The New MSI Sword: One of the Best Budget Gaming Laptops Just Got Even Better

MSI’s Sword range has always aimed to hit the popular sweet spot of providing affordable, wallet-friendly gaming laptops that are well built and offer performance where you need it the most. The company has succeeded too. MSI’s Swords have always been incredibly popular (globally) and their reviews have always been among our most read. Even better news is that, once again, MSI has knocked it out of the park with the latest MSI Sword 16 HX B13V. So, what does it bring to the party?

At first glance, you might think that this Sword had become gentrified and expensive because it’s doesn’t look like a cheap laptop. It feels well-built, it looks classy with its ‘Cosmos Gray’ livery and that 24-zone, RGB backlit keyboard steals the show when displayed alongside many rivals.

Inside, the Sword 16 HX B13V certainly has it where it counts. There’s a powerful Intel Core i7-13700HX processor which has eight Performance cores and eight Efficient cores that operate between 3.7GHz and 5.0GHz, across 24 Threads. It’s partnered by 16GB of quick DDR5-5600 RAM and a speedy, 1TB, PCIe 5.0, NVMe hard drive. Best of all, there’s an upper-mid-range Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 graphics chip which has 8GB of GDDR6 RAM.

All this, along with Nvidia’s DLSS 3 Ai-upscaling technology, means there’s more than enough grunt to play almost any game, with significant eye-candy levels of settings.

Furthermore, the exterior chassis has been redesigned to enhance cooling with six, new, multi-directional exhaust vents which don’t interfere with the sleek lines. Meanwhile, the CoolerBoost technology inside has been ‘reforged’ to include five, new, larger-diameter heat pipes that are shared between the CPU and GPU in addition to the two fans. These keep it cool and quiet for the most part but you can force everything to ramp up to maximum when choosing the top Performance profile (or when overclocking) inside the MSI Center app.

MSI Center also embraces Ai to automatically enhance the performance of any task you’re doing. It can recognise when you’re in a meeting, when your gaming, when you’re working and when you’re entertaining yourself with multimedia. It then, subsequently, automatically adjusts the laptop’s settings to best-suit each task.

Everything looks great on the fast, 1,920 x 1,200 resolution screen whose 144Hz refresh rate partners with a quick pixel response time to keep fast-moving objects almost-completely blur free – just what fast-and-frantic FPS gamers want. It also supports 100 per cent of the tricky DCI-P3 colour space, which creators will like.

Gamers will also appreciate the keyboard’s responsive, low-travel 1.7mm key-travel which makes game inputs more responsive and accurate. There are also full-sized arrow keys and full number pad, plus plenty of quick function shortcuts to rapidly adjust things on the fly. For instance, the arrow keys (alone) can instantly change the fan settings for a performance boost (or quietness), overlay a crosshair on to the display, turn off the laptop’s screen off and start/stop multimedia playback.

There’s an HD webcam with privacy slide for web-conferencing and streaming. The microphone array is adept at cancelling out background noise and the twin, two-Watt speakers get loud.

There’s impressive connectivity too: on the left there’s a USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 port and a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port. On the right there’s a 3.5mm audio jack and another USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 port. At the rear there is a third USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 port, an HDMI 2.1 port and Gigabit Ethernet. Inside there’s Bluetooth 5.3 and Wi-Fi 6E. That’s a great collection of modern and legacy connections.

Despite being a gaming laptop, the MSI Sword 16 HX B13V weighs just 2.3KG and is just shy of 28mm thick. Plus, the sizeable 65Wh battery managed to run multiple battery benchmarks for an impressive 9 hours, in this review. That’s more than a full day out of the office, so you can use it for work when out and about.

It all boils down to the fact that the MSI Sword 16 HX B13V punches well above its weight for a wallet-friendly gaming laptop. The best news of all though, is that MSI’s Holiday Laptop Sale is still running so, if you’re quick, you can pick up this, or one of MSI’s other winning laptops, for a bargain price. Check it out, now!

Last Updated on 20 December 2024 by Nick Ross