It’s rare to see a £400 discount on an RTX 3070 Ti gaming laptop, but that’s the situation today as the MSI Katana GF66 is reduced on Amazon UK by 25%. This model is well-equipped too, with a 12th-gen Core i7 12650H processor, 16GB of DDR5 RAM, a 1TB NVMe SSD and a 15-in 144Hz display.
I’ve not used this generation Katana, but the series has gotten a good reputation for its value, offering high-end specs at more mid-range prices. That means the design is not as fancy as other options, but it’s still quite a slim gaming laptop that offers all of the creature comforts you deserve at this price point. On this 12UGSZOK spec that includes a high-refresh rate IPS display, as we mentioned earlier, but also two NVMe PCIe 4.0 slots and a good selection of ports with one USB-C, three USB-A, HDMI 2.0, a headphone jack and ethernet on board
In terms of performance, MSI quotes a 30% boost in graphics horsepower over the last-gen RTX 2070 Super Laptop GPU, which sounds about right from my testing of similar laptops. The CPU is also impressive, sporting Intel’s hybrid architecture with six performance cores and four efficiency cores for background tasks. With all this, you should have more than enough oomph here to max out the 144Hz refresh rate in esports titles, while AAA games should run comfortably at 60fps or higher.
Overall, it’s a great laptop deal for the money, but as always for an investment of this magnitude it’s worth reading some reviews – the likes of Notebookcheck is always good value!