MSI Bravo 15 A no-frills gaming laptop review

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Hello, Guys welcome back to The MSI Bravo 15 is a no-frills gaming laptop that offers decent performance at a fair price. The MSI Bravo 15 uses good AMD components to give adequate gaming performance, while not having the most attractive appearance or screen.

MSI Bravo 15 A no-frills gaming laptop review

After a week with the MSI Bravo 15, I came to the surprising conclusion that I loved the computer a lot more than I had anticipated. As far as gaming laptops go, it’s not particularly powerful, with 1080p resolution and 30-ish fps frame rates if the settings are turned all the way up. On the other hand, it’s not outrageously priced, costing less than $1,000 rather than $2,500 — or more.

MSI BRAVO 15: SPECS

  • CPU: AMD Ryzen 5600H
  • GPU: AMD Radeon RX 5500M
  • Display: 15.6 inches, 1080p, 144 Hz
  • RAM: 16 GB
  • Storage: 512 GB SSD
  • Dimensions: 14.1 x 10.2 x 1.0 inches
  • Weight: 5.1 pounds

The Bravo 15 has a better keyboard than I expected, as well as plenty of ports and a good degree of performance for both work and pleasure. Granted, the screen could be much better, and getting games up and running could be a frustrating process at times. However, as a mid-range gaming laptop, the Bravo 15 delivers on its promises, which is probably all it needs to achieve.

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If you only have a few portable gaming demands and a limited budget, the Bravo 15 should suffice. Otherwise, you’ll need to get a more powerful — and perhaps more expensive — machine. Continue reading for our complete MSI Bravo 15 review.

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MSI Bravo 15 review: Price and configurations

While the MSI Bravo 15 has had a variety of prices and configurations over the years, the present edition offers only one option. Sam’s Club (Walmart’s alternative to Costco, for those who aren’t acquainted) sells it for $899. This necessitates the purchase of a Sam’s Club membership, which costs $45 per year.

The MSI Bravo currently has an AMD Ryzen 5600H CPU, an AMD Radeon 5500M GPU, 16 GB RAM, a 512 GB SSD, and a 15.6-inch, 1080p screen with a 144 Hz refresh rate. To be fair, these are modest specifications, but they’re not terrible for the price.

MSI Bravo 15 review: Design

The MSI Bravo 15 is a spending plan gaming PC, and it looks like it. Not at all like the smooth Razer Blade models or MSI’s own Stealth line of workstations, the Bravo 15 is a massive, thick thing, crammed with bizarre points and superfluous twists. At 14.1 x 10.2 x 1.0 inches, it’s two times as thick as a portion of its more top notch rivals in the 15-inch gaming PC space. Furthermore at 5.1 pounds, it’s likewise a decent half-pound heavier. The gadget fits effectively into a standard worker knapsack, however, so hefting it around isn’t an over the top issue.

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The plain dark case has some uncommon plan highlights, including a huge hole at the pivot, and a raised mathematical example on the top. There’s additionally a phoenix image there, just in case, despite the fact that it doesn’t illuminate.

The Bravo 15 is a weird looking machine, and likely wouldn’t feel comfortable in an office climate – despite the fact that it’s not horrible for usefulness work, as we’ll address later.

MSI Bravo 15 review: Ports

Taking into account that it’s anything but a gigantic machine, the MSI Bravo 15 packs a decent number of ports.

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On the left, there are two USB-A ports and a power port. On the right, there’s a 3.5 mm sound jack, a USB-A port, a USB-C port, a HDMI port and an Ethernet port.

While another USB-C port would have been great, I didn’t experience any difficulty interfacing the extras that I wanted. The absence of a SD card peruser might be an impediment to efficiency disapproved of clients, yet the Bravo 15 is a gaming machine, most importantly.

MSI Bravo 15 review: Keyboard and touchpad

The MSI Bravo 15’s console ended up being one of its most unexpected, yet wonderful treats. One of my continuous reactions of gaming PCs is that they lose their consoles, packing small arrangements into the focal point of the skeleton, rather than utilizing all accessible space. The Bravo 15 has a full console – with a number cushion! – that grows across the gadget’s entire face.

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The numpad alone significantly impacts contact typists, while standard size Enter, Backspace and number keys make route a breeze. Honestly talking, there are a lot fancier gaming workstations that could bear learning an example from the Bravo 15 in such manner.

The touchpad, then again, is even more a hodgepodge. It feels adequately responsive enough, and didn’t disrupt everything while I was composing. In any case, it’s a gnawed off-focus from the remainder of the machine, making it an aggravation to reshape your arms into position for it. Consider one of our picks for the best gaming mouse all things being equal.

MSI Bravo 15 review: Display

The most significant problem I ran into with the MSI Bravo 15 was its display. When I started using the machine, I thought it looked a little dim and lifeless for work, multimedia and gaming alike. Compared to some other gaming laptops that Tom’s Guide has reviewed recently, the numbers back up my observations:

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MSI Bravo 15 Asus ROG Flow X13 Razer Blade 15 Advanced
Brightness (nits) 251 290 313
sRGB Color Gamut (%) 67 114 109
Delta-E 0.25 0.28 0.24

Facing the Asus ROG Flow X13 and the Razer Blade 15 Advanced, the Bravo 15 is fairly less splendid and offers extensively less shading. The shading exactness isn’t awful (with Delta-E, more like zero is better), yet showing just 67% of the sRGB range isn’t especially noteworthy when other gaming workstations regularly get over 100 percent.

I’ll concede that 1080p is a totally decent goal for a 15-inch screen, and the Bravo 15 can for sure run a few games at up to 144 casings each second. However, regardless of whether you wrench up the brilliance, the screen could not hope to compare – both in a real sense and metaphorically – to a portion of its rivals.

MSI Bravo 15 review: Gaming performance

There are two methods for survey the MSI Bravo 15’s gaming execution. One is as a $900 machine, which is the place where it really does fine and dandy. The other is in contrast with fancier gaming workstations, which is the place where it doesn’t work out quite as well. This is the way the gadget fared in gaming benchmarks, estimated in fps at 1080p goal:

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MSI Bravo 15
Asus ROG Flow X13 Razer Blade 15 Advanced
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla 32 29 66
Dirt 5 30 29* 78
Grand Theft Auto V 40 42 106
Shadow of the Tomb Raider 33 35 82

Most importantly, assuming you were puzzling over whether the Bravo 15 can go head to head with a top notch gaming PC, it can’t. Your extra $1,000 (or more) on something like the Razer Blade 15 will improve execution.

Notwithstanding, the Bravo 15 holds up commendably in its own value range, even against the to some degree more costly ROG Flow X13. It didn’t fall under 30 fps in any of our benchmarks, and that implies you can expect execution tantamount to a PS4 or Xbox One, conceivably with better surfaces and lighting.

It’s additionally important that from a subjective viewpoint, you can cajole a lot higher edge rates out of the Bravo 15. By utilizing medium or high graphical settings, rather than turning the visuals as far as possible up, I had the option to run Age of Empires IV at 75 fps, Doom Eternal at 70 fps, Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen at 140 fps and Final Fantasy XIV at 140 fps. Every one of the games chugged along as expected, even subsequent to playing them for extensive stretches of time. Nonetheless, I saw that each of the games consumed a large chunk of the day to boot up, taking into account that they were running off of a SSD.

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MSI Bravo 15 review: Productivity performance

As a productivity machine, the Bravo 15 is a bit of a mixed bag. Here’s how it stacked up against its competitors on an artificial Geekbench 5.4 benchmark, which measures overall system power, as well as a file transfer and video encoding test:

MSI Bravo 15 Asus ROG Flow X13 Razer Blade 15 Advanced
Geekbench 5.4 (artificial performance benchmark) 6,676 7,640 6,924
Copying 25 GB from flash drive (MBps) 433 750 1,796
Handbrake video encoding (minutes:seconds) 7:55 8:13 8:46

While the Bravo 15 encodes video quicker than I would have anticipated that it should, it’s not amazingly quick or strong for usefulness work in any case. Then again, as a gaming machine, the Bravo 15 for the most part has a very sizable amount of ability to run whatever efficiency applications you really want without skirting a beat. As I compose this audit, I have Microsoft Word, Spotify, Notepad, Slack and Google Chrome with 10 requesting tabs open, and I’m utilizing around 8 GB of the accessible 16 GB RAM. However, programs in all actuality do in some cases take surprisingly long to boot up, and 512 GB stockpiling will top off significantly quicker than you expect.

My main huge objection about the Bravo 15’s presentation has to do with the product that comes preinstalled. The AMD Radeon programming is, beneficently talking, a digit of a wreck. The Bravo 15 really accompanies some unacceptable rendition of the product introduced (this is something of a subject with MSI machines). Yet, even after I refreshed, it actually wasn’t truly adept at upgrading games, estimating outline rates or in any event, relegating the right GPU to requesting applications. (I was unable to run Doom Eternal from the start, on the grounds that the Radeon programming totally, emphatically demanded that the Bravo 15 needed to run it with coordinated designs). To run games on the Bravo 15, you’ll have to have some DIY technical support expertise.

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MSI Bravo 15 review: Battery life and heat

The MSI Bravo 15 has decent battery life for productivity, and abysmal battery life for gaming. It also gets a bit hot, whether or not you’re gaming on it. Both of these are par for the course in the land of gaming laptops:

MSI Bravo 15 Asus ROG Flow X13 Razer Blade 15 Advanced
Battery life – productivity (minutes:seconds) 6:20 7:23 5:22
Battery life – gaming (minutes:seconds) 1:14 1:34 1:35
Heat – productivity (°F) 94 105 88
Heat – gaming (°F) 115 130 123

The Bravo 15’s battery life is by no means best-in-class, but it’ll last for a long flight, if you need it for productivity. 

At 94 degrees, it’s not comfortable to keep in your lap for long periods of time — but it’s not quite as dire as the ROG Flow X13’s 105 degrees, either.

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MSI Bravo 15 audit: Verdict

At $900, the MSI Bravo 15 is a fit little machine. It’s equipped rather than amazing, and workmanlike rather than inventive. In any case, it messes around at good casing rates and runs usefulness programming for over six hours on a solitary charge. It’s little to the point of reserving in a knapsack serenely, and the numpad on the console is a great touch.

Assuming you really want top of the line execution, you’ll need to burrow profound for Razer Blade cash. It’s likewise worth thinking about that the Bravo 15 is pushing its cutoff points to run the best in class games at 30 fps, and that implies it may not be the most future-evidence framework available. Yet, rarely would you can track down a gaming PC with not many trade offs for under $1,000. Assuming you’re a Sam’s Club part as of now, you should effectively utilize that enrollment.

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