MSI Sword 15 A12UC

Entry-level gaming laptops from the relatively new Sword gaming line that MSI announced in 2021. In the hierarchy of the company, they are on the same level with the Thin, Alpha and Bravo models, inferior in their capabilities to the more advanced Leopard and Pulse GL devices. Affordable cost is what unites this line with other popular entry-level and middle-class gaming laptops: Asus TUF and Acer Nitro.

The visual highlight of the Sword laptops is the white base of the keyboard with contrasting blue backlit keys. From a technical point of view, this line is distinguished by the use of a gaming IPS display with a refresh rate of 144 Hz, a junior video card from the NVIDIA Ampere family and an NVMe solid-state drive that works with the PCI-E 4.0 bus. The brains of the MSI Sword 15 A12UC is the Intel Core i5 8-core processor (12th generation, Alder Lake architecture), which exhibits impressive power efficiency, high IPC, and supports multi-threading and automatic overclocking.

It is complemented by 8 or 16 GB of DDR4 RAM and M.2 SSD storage with capacities from 512 to 1024 GB. At the same time, the manufacturer left room for independent modernization and memory replacement. The GeForce RTX 3050/3050 Ti video card, which is the youngest solution in the Nvidia Ampere mobile video card line, is responsible for processing three-dimensional graphics in games.

It is equipped with 4 GB of GDDR6 video memory, supports hardware ray tracing and DLSS artificial scaling technologies, and its power is sufficient for gaming at 1080p resolution at medium or high graphics settings. Other features of this series include a powerful 180 W power supply, a sound card with support for Nahimic multi-channel audio, and a modern network controller with a gigabit port and Wi-Fi 6.