Count on a gaming laptop named after a legendary blade to define the cutting edge in budget gear. The MSI Katana GF66 (starts at $799; $1,199 for the in-store Micro Center model tested here) is an impressive value among 15.6-inch budget gaming laptops, offering an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 GPU at a price you’d normally expect to find an RTX 3050 Ti, plus an eight-core Intel Core i7 CPU and a roomy 1TB solid-state drive. Though its battery life is shorter and its screen less vivid than we’d like, the Katana nevertheless covers the gaming essentials without major weaknesses, especially in these days of rising core-component prices and a redefinition of what makes for a “budget” gaming laptop. It replaces MSI’s Bravo 15 as our Editors’ Choice winner among affordable 15-inch gaming rigs.
Staying on the Budget Rails
The Katana GF66 is about as wallet-friendly a gaming laptop as you’ll find. The $799 base model is good for basic 1080p gaming and esports, with a six-core Core i5-11400H processor, a 4GB GeForce RTX 3050 GPU, a 144Hz screen refresh rate, 8GB of memory, and 512GB of solid-state storage. Step-up models offer Nvidia’s 4GB RTX 3050 Ti for peppier performance. Windows 10 Home and a one-year warranty are standard across the board.
The top-tier $1,199 model seen and tested here has an eight-core, 2.3GHz (4.6GHz turbo) Core i7-11800H, GeForce RTX 3060 graphics with 6GB of display memory, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD. The price only applies in-store at Micro Center, but even if you spend up to $200 more online, it’s still reasonable: Asus’ comparably equipped TUF Gaming F15 commands $1,399 on Amazon. You can find an RTX 3060 for less in the Gigabyte G5 KC (I saw that model for $1,049 after rebate), but that laptop is saddled with a previous-generation Core i5-10500H chip and half the storage (512GB).
Visually, the Katana GF66 makes its gaming credentials plain. The black-and-red color scheme is far from unique among gaming laptops (take a look at the Acer Nitro 5 for a seeming sibling), but it still provides a sense of identity. An angled lid and large cooling vents complement the look.
Inward-sloped edges help the Katana look sleeker than its actual measurements of 0.98 by 14.1 by 10.2 inches (HWD). Its weight is within budget gaming expectations at 4.96 pounds. Ditto for its all-plastic build, which feels solid if not luxurious.
The Katana GF66’s 1,920-by-1,080-pixel display could be better. Its 144Hz refresh rate is its best feature, enabling a silky-smooth gaming experience; the GeForce RTX 3060 GPU has no trouble pushing it to the limit in many games, as our benchmark tests will show below. But its picture quality is ho-hum for discriminating eyes; our Datacolor SpyderX Elite measured a meager 62% coverage of the sRGB color gamut and a peak brightness of a modest 267 nits.
Average Inputs and Outputs
Red keyboard backlighting is the MSI Katana GF66’s only real nod to gamer-style bling. Both the tops and the edges of the keys are illuminated, and I like the futuristic font on the keycaps.
Keypresses, unfortunately, lack tactile engagement; there should be more up-and-down travel. The number pad also seems like a squeezed-in afterthought, with undersize keys and a nonstandard three-column layout. The touchpad, offset in line with the keyboard, has a similar mix of pros and cons: It’s rightly sized and has a smooth, stutter-free surface, but it makes you work with its stiff physical click-down action. Relying on gentle, virtual tap-to-click is an easy way to get around that.
The physical connectors arrayed on the Katana’s sides include three USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports (two Type-A and one Type-C), a legacy USB 2.0 port (well suited for plugging in a mouse), headset and Ethernet jacks, and an HDMI 2.0b video output.
Thunderbolt 4 remains on the wish list. There are no built-in biometric features, and the 720p webcam atop the display lacks a privacy shutter. Twin speakers under the palm rest project strained but loud-enough sound.
The memory and storage are user-upgradable, though removing the bottom panel is tricky. After taking out numerous screws, you’ll need a trim-removal tool to gently pry around its edges before it comes free. Inside, you’ll find two M.2 2280 PCI Express 3.0 SSD slots and two DDR4-3200 memory sockets. The upper RAM limit is 64GB (via two 32GB modules). Also accessible are the Intel AX201 Wi-Fi 6 card and the 53.5-watt-hour battery. (See our feature on how to upgrade your laptop.)
Testing the Katana GF66: Solid Performance for the Money
To refresh, our Katana GF66 test unit has an eight-core Intel Core i7-11800H CPU, a 6GB GeForce RTX 3060 GPU, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB solid-state drive. That recipe is well-suited for 1080p gaming, as our benchmarks will show. The RTX 3060 GPU, as implemented here, is rated for 85 watts.
As for cooling, the Katana isn’t a silent runner by any means, but its fans aren’t distracting, and its chassis has no hotspots where you’d normally put your fingers.
The Katana GF66 faces an uphill battle against most of the gaming laptops I used for comparisons, which are listed below. They include the Alienware x15, MSI’s own Delta 15, and the XPG Xenia 15 KC. The smaller Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 is the only one that also sports an RTX 3060 GPU. As tested, however, all of these models cost at least several hundred dollars more than the Katana.
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 Katana GF66 scored well, hitting far above the 4,000 points we consider a sign of strong productivity performance. Though it didn’t excel in the storage test, its SSD offers ample pep for general use.
Our other three 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 Katana GF66’s middling CPU performance is disappointing; the XPG and especially the Alienware outperformed it using the same Core i7-11800H. This kind of performance deficiency suggests its CPU is reaching a power or thermal limit. The bargain MSI is still a potent performer, but not as potent as it should be.
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 test suite: 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.
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, Valhalla and Siege are run twice (Valhalla at Medium and Ultra quality, Siege at Low and Ultra quality), while we run F1 2021 once at Ultra quality settings and, for GeForce RTX laptops, a second time with Nvidia’s performance-boosting DLSS anti-aliasing turned on.
Fortunately, the Katana GF66’s CPU performance difficulties didn’t seem to carry over into the GPU-focused tests, where it generally outperformed the Asus, also equipped with the RTX 3060. Of note: It achieved well over 144fps in Rainbow Six Siege, making full use of its 144Hz screen. No recent RTX 3050 laptop has gone through our new benchmark suite yet, but the RTX 3060 is a far superior performer and has more video memory (6GB versus 4GB). If you can afford the jump, it’s worthwhile.
Battery and Display Tests
PCMag tests laptops’ 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.
Neither battery life nor display quality is a strength for the Katana GF66. We expect at least six hours from a 15-inch gaming laptop, and on the display side, 100% of sRGB and at least 300 nits of brightness would be nice. As I noted, what salvages the Katana’s screen for gaming is its 144Hz refresh rate.
The Essence of Laptop Budget Gaming
Though we wish the MSI Katana GF66 had a more vivid screen, a little more CPU muscle, and longer battery life, none of those flaws stops it from being a respectable budget gaming laptop. It offers GeForce RTX 3060 graphics at an RTX 3050 Ti (or even regular RTX 3050) price, and that GPU helps it make the most of its 144Hz display. That’s a rare achievement for a laptop in this price class, and equally unusual for the money is its roomy 1TB solid-state drive, well suited to the ballooning sizes of today’s game installs. All told, the Katana GF66 is a standout value and earns an Editors’ Choice award for cash-strapped gamers’ consideration.
