Watch out, Nvidia—AMD’s “Navi” graphics silicon has gone mobile in MSI’s Delta 15 ($1,699 as tested), the first gaming laptop we’ve seen with the Radeon RX 6700M GPU. Also boasting an eight-core Ryzen 7 processor and a 240Hz high-refresh display, the Delta 15 is a force to be reckoned with. But though its performance is impressive, it comes at the expense of heat and fan noise. Given the MSI’s high-end focus, we’d also like to see PCI Express Gen 4 storage and better input devices. Alienware’s m15 Ryzen Edition R5 and Lenovo’s Legion 5 Pro remain our top picks among mid-priced gaming rigs, assuming you’re willing to live with a Team Green GPU. But if Team Red has your number, the Delta 15’s all-AMD call is hard to ignore.
Meet ‘AMD Advantage’
The MSI Delta 15 reviewed here is available at Best Buy. It sports AMD’s potent eight-core, 3.2GHz (4.4GHz turbo) Ryzen 7 5800H processor, 16GB of dual-channel DDR4-3200 memory, a 1080p screen with 240Hz refresh rate, and a 1TB solid-state drive loaded with Windows 10 Home. The machine can accommodate a second M.2 SSD, but both slots are restricted to PCIe Gen 3 drives. Given that the Delta 15 uses AMD’s latest platform, it should have supported PCIe Gen 4.
All that hardware qualifies the Delta 15 as an AMD Advantage laptop, a label intended to assure buyers that they’re getting a high-performance gaming notebook that can also work well for everyday use. The Delta 15 exceeds AMD’s requirements—a 144Hz or faster display, NVMe SSD storage, and 10 hours of video playback on battery power. The battery requirement is ambitious, though it’d be hard to sell a midrange or high-end gaming laptop today without the other two. Nonetheless, the label is an encouraging sign that a big tech company realizes buying a gaming PC (especially for parents buying for kids) should be simpler than it is.
The Delta 15’s most intriguing component is its Radeon RX 6700M GPU, AMD’s answer to Nvidia’s mobile GeForce RTX 3070. It has a 336-square-mm die and 17.2 billion transistors like the desktop Radeon RX 6700 XT, though it drops to 10GB of GDDR6 memory versus 12GB; 2,304 processing cores versus 2,560; and a 160-bit instead of 192-bit memory bus. Its boost clock is also much lower, at 1,836MHz versus 2,581MHz, but some downgrading is inevitable for mobile silicon. After all, the Radeon RX 6700M must operate with a fraction of the power (the Delta 15 laptop’s entire power supply is 240 watts, while AMD recommends at least 650 watts for the desktop GPU) and limited cooling.
Aluminum Always Looks Good
Moving away from paper specs, let’s check out the Delta 15’s spiffy aluminum chassis. Gunmetal gray all over, it’s a quality look. The aluminum is relatively thin and doesn’t feel as solid as that of the Razer Blade 15 Advanced Edition, though you’ll pay a lot more for the latter laptop.
The MSI measures 0.75 by 14.1 by 9.7 inches (HWD) and weighs a reasonable 4.2 pounds. That’s more portable than Acer’s Predator Helios 300 (0.9 by 14.3 by 10 inches, 4.85 pounds) and the Alienware m15 Ryzen Edition R5 (0.89 by 14 by 10.7 inches, 5.93 pounds).
It’s possible to open the lid with a one-handed flip. The bezels around the screen are thin, if not the thinnest out there. The 15.6-inch IPS display, as mentioned, has an esports-friendly 240Hz refresh rate, plus an anti-glare coating that minimizes reflections. We measured its peak brightness at 318 nits, which is just average for a gaming laptop, but its color gamut is above average at 100% coverage of sRGB, 77% of Adobe RGB, and 78% of DCI-P3. The screen does not support AMD FreeSync frame rate smoothing, which I find odd considering MSI’s less expensive, all-AMD Alpha 15 does. Ultimately, it’s not a big omission.
The Delta 15’s concise port selection includes four USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports (two Type-A and two Type-C), an audio combo jack, and an HDMI 2.0 video output.
The right-side USB-C port supports DisplayPort video output. There’s no Ethernet jack, but an Intel AX200 Wi-Fi 6 card covers wireless networking. The only real downside is that the ports are clustered around the midpoint of either edge, so peripherals you plug in might jut into your external mouse space. The included power adapter, which plugs in on the left, has a right-angle connector to avoid this problem.
So-So Controls
Input devices aren’t the Delta 15’s strong suit. Though the RGB keyboard backlight is bright enough, it’s all the same color; four color zones or per-key RGB control would be nice at this price. And though the keys have a comfortable feel, the layout has usability issues—the oversize left Control key, good for gaming but not much else, forces the Fn key to the right of the spacebar, making Fn-key combos awkward and leaving you a pinky-sized right Control key. The supplied MSI Center app lets you swap the Windows and Fn keys, but then Windows-key shortcuts become clumsy. These are nuances you can probably get used to if the Delta 15 is your only PC.
The buttonless touchpad also underwhelms, with an imprecise feel (created by a surface that has too much give) and physical clicks that are too stiff and loud. Interestingly, the pad is offset further to the right than usual to prevent your left palm from resting on it while gaming. As a right-hander, I like its placement because I don’t have to reach as far over.
Like most gaming laptops, the Delta 15 lacks a biometric fingerprint reader or IR face-recognition webcam. The 720p webcam above the display has the semi-blurry quality you’d expect; sharper 1080p cameras are still rare even on laptops more expensive than this one. Rounding out everything are the under-the-palmrest speakers, which project surprisingly well and have perceptible bass. A Nahimic software app lets you tweak basic audio settings or create your own EQ.
Benchmarking in the Red: Testing the MSI Delta 15
To recap, the $1,699 Best Buy version of the MSI Delta 15 seen here combines an eight-core Ryzen 7 5800H CPU, a 10GB Radeon RX 6700M GPU, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD. It’s backed by a one-year warranty. It briefly dropped to $1,599 while I was writing this review.
Comparatively, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 laptops command a premium; at Best Buy, for example, the Alienware m15 Ryzen Edition R5 cost $1,899 and the Acer Predator Triton 500 SE was $1,999, both with half as much storage (512GB) but finer QHD (2,560-by-1,440-pixel) screens. The Delta 15’s 1TB solid-state drive gives it strong appeal; today’s games make 512GB SSDs seem mighty restrictive.
Let’s get on with testing. The Delta 15 wasn’t a cool or quiet operator; its twin fans are noisy to the point of distraction at full tilt, especially in a quiet room. The fans could have been less sensitive, too; they tended to ramp up and down for seemingly mundane tasks such as web surfing. Heat-wise, this photo taken with our FLIR One Pro at the end of a 3DMark Time Spy stress test speaks for itself.
The metal above the keyboard reached 125 degrees F, which is too hot to touch. The laptop’s bottom was also scorching. Granted, the hottest areas are where your fingers normally wouldn’t be, and the keyboard stayed acceptably cool. Inside, the GPU hovered in the upper-80-degree C range with the CPU in the lower 80’s C, both of which are on the high side, but my GPU-Z logs showed no GPU throttling. The Radeon RX 6700M consumed between 105 and 110 watts of power in this scenario.
I compared the Delta 15 to the gaming laptops listed below. The only two that haven’t been introduced are the beastly 17.3-inch Alienware x17 and the 14-inch Asus ROG Zephyrus G14. All use Nvidia GPUs, starting with the midrange GeForce RTX 3060 in the Alienware Ryzen Edition R5 and the Asus and jumping to the flagship GeForce RTX 3080 in the Razer and the m17 R4. I didn’t have a GeForce RTX 3070 laptop for comparison, but assume one would land roughly between those two groups. (See our primer on why performance can vary so much among Nvidia RTX 30 Series laptops, and more about how we test laptops in general.)
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
Our first test is UL’s PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive. The Delta 15 scored well in the main test but only average in the storage test; it would likely have done better in the latter had it been equipped with a PCIe Gen 4 SSD.
Three other benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs’ Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
Our final productivity test is Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s famous image editor to rate a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It’s an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
The MSI Delta 15 and Alienware m15 Ryzen Edition R5 posted similar scores, a good sign considering they use the same Ryzen 7 5800H CPU. Both outperformed the Razer’s previous-generation Intel silicon, though the big Alienware’s newer Intel “Tiger Lake-H” chip topped them all.
Graphics and Gaming Tests
For Windows PCs, we run both synthetic and real-world gaming tests. The former includes two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark: Night Raid (more modest, suitable for systems with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). Also looped into that group is the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which we use to gauge OpenGL performance.
The Time Spy scores confirm that the Delta 15 slots somewhere between GeForce RTX 3060 and RTX 3080 laptops. However, it’s hard to make a general statement; the m15 Ryzen Edition R5 caught up with the Delta 15 with its GeForce RTX 3060, which has a higher power limit than most RTX 3060 laptops we’ve tested. (The Asus’ score illustrates that.)
Moving on, our real-world gaming testing comes from the in-game benchmarks of F1 2021, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege, representing simulation, open-world action-adventure, and competitive/esports shooter games respectively. On laptops, we run Valhalla and Siege twice (the first at Medium and Ultra quality, the second at Low and Ultra quality), while F1 2021 is run once at the Ultra quality preset. GeForce RTX laptops run F1 2021 a second time with Nvidia’s performance-boosting DLSS anti-aliasing turned on, something the Delta 15 can’t do.
The Delta 15 had difficulty running Rainbow Six Siege until I updated its graphics driver to the latest from MSI’s support site, though I still didn’t get Assassin’s Creed Valhalla to run at Ultra. Barring that, the Delta performed very well in all games. Its 245fps average in Rainbow Six Siege completely saturates its 240Hz screen.
Battery and Display Tests
PCMag tests laptop battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with screen brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100% until the system quits. Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting are turned off during the test.
We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its software to measure a laptop screen’s color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its brightness in nits (candelas per square meter) at the screen’s 50% and peak settings.
The Delta 15 delivers on battery life; over 10 hours for a laptop this powerful is a feat, and enough to keep up with its nemesis, the Alienware m15 Ryzen Edition R5. Its display, on the other hand, isn’t the brightest, though as I said its color accuracy is quite respectable.
Verdict: AMD Fans Will Be Pleased
The MSI Delta 15’s all-AMD silicon makes it an able gaming laptop. It’s the first time we’ve had our hands on a Radeon RX 6700M GPU and it doesn’t disappoint, offering performance in line with GeForce RTX 3070 notebooks at a lower price. However, its prowess comes at the expense of heat and noise, which detract from the gaming experience. The rest of the laptop is a similar melange of ups and downs, with good battery life and speakers and a roomy 1TB SSD arrayed against lackluster input devices and missing PCIe Gen 4 support.
Overall, the Delta 15’s appeal centers on its CPU and GPU combo—finally, AMD is competitive in higher-end gaming laptops. The Delta 15 isn’t as polished as it should be, but it’s still a welcome face in an Nvidia-dominated market.
