Review: MSI Creator 15 – Heavyweight Performance

Every laptop manufacturer today is caught between two powerful forces. The first being the demand for hard-core performance with equal battery performance and weight considerations. The other is the sheer bulk of a laptop that appeals to a gaming or content creator audience that wants all the performance and battery life but they misunderstand simple physics.

The latest 15″ Creator laptop from MSI is just this type of hardware – but they might just have worked out how to strike the right balance.

Packing some very impressive performance statistics, the MSI Creator 15 is every bit the Clydesdale horse of the gaming and creator market. Here are the headlines:

• Latest 10th Gen. Intel® Core™ i7 processor
• Windows 10 Home or Windows 10 Pro
• Up to latest NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 3080 Laptop GPU 16GB GDDR6
• NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ Studio Laptop
• 15.6″ 4K UHD (3840×2160), 100% Adobe RGB color gamut
• 99.9 Whr Battery Capacity
• New Cooler Boost Trinity+ with 0.1mm thin blades
• Duo Wave Speaker Design

Two different versions are available with only slight changes in specification that make a big difference.

The key features of both variants help to provide very robust performance for any content creator of gamer that’s looking for that competitive edge to their portable computing.

Other great features include the fingerprint reader that’s integrated into the very generous track-pad, as well as the integrated Creator Centre which is essentially an interface where you can arrange all your content applications such as Photoshop, Lightroom, and Premiere Pro to launch as you need them. This takes a bit to set up, but once you’ve got all your key apps arranged this is a very useful tool.

From a connectivity perspective the Creator 15 is loaded with lots of wireless and wired ports.

• USB 3.2 Gen2 (USB)
• 1x Thunderbolt 3; 1x USB-C Gen2 (USB-C)
• HDMI (supports 4K @ 60Hz)
• SD UHS-III Card Reader
• INTEL/I225-V(SLN9D) LAN Port (RJ45)

I suspect that some of that performance might come at the expense of more budget-conscious buyers who may be put off by the price tag that is north of $3,000. That being said, I might well be wrong about the MSI Creator 15 being too pricey as almost all the retailers have this excellent machine on back-order.

Available from various retails via the MSI Australia website.