MSI’s GS40 Phantom Gaming Notebook Sports Modest Frame, Not So Modest Internals

A search for a gaming notebook that happens to offer great performance and a modest form-factor is one that’s usually going to be in vain. Well, that’s at least how it used to be. Today, thanks to the continued evolution of our processors, it’s more than feasible to get a light notebook that packs a serious punch.

Take MSI’s GS40 Phantom, for example. This 14-inch notebook weighs 3.5lbs and measures just 0.86-inch thick. Despite that, it packs NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 970M mobile GPU under its hood, as well as Intel’s sixth-gen Skylake-based i7-6700HQ processor. Seriously – that’s some capable hardware, right there.

When I took ASUS’ G751JY gaming notebook for a spin earlier this year, I was blown-away by its GeForce 980M GPU. It allowed me to crank the detail levels of games at the notebook’s native resolution of 1080p, and didn’t shy away from games at 1440p when connected to an external monitor.

The 970M in MSI’s GS40 Phantom won’t deter too much from that. It offers 83% of the cores of the 980M, and a loss of about 100MHz on the core speed. Overall, it’s still going to let you run games at great detail at the notebook’s native resolution of 1080p. For something that weighs 3.5lbs, that’s impressive. ASUS’ G751JY was a 17-inch notebook that weighed 10.50lbs, by comparison.

On the CPU side of things, the Intel Core i7-6700HQ quad-core processor that graces this notebook is clocked at 2.6GHz, bursts to 3.5GHz, and offers HyperThreading.

Other specs include a 128GB PCIe SSD that’s paired with a 1TB 7200RPM HDD, 16GB of DDR4-2133 memory, Killer E2400 networking, 4 Dynaudio speakers, and as mentioned before, a 14-inch screen (non-reflective) with 1080p resolution. It’s also worth pointing out that the keyboard uses SteelSeries single-color backlighting.

MSI says that its GS40 Phantom is now available, but I’ve been unable to find it at e-tail at this point. Nonetheless, once you can find it in stock somewhere, this configuration can be yours for $1,599 USD.