MSI Stealth A16 AI+ Ultra Slim Gaming Laptop (2024 release, A3HVGG-002US) Review

MSI Stealth A16 AI+ Ultra Slim Gaming Laptop (2024 release, A3HVGG-002US) Review

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Takeaway: Lightweight, fast, powerful,great battery life and visual display.

Thank you to Best Buy for sending me this laptop for free to try. In the box, you’ll receive the laptop, 6ft power cord, a power adapter with 4.5ft cable, and quick start guide. The laptop measures 14"" wide, 10"" from back to front, and is 1"" at the back tapering down to 13/16” at the front. It weighs a little over 4.5 lbs but tops 6 lbs once you add in the weight of the 240W charger and power cable.

On the right-hand side are the battery LED, combo mic/headphone jack, USB-C 4 port with DisplayPort 2.1 out and PD-in charging capability, a USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 port, and proprietary power port. Along the left-hand side are a Kensington lock slot at the back corner, 2.5Gb Ethernet jack, HDMI 2.1 out, and another USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 port. A mirror-finish accent bar runs across the backside bearing the “Stealth” product line logo which aptly describes the branding as the chassis of the laptop is all metal, black, Magnesium-Aluminum alloy with a durable but unassuming smooth, matte that looks as great as it feels in the hand. Plus the finish is pretty good at hiding fingerprints. The logo is an etched dragon/shield logo so subtle that it’s nearly invisible, so pretty stealth.

Half the base is vented with fine mesh because this laptop outputs a lot of heat during heavy use, though rubber feet at the back, front, and middle keep it raised off your desk to help with proper air flow. At the front corners are pairs of downward-facing woofers for a total of 4. Access to the internals requires the removal of only 7 screws, though you’ll need to break the factory seal sticker to access the one in the middle and taking off the bottom panel is a little finicky. You’ll find the cooling fans and heat sink tubes all along the back, and the pre-installed 1TB WD SN560 SSD in the right-hand NVMe slot, with a secondary 2280 m.2 NVMe Gen 4 slot available for additional storage. I like that the DC power connector is reversible, like USB-C, and when charging the LED illuminates white. However, I don’t love its placement next to the USB-A port as it’s roughly the same size and shape. The laptop can also charge via Power Delivery up to 100 Watts.

The laptop’s screen opens to a fully lay flat orientation. On first boot up, you’ll need to setup Windows 11, and you’ll find that it supports the 6GHz frequency bands as it has a WiFi 7 card inside. I like that there are multiple login options in addition to a password including Microsoft Hello facial recognition via the webcam, a fingerprint reader to the right of the mouse trackpad, and optional PIN. The 16"" diagonal IPS display has a 16:10 ratio and 240Hz max refresh rate. It has a max resolution of 2560 x 1600 and covers 100% of the DCI-P3 colorspace, making this screen awesome for both gaming and creative work where accurate colors are a must. Colors are bright and vibrant with decent contrast, though I prefer the deep true blacks of my OLED monitor. At the top of the screen is a built-in 2 MP webcam with IR that can record 30fps video at 1080p with HDR 3D Noise Reduction+, which enhances and make your images clearer when video chatting and streaming. There's also optional automatic background blurring and eye tracking that is AI-enhanced to make it appear as if you're looking into the camera rather than at your screen. A privacy switch lets you “disable” the webcam by covering its lens. The accompanying dual-array microphone captures audio clearly with good left/right separation but at times sounds slightly robotic since it is processed to eliminate background noise and focus on your voice.

Inside, it runs on the AMD Ryzen AI 9-365 CPU with a base clock of 2GHz and max boost clock of 5 GHz, 32GB of 7500MHz LPDDR5x RAM and has an NVIDIA GeForce RTX4070 discrete GPU. The CPU also has integrated graphics, AMD’s Radeon 880M, available for use in MSHybrid graphics mode. However, MUX switching is available for full-time dedicated graphics when you need consistent, powerful performance over efficiency.

The per-key RGB backlit keyboard is fully customizable with individually addressable and re-assignable keys in the SteelSeries GG app. You can even record custom macros to run with key presses. I’m not a huge fan of the lettering on the keys though, as I find them a bit too “stylized” in a way that makes them less legible to me. I also think the LEDs could be brighter since even at the brightest setting, I have a hard time telling that they’re on, except in very dark conditions; unless, of course, I’m looking for the lights under the keys and not through them. The other issue I have with it is that the keys have a slightly higher actuation force than I’m used to which leads to faster fatigue over longer typing sessions, but strangely feel mushy when you bottom out the keys. I do however appreciate that there’s a numpad on the right-hand side.

During heavy use, like gameplay, the back end of the laptop can get pretty hot but all that heat is concentrated behind/above the keyboard with internal temps ranging in the mid to high 70s °C. Even so, the fans don’t seem to run super hard at all and the noise from them is fairly low. There is a keyboard shortcut to enable max fan speeds though, if you do experience heat throttling performance issues. The mousepad is generously sized with a 5-1/8"" x 3-1/4"" area, however, I prefer to disable it and use a wireless mouse due to the propensity for accidental touches while using the keyboard. This laptop has a 99.9 Whr battery and has some of the best battery life performance that I’ve seen on any gaming laptop. It’s rated to run for up to 13 hours with conservative battery consumption and energy saver options enabled and for casual use will do just that. Of course, if you want to best performance for gaming and content creation you'll likely not get more than 3 hours on it, so you probably want to have the laptop plugged in.

The RTX4070 let me play games like Warframe, CS:2, and Path of Exile at Ultra video settings and handled them perfectly. Fast motion and visuals were super smooth and framerates regularly topped 100 fps depending on the game and settings. When playing games, I didn’t notice any tearing or stuttering during fast-paced motion thanks to G-sync and a fast response time. For non-gaming purposes like content creation, rendered 4K video exported quickly and file transfers were fast. I will say that I’m continually impressed with how good contemporary laptop speakers sound compared to only a few years ago. The ones on this unit are pretty impressive and feature dual upward facing Dynaudio speakers on the left and right sides of the keyboard deck and don’t forget the 4 woofers at the front corners.

Last but not least is the native AI support of this system with 50 NPU TOPS (80 total AI TOPS) so AI tasks can run locally. It comes with Microsoft’s Copilot pre-installed, and there’s even a dedicated launch button for Copilot, so you can quickly bring up the chat window to interact with it through text or voice and ask it questions or have it generate content for you. While it can generate both text and images, there seems to be a daily limit on the images you can create as a “free” user. Of course, there is a paid tier for “Copilot Pro” that unlocks more features and gives you additional boosts for image generation. Interacting with Copilot is interesting and kind of fun, but it has limitations and will let you know when it can no longer proceed down the query path to respond to your input. I also found it interesting that the AI has recall tied to your Microsoft account, so it should remember past interactions to learn more about you as a user and use that information to inform future responses. An internet connection is required, however, to use Copilot.

Overall, the Stealth A16 is a high-powered laptop that functions well as both a portable gaming rig and creative studio for content creators. Its aesthetics are clean and unassuming -- stealthy. The fast CPU, NPU, and GPU, quality display, and ample processing power give you the tools you’ll need to run programs for audio, video, and image editing or AI content generation and also contemporary AAA title games at very high to ultra video settings smoothly. While touted as ultra-slim, I still find it a tad on the heavy side, considering you’ll probably want to take the charging brick with you, but the battery life is decent for everyday computing tasks when you’re on-the-go as well.

As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. #CommissionsEarned
Buy it at Amazon: MSI Stealth A16 AI+ Ultra Slim Gaming Laptop (2024 release, A3HVGG-002US) [Affiliate Link]