MSI Sword 15 (2022) - Nuclear Review

Originally published in late 2022. Text review adapted from YouTube video script. Original video currently only available at patreon.com/NuclearNotebook.

This is an MSI Sword 15, which means that fundamentally it’s the exact same design as the Katana, Crosshair, Bravo, and Pulse.

While fairly inexpensive, it’s important to note that this is not MSI’s cheapest gaming laptop – that title goes to the GF63 – and so you’d probably expect that there aren’t too many corners cut here.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case, and it doesn’t take long to see that you’re better off looking at something else.

This particular unit is a 2022 model with Core i7-12700H and an RTX 3050. This configuration ships with 16 gigabytes of RAM in dual-channel and a half-terabyte SSD. Higher end configurations exist, but they shouldn’t.

In the Box

Included in the box is very little – laptop, 180-watt power brick, and multiple documents begging you to give MSI your personal information, totally not to sell on to third parties, trust me bro.

Kicking things off on a low note, this unit wasn’t clipped together properly at the factory, but that’s not the worst build quality failure I’ve seen on an MSI product.

External Interface Extravaganza

Connectivity is basic but adequate.

Starting on the right hand side, there’s a battery status indicator, combined headphone/microphone jack, a USB 3 type-A, a single USB-C port which does not support charging the laptop, HDMI, and gigabit Ethernet.

The rear end is totally devoid of ports, and along the left we have the DC-in jack, one more USB 3 type A and, quite amusingly, a USB 2.0 port.

While a bit small and fragile, the DC-in jack is an easily replaceable part.

The two USB type-A ports on the left are the only other ports mounted to a replaceable daughterboard, while the remainder are soldered directly to the motherboard.

Vents, Daggers & Weights

Underneath, we have quite a lot of ventilation. While none of this is directly over the fans, that’s not the end of the world, especially with the amount of internal clearance in this machine.

A major oversight in the design is this collection of little plastic daggers dotting the underside. They’re there to stop the machine bending in a way that reduces airflow to the cooler – never a good sign – but in practice they make it incredibly irritating to use on your lap. They’re sharp, and they dig into your legs like crazy.

The Sword 15 weighs in at 2.295 kilograms, and the power supply adds 453 grams.

Amusingly, some of this weight is very literally deadweight – stuck to the bottom shell is a big hunk of metal, doing nothing more exciting than weighing the corner of the laptop down.

It's only held on by a thin layer of adhesive, but there is a big rubber block helping hold it in place, so maybe it won’t fall off and start shorting things out. Or maybe it will. Who knows.

This fun easter egg weighs in at 149 grams, or 5 goldfish in Freedom Units.

Open Up

This lid on this machine is *extremely* wobbly. It just constantly wiggles back and forth, all the time.

That’s not due to loose hinges – it’s simply the result of soft plastics with no reinforcement. At both ends, the hinge mechanisms bolt straight into plastic standoffs. What you’re looking at is the worst hinge design of any laptop I’ve covered so far. Congratulations, MSI.

Shown here is the hinge bracket where it attaches to the palmrest assembly:

And where the hinge is bolted to the display housing:

Input Devices

The trackpad is small, plastic, and has a very stiff and unpleasant click mechanism.

Taking a look from the other side, you can see why – this is an amusingly, let’s say, cost-optimized setup, which uses two cheap pieces of foam pressed up against the battery as the spring mechanism. Lovely.

The tracking surface is reasonable for now, but plastic trackpads always end up losing their roughened texture and become very slimy and sticky over time, and this one will be no exception.

The keyboard is a bit bizarre, and for more than one reason. Firstly, this numberpad has been squashed to death, losing all of its usability and becoming little more than a waste of space. Anyone who actually wants a numberpad won’t find this one useful, so it may as well have been omitted entirely.

Secondly, by default, the FN key is toward the lower right, and the function buttons mapped to volume control are in the top left. This means that changing the volume is a two-handed operation even if you have massive hands. This gets annoying pretty fast, especially when you’re using an external mouse so your right hand is nowhere near the Fn key.

Typing feel is marred by both a complete lack of any resistance in the key switches and the constantly noticeable flexing of the case, which has one of the squishiest keyboard decks I’ve ever encountered.

In fact, the only reinforcement underneath the keyboard is the frame directly below the keys; the rest is just soft plastic.

Display

Moving onto the display.

While it does support a 144hz refresh rate, this display is about as bad as they get.

Mine measured in with a hopeless 220 nits at maximum brightness, and covering only 59 percent of the sRGB colour gamut. Contrast is low at 1200:1, and while this is normal for IPS-type displays, it conspires with the washed-out colours and low brightness to make everything look dim and miserable.

I don’t want to game on a screen this poor, even for testing, and I only managed one or two game sessions on this one without switching to an external display.

This sort of garbage-tier display is almost expected in this class of laptop, but it shouldn’t be, and this is the worst offender so far.

Sound

The installed speaker system is small, basic, and low on power. Speaker enclosures are at least shock-mounted to minimize vibration.

For some reason, somebody has written the word LIE underneath the right-hand-side speaker with a blue Sharpie.

Under the left speaker is the number 14. The plot thickens.

Subjectively, sound is very weak and muffled and it can even be hard to hear over the fans under load.

Combine that with the appalling screen and, well, you get the idea. This isn’t a fun toy, it’s just frustrating.

DPC Latency (Windows)

Speaking of audio – here’s the LatencyMon results for DPC latency. Yep, once again it’s hopeless. You wouldn’t have a good time doing any audio work on this machine.

Storage

For storage there’s a Micron 2450 512GB NVMe SSD. This one is a PCIE 4.0 drive but read and write speeds are more like older PCIE 3 SSDs.

Surprisingly, there is only one M2 socket on this motherboard.

As delivered, there is no heat spreader or thermal pad on the controller or NAND flash, but MSI have decided to place a couple of useless thermal pads on the wrong side of the drive.

Battery

Runtimes from the 52 watt hour battery are dismal.

Using the Balanced power plan, while idle on the Windows desktop with the display set to full brightness – remembering that’s only 220 nits – the Sword managed 5 and a half hours.

Testing with my usual mix of heavy internet use, the battery clocked off for the day after 2 hours and 34 minutes. Yikes.

The battery is easily removed and the part number is BTY-M492.

Cooling & Power Delivery

The Sword 15 uses a basic ventilation system with 4 heatpipes and a pair of asymmetric fans,.

The cooler assembly, without fans, weighs 180g. The higher the weight, the more thermal mass, so the more heat a cooler can absorb and dissipate without cranking the fans up.

Coldplates on this cooler are in the worst shape I’ve ever seen. There’s an insane amount of scoring on these, pointing to an extremely lazy manufacturing process. Usually I’d say this shouldn’t cause any problems, but I don’t want to defend this.

Question: What’s short, skinny, and hugely underqualified for its job?

No, not you, it’s the Sword 15s CPU coldplate. This is being reused from older systems, as it isn’t wide enough to fully cover the Alder Lake Core i7, a large part of which just hangs out totally dry with no contact.

I think this might be the stupidest piece of cost-cutting I’ve ever seen in a laptop, and since we’re well beyond any sort of three-strikes-and-you’re-out rule, I think we’re done here.

In summary: No. Do not buy this.