minutes passed by, the battery level held stable. Sometimes Windows would get a bit confused and fluctuate down a percent. But in fact, at the end of an hour-long test, it actually ended up 4% higher than when it started. Folks, break out the champagne, open up the boxes of streamers. It's happened. The dream is a reality. In my hands is a laptop that can dock to multiple 4k screens with no quality loss, run 1440p and 4k workloads, and stay completely charged all through one cable. No hassle, no mess of cables to deal with every time you dock and undock. And for a relatively reasonable price, well, for laptops anyways. In fact, if you don't demand a 1440p screen like I did, this laptop has a model with a 1080p screen and a slightly downgraded processor for only $1,500. Now that's affordable. I've literally been waiting for this moment since I first heard of Thunderbolt existing. So this experiment being a success brings me great joy. Even just as a general gaming laptop, it does well. We measured around seven hours of battery life in mixed use, the keyboard makes some very clever choices to save space, and the 240hz screen, it's a real nice bonus. That's certainly not to say it's perfect. It's out-of-the-box experience is awful, and being this powerful means the fans are audible all the time, even when just browsing the internet. But so far, after a few tweaks, my time with it has been pretty great. I really look forward to processors and graphics cards continuing to improve over the years, because the day everyone at home can achieve this dream for a leaner price, well that will be a beautiful day.