MSI Thin Thin 15 Cosmos Gray 2024

The RTX 4050 is the main event here, landing in the 77th percentile and driving that 144Hz panel nicely for 1080p gaming. But the 45% NTSC screen is rough for anything beyond gaming, and at over 3.6kg, this thing is a chonk. It's a budget gaming workhorse if you can snag it at the right price, just don't expect to love looking at it.

The Core i5-13420H is a solid mid-pack performer, sitting right around the 56th percentile for CPUs. It's got 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores, which is plenty for everyday multitasking and won't bottleneck the RTX 4050 in most games. The GPU is the real star here. At the 77th percentile, it's well above average and can handle 1080p gaming at medium to high settings without breaking a sweat. You'll see smooth framerates in esports titles that actually take advantage of that 144Hz panel. Just don't expect to crank ray tracing in Cyberpunk. The 6GB of VRAM is the minimum for modern AAA titles, but it gets the job done. Our AI and LLM benchmarks tell a different story though. That score of 41 out of 100 is a real weak spot, so if you're planning to run local AI models, this isn't the machine for it.

Stacked against the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14, the MSI gets smoked on portability and screen quality. The Zephyrus is lighter, brighter, and has a color-accurate panel that makes this 45% NTSC display look like a budget monitor from 2010. The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 is in a different performance tier entirely, but it also costs significantly more. Where the MSI makes sense is against other budget RTX 4050 machines. You're trading a nicer chassis for more RAM and storage out of the box. The Apple MacBook Pro M5 Pro isn't even a fair fight for gaming, but for creator work, the Mac's screen and efficiency are lightyears ahead. The HP OmniBook X Flip and Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro are ultraportable alternatives that crush the MSI on battery life and weight, but they can't touch its discrete GPU for gaming.

Pricing on this config is all over the map, with a spread of over $31,000 across vendors. That's not a typo, and it means you absolutely need to shop around. The $869 listing on Amazon for the base 16GB/512GB model is a genuine budget contender. But the 32GB/1TB version we tested can creep up in price fast. At anything under $1,000, the performance-per-dollar ratio is impressive. Push past $1,200 and you're in territory where a Lenovo Legion or ASUS Zephyrus starts looking a lot more appealing with better screens and build quality.

The MSI Thin B13VE is a budget gaming laptop that makes some smart trade-offs. You're getting an RTX 4050 with 6GB of VRAM and a generous 32GB of DDR4 in our test config, which puts it in the top quarter for RAM and storage among all laptops we track. The 1TB NVMe drive is a nice surprise at this price point, landing in the 82nd percentile for capacity. But the 15.6-inch 144Hz screen is a mixed bag. 300 nits of brightness is usable indoors, but that 45% NTSC color gamut means colors look washed out next to almost any modern phone screen.

Content creators and anyone who cares about color accuracy should look elsewhere. That 45% NTSC panel is a dealbreaker for photo or video work. If you need to run local AI models, the abysmal 41 out of 100 score in our AI benchmarks makes this a non-starter. And if portability matters, the 3.63kg weight puts it in the 13th percentile. This is a desktop that happens to fold, not a laptop you'll toss in a bag every day.

The MSI Thin B13VE is a parts-bin special that gets the fundamentals right where it counts for budget gamers. The RTX 4050 and 144Hz screen are a legit combo for esports and older AAA games. But you have to accept a dim, washed-out display and a laptop that feels more like a desktop replacement than something you'd actually want to carry around. If you can find the 32GB/1TB config for under a grand, it's a solid deal. Just know you're buying a GPU attached to a laptop, not a premium all-rounder.