MSI GF63 12VE (2023) - Nuclear Review

Originally published in early 2023. Text review adapted from YouTube video script. Original video available at youtube.com/@NuclearNotebook.

This is MSI’s cheapest gaming laptop, and more often than not, it’s also the cheapest gaming laptop on the market.

Debuting all the way back in 2018 as one of the first low-cost laptops with thin-ish display bezels, the GF63 Thin is an ancient design by laptop standards, and MSI have kept this thing chugging along by simply swapping the chips out every year.

The pitch for this one – and part of the name – is that it’s a Thin gaming laptop, but at 2 and a half centimetres thick, it’s a bit hard to see what they’re on about.

It looks decidedly chubby next to a Gigabyte Aero 16:

It is remarkably lightweight though. Almost disconcertingly lightweight: coming in at only 1.8 kilos (plus 455g for the AC adapter), the GF63 almost feels like it’s got something missing on the inside. Hold that thought.

In the Box

Included in the box is not too much, just the laptop, a 180-watt power brick, some of the usual paraphernalia asking for too much information, and a caddy for installing a 2 and a half inch SSD or hard disk. Yep, it’s 2018 alright.

Almost unbelievably, this laptop arrived completely free of obvious factory defects or cosmetic blemishes.

There’s some genuine comedy in the fact that the cheapest MSI product is the first one I’ve seen that they’ve managed to slap together properly. Congratulations, I guess.

Design-wise, this is a fairly generic bland black laptop with a thin brushed-aluminium skin on both the display lid and the keyboard palmrest.

While they are just stuck on like a posh Dbrand skin, the aluminium inserts are actually quite well integrated with surprisingly tight tolerances around the edges.

Despite all sorts of chaotic triangles and fake vents dotted around the bottom it’s still pleasantly boring to look at from most angles.

Aside from the bright red dragon on the lid and the red-lit keyboard, it does a pretty good job of just looking like “An Laptop”.

So, cheap, lightweight, and inoffensive.

There’s probably a catch somewhere, so let’s have a closer look.

External Interface Extravaganza

On the right-hand side of the machine, there’s separate headphone and microphone jacks, two USB 3 Type-A ports, one USB type-C with DisplayPort, Gigabit Ethernet and a Kensington lock:

At the rear is a lonely HDMI port:

And on the left is the DC-in jack, another USB 3 Type-A, and a battery status light.

Note that the USB-C port does not support charging the device, and the HDMI is version 1.4 which only supports a refresh rate of 30Hz at 4K.

Disappointing but at least there aren’t any USB 2.0 ports.

Input Devices

I was expecting bad things from the trackpad, but against all odds, it's actually pretty serviceable.

The button is well weighted and has a satisfying click, which you can activate fairly easily from anywhere on the lower two thirds of the tracking surface.

Accuracy is good, palm rejection is good, and it doesn't fight with you too much when you need to one-hand a gaming session because chips.

The plastic surface feels OK for now but it will degrade with use. Glass trackpads are far more durable but they are more expensive so you wouldn't expect to see one here.

Even moreso than the trackpad, the red backlit keyboard is surprisingly decent, and noticeably nicer to use than the one fitted to the more expensive MSI Sword 15.

The layout certainly makes more sense than the Sword's, with the FN key close to both brightness and volume controls, and there's a row of useful keys down the right hand side instead of a hopelessly squished number pad.

Key switches have a short throw which I found a little jarring at first, but after adapting to hitting them a bit less firmly than usual, I've decided I quite like these. They've got a good tactile response and they’re pleasantly stable and precise-feeling.

It's even nice and quiet.

Keyboard flex is close to nonexistent while typing, although you can induce some in the centre if you're keen.

There’s actually a surprising 3 layers of material inside contributing to the relative solidity of the keyboard deck – under the aluminium skin is a thick layer of plastic, and below the keyboard this is further reinforced with another metal sheet.

Disappointingly, the keyboard is plastic-welded in and can’t be replaced.

While the typing experience is generally decent, the leading edge of the palmrest is where a few different materials and textures smash together and the result is a fairly jagged ridge that will occasionally bite you.

Hinges & Disappointment

Some of you might have known this was coming: We can’t talk about the display assembly without addressing the hinge.

I have decades of experience repairing laptops and at this point I just expect MSI’s hinges to consistently be the weakest designs on the market, and this machine is no exception.

It’s certainly not trying to hide it – from new, there’s a very distinctive crunching sound every time you move the display.

Having a look from inside, behind the display’s lower bezel, things are grim.

Anchor points for the lid are far too short and narrow, and the miniscule screws go straight into tiny plastic standoffs that are grouped far too close together.

This design concentrates a high force in a very small area and relies on thin, brittle plastic to bear the load.

Without any reinforcement, these little plastic standoffs bend back and forth slightly every time you open and close the screen, causing them to fatigue and eventually fail which usually manifests in the hinge being suddenly torn out of the display bezel, and your day being ruined.

Replacement lid assemblies are readily available for the GF63, but they’re not cheap, and because MSI use aggresively sticky double-sided tape to attach the LCD to the lid you’ve got a high chance of cracking the screen while removing it.

This right here is a valid reason to avoid this laptop entirely, you are buying a product that is almost guaranteed to fail and will be expensive and wasteful to repair.

That’s textbook planned obsolescence.

Given the low price and resultant enormous sales figures on the GF63, we’re going to press on, but you’ve been warned, and I would strongly urge you to consider buying something more durable.

Display

Now you're probably not expecting much from the screen, so you probably won't be disappointed. Brightness is low at 250 nits, colour gamut coverage is well below the minimum-acceptable sRGB standard, and as is the case far too often in this class of machine everything looks dull and miserable.

Webcam & Microphones

Above the display is the usual array of poor quality webcam and stereo microphones.

The dim, grainy image and very poor sound quality are perfect for re-enacting a 2008 unboxing of Grand Theft Auto 4.

Fabulous.

Sound

The frustratingly-downward-firing speakers installed in the GF63 are the familiar ugly little rectangular units fitted to pretty much every low-end laptop. Speaker enclosures are impressively large and they are shock mounted to avoid vibration.

If you’re using Windows, MSI bundles the Nahimic software which provides user-adjustable audio processing to get the most out of the internal sound system. This is a pretty big, bloated mess of an application, with far more knobs and sliders than I think you really need, but at least there is a lot of scope for personalisation.

When set up the way I prefer, with everything other than bass and treble enhancement turned off, audio is best described as adequate. It goes loud enough to drown out the fans, and won’t blow out your eardrums, but there’s little to no bass or higher frequencies and it just sounds a bit “MEH”.

On the plus side, the integrated headphone amplifier seems pretty good, doing a great job of powering my big Focals, so that’s something.

Storage

The included SSD is a half-terabyte Samsung PM9B1.

Read and write speeds are fairly typical for this class of laptop, at around half the speed of the best PCIE 4 SSDs.

Once again, MSI have not put a heat spreader over the controller or NAND flash, instead shoving two pointless thermal pads on the wrong side of the drive.

Software – Power/Temp controls

MSI Centre is where you’ll find most controls for the laptop, including power modes, fan curve customization, and general system settings.

This software is frustratingly laid out, hiding commonly-used buttons behind annoying animations, and after every update, it requires you to agree to the privacy policy again.

In case you’re wondering, at this point in time there’s nothing too concerning in that privacy policy, but it’s unnerving how often you might need to check it for dodgy changes.

On the plus side, power modes can be selected from within the BIOS, so you don’t need to have MSI Centre installed unless you want to use a specific feature in the app.

Battery & Power Draw

Power draw on the GF63 is extremely conservative by gaming laptop standards.

The 52 watt hour battery fitted to this unit is reporting 51.5 watt hours after calibrating over a few charge cycles which is acceptably close to the rated capacity. This will gradually drop with use.

Battery runtimes are exactly as bad as you'd expect from a small battery with powerful-ish components.

Charging from empty, it took exactly one hour to hit 50%, and 3 hours to get back up to 100%. That's almost impressively slow.

When it finally wears out, the battery is difficult and potentially dangerous to replace since MSI have decided to mount it with double-sided tape instead of screws, so if you’re removing it you will need to use extreme caution.

There are multiple ribbon cables loosely hanging underneath the battery as well so care needs to be taken not to damage any of these.

Removal can take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour depending on how much it fights you and the part number is BTY-M6K.

Processor

The processor included here is an Intel Core i5-12450H, which is a fairly interesting chip with four Alder Lake performance cores with hyperthreading, and four Gracemont efficiency cores, for a total of 12 threads.

The CPU is fed by what looks to be a 5+2+1 phase power supply, with 5 phases for the CPU cores.

Memory

The RAM supplied with this unit is a pair of 8GB Samsung DDR4-3200 single-rank chips with CAS latency of of 22. It’s good to see laptops in this class are finally shipping with dual-channel memory more often than not.

Graphics

And of course the GPU is a GeForce RTX 4050, so there’s 2560 CUDA cores, 48 ROPs, and 80 TMUs.

Memory is an acceptable 6 gigabytes but unfortunately it’s being choked by a very narrow 96-bit memory bus.

Maximum TGP is a wildly low 45 watts, and since this laptop supports Nvidia Dynamic Boost the power will vary during gameplay.

Power delivery for the GPU is provided by a very minimalistic 2+1 phase power supply.

Cooling System

The system tasked with extracting heat from these parts is what could be described as half of a cooler.

It’s a very basic design with three heatpipes and one 50-millimetre fan pushing cool air over two heat exchangers.

Without the fan, the cooling assembly weighs in at a miniscule 121 grams. Less weight means less thermal mass and that means the fan has to kick in faster to deal with spikes in heat output, and in this case you’ll pretty much hear it ramping up constantly even with the machine mostly idle.

Fan noise is generally quiet, but the constant fluctuations are annoying.

Factory thermal paste application is pretty much perfect, and covers the entirety of both dies.

Coldplate surfaces aren’t too bad, with only very light scuffing which will have no impact on temperatures.

The GPU’s VRM circuitry is no contacted by the cooler at all, so they’re relying on minimal airflow to keep the temperatures under control.

Having a look at this with a thermal camera, the MOSFETs seemed to max out at around 80 degrees which is completely OK, but they’re still easily the hottest components on the entire board and I’m not sure I’d trust this setup to stay within spec on a hot day.

Another knock against the cooler is that you can’t take the fan out to clear dust and cat hair out of the heatsink fins without removing the entire assembly. That’s very annoying since the fins need cleaning far more often than you should be repasting the chips, but you’re forced to do both jobs every time.

On the plus side, disassembly only takes around 10-15 minutes.

Power Delivery, Temperature

Now, because a gaming laptop is expected to run at full load for extended periods of time, we're going to have a look at how the temperatures and power delivery behave over a 30 minute torture test.

For this test, the laptop is in its Extreme Performance mode, sitting flat on the desk, with Cinebench 23 and MSI Kombustor running together for 30 minutes.

Data is recorded approximately every half second and clock speeds won’t be included since they’ll vary wildly depending on the workload.

Power for the Core i5 is kept within a range of 20 to 30 watts with the expected brief drops every time Cinebench restarts. You can safely ignore those outliers down the bottom.

Temperature briefly spikes but settles in the mid 70s and stays there. No problems here.

The RTX 4050 GPU is similarly consistent, hanging out around the targeted 45 watts for the duration of the test.

The GPU temperature hangs out right at 70 degrees, with the GPU hotspot just barely nudging 80.

And lastly, video memory just about matches the GPU core temperature, sitting just under 70 degrees.

So, we’ve got a machine indended to dissipate around 70 watts of heat, that does a good job of dissipating 70 watts of heat.

That’s decidedly a good thing, and means this lightweight little machine with a single fan is doing a better job than the very expensive Dell XPS 15 that embarassed itself on NuclearNotebook’s test bench last year.

Good stuff.

If you’re wondering whether a laptop stand or cooler would drop temperatures any further, here’s a side-by-side of the GF sitting directly on the desk, and elevated on a fanless stand.

Can you tell which is which? Didn’t think so!

The GF63 is the first laptop I’ve seen with ventilation so adequate, and cooling requirements so low, that you may as well just park it on the desk.

Despite all this, you still can’t get away with gaming with this one on your lap, as the temperatures underneath are far too high.

Speaking of surface temperatures, they’re generally kept well under control in areas you’re likely to touch such as the keyboard and palmrests, and that’s especially impressive given that there’s a conductive metal skin in this area.

Gaming

So, low wattage, a small processor, and a tiny GPU. Hmmm...

Against all odds, the GF turns out to be a passable setup for running triple-A games at framerates above 60, provided you’re happy to be conservative with the settings.

You’ll find the occasional game that you can crank up to Ultra, but for all the heavy titles I tested, the sweet spot for decent graphics and a high framerate seems to be Medium.

It’s impressive to see a 45-watt GPU handling heavy games this well, and shows how much of an improvement in performance-per-watt Nvidia’s new Ada architecture has over their previous Ampere and Turing generations.

A real knock against this configuration for gaming is that Core i5. It’s usually being run at less than 30 watts, and while it’s managing to just about keep up for the most part, in many games it’s being pushed to its absolute limit and can cause noticeable stutters here and there. Nothing game-breaking, but it’s not enough to guarantee a buttery-smooth experience

Relative Gaming Performance

Gathering benchmark data from numerous games to position the GF63 on our Relative Gaming Performance chart, things are looking OK, but not great.

The GF isn’t really on par with a last-generation laptop with an RTX 3060, but at least it’s still an improvement over anything with an RTX 3050 or 3050 Ti.

Looking to the future, it feels like this will be the bare minimum to get games running sooner rather than later, so gameplay performance definitely isn’t even close to a selling point here.

Conclusion

The GF63’s performance is, by design, crippled by low power delivery to the CPU and GPU, battery life is terrible, the display is terrible, the design and construction are appalling from the perspective of durability, and it’s generally unnecessarily difficult to repair.

The only genuine positives here are a decent enough keyboard & trackpad, low weight, and low power consumption. That’s it.

So. I think it goes without saying that it’s impossible to recommend this laptop & we would strongly suggest that you look for something - or maybe anything - else!