MSI Alpha 15 A3DDK [A3DDK-005RU] (9S7-16U622-005)

A promising tandem between MSI and AMD

For a long time, the laptop market was similar to the times of the late USSR with its stagnation: Intel did not offer anything radically new on the processor market, and the choice between video cards consisted only in choosing the right model from NVIDIA. However, last year this swamp was stirred up by AMD with its progressive architecture. One of the first laptops built entirely on the new platform was the MSI Alpha.

New Navi Architecture

And if we see laptops based on the quad-core and eight-thread Ryzen 7 3750H more and more often, the RX 5500M mobile graphics card based on the Navi architecture is the first time we meet. Looking at its characteristics, one gets the feeling of a cropped Radeon RX 5700 XT, which belongs to the top class. Even though the CPU is Zen+ and not Zen2, the graphics card is somehow connected to the system via 8 PCI-Express 4.0 lanes, which are only available to the X570 chipset and CPUs with the Zen2 microarchitecture. However, what is more interesting here is not the core frequency or the number of computing units, but the fact that the laptop handles well with both heavy toys and resource-intensive applications. System performance is 10-12% faster than the Core i5 9300H and GTX 1060 combo. With 16 GB of RAM and a couple of HDDs and SSDs, the laptop is powerful enough for most people. The only bottleneck in the future may be perhaps 4 GB of video memory.

Recognizable appearance

The appearance of MSI is easy to guess even without the company logo with a dragon. The cover, as well as the area around the keyboard, by the way, is made of metal, and all other parts of the case are plastic. In general, I liked this combination for its practicality, it is not often necessary to wipe off fingerprints. The device has a very thin screen bezels — as a result, it looks quite compact. At the same time, the thickness of the laptop does not exceed 28 mm, and its weight is 2.3 kilograms. The keyboard completes the picture with independent colorful backlighting of each key. By the way, the keyboard here is really gaming, handicraftsmen from SteelSeries traditionally put a hand in its creation.

Keyboard by SteelSeries with custom backlit keys

The FreeSync sticker flaunts on the case for a reason: the matrix operates at a frequency of up to 120 Hz and can adjust the image refresh rate to the frame rate of the running game. But the brightness is low: if you sit on a sunny day facing the window, when direct rays do not fall on the display, it is not enough for comfortable work. Otherwise, this is an excellent and modern laptop that claims to be the only computer in the house. It is quite heavy (2.3 kg) and thick (28 mm), but it is equipped with individual backlit keys, a Killer E2600 gaming LAN controller, an unusual set of multimedia outputs (HDMI + miniDisplayPort + S / P-DIF) and dual-band Wi-Fi. Plus, it has an excellent cooling system that minimized body heat during a 4-hour COD Warzone session. However the laptop makes noise under load, but you still need to make allowances for the fact that there are simply no silent gaming laptops.