Pros & Cons
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- Capable everyday productivity performance
- RTX 5050 stands up to demanding games with DLSS 4
- Comfortable keyboard with RGB lighting
- Varied connectivity
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- Just 512GB storage is tight for modern gaming
- Dim display
- Chunky for a 15-inch laptop
MSI Katana 15 HX Specs
| Boot Drive Capacity (as Tested) | 512 |
| Boot Drive Type | SSD |
| Class | Gaming |
| Dimensions (HWD) | 1 by 14.1 by 10.3 inches |
| Graphics Memory | 8 |
| Graphics Processor | Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050 Laptop GPU |
| Native Display Resolution | 1920 by 1080 |
| Operating System | Windows 11 Home |
| Panel Technology | IPS |
| Processor | Intel Core i7-14650HX |
| RAM (as Tested) | 16 |
| Screen Refresh Rate | 144 |
| Screen Size | 15.6 |
| Tested Battery Life (Hours:Minutes) | 8:11 |
| Variable Refresh Support | None |
| Weight | 5.29 |
| Wireless Networking | Bluetooth |
| Wireless Networking | Wi-Fi 6E |
Previous editions of MSI’s Katana gaming laptop were among our favorite budget picks for their time. Now, the Katana 15 HX (starts at $999.99; as tested) adds Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 50-series graphics to the equation. Our model comes with an Intel Core i7-14650HX processor and an RTX 5050 GPU, and it’s our first look at the latter. This entry-level GPU is surprisingly capable for mainstream AAA and competitive gaming, and that’s before you get to the significant frame rate boosts possible via DLSS 4 resolution scaling and multi-frame generation. The Katana is a quick performer for its price class, with long enough battery life, though its restrictive SSD space and middling display are concessions to reach that price. The storage capacity will require some juggling, but considering the gaming performance for the price and otherwise solid build quality, the Katana 15 HX is our new Editors’ Choice pick among budget gaming laptops.
Components and Configurations: Our First Look at the RTX 5050 Laptop GPU
In a sea of expensive gaming laptops, I’m glad to see a reasonably priced entry-level model come into our lab. I tested this system's $999.99 base model, which keeps the cost down compared with the higher configurations and the many pricey gaming systems we see. It’s especially easy to appreciate, given what kind of performance you can get out of these machines now, compared with the past. It falls right at that $1,000 mark at its current list price, which is a difficult threshold to meet these days. With generally rising prices, tariff uncertainty, and retailer differences, it’s all too normal for $100 or $200 more to creep into the cost as the wind blows. This price makes the component concessions easier to swallow versus a machine closer to $1,200, or higher.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)This basic configuration contains an Intel Core i7-14650HX processor, 16GB of memory, a 512GB solid-state drive, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050 graphics chip. This system is our first look at the RTX 5050 laptop GPU, following the higher-end 50-series GPUs that rolled out earlier this year. You can see the performance details below, but the RTX 5050 is an essential baseline as the entry-level GPU in the new generation.
A 16-core, 24-thread Intel Core 14th Generation chip in the performant HX tier is nice for the price. A 512GB SSD, on the other hand, will leave you short for a gaming laptop (with only about 447GB of usable space). While that will hold plenty of smaller games and a couple of large ones, it can fill up fast depending on the types of games you play. Our three benchmark test games alone add up to more than 250GB when installed. Between those and other files, I couldn’t keep all three installed at once when testing.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)MSI sells more potent Katana configurations, though prices vary by reseller. You’ll find an RTX 5070 version available, as well as a Core i9 CPU tier, and the two are not mutually exclusive. At the time of writing, a fully kitted Katana—Core i9-14900HX, RTX 5070, 32GB of memory, a 1TBD SSD—will run you north of $1,600. That’s much more than my test model, though not a bad value on paper for those parts. However, I may side-eye this laptop’s build at that price.
Design: A Basic Budget Build
To achieve this low price point, you’ll find concessions that laptop makers are unlikely to avoid. Aside from rare exceptions, a fully plastic build is one of them, as is the case here. Some midrange and even high-end laptops will use plastic bodies with a metal lid, but for budget pricing, it’s usually plastic all the way.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)The trend across virtually all categories is generally slimmer designs, but making a thinner laptop adds cost, too. The plastic and the cost considerations ultimately lead to a fairly chunky 15-inch laptop, coming in at 1.0 by 14.1 by 10.3 inches and 5.29 pounds. This laptop is still portable enough (crucial if it’s your only portable computer), but the Katana is a little heavier than it looks, and far from the land of ultraportables. Still, considering the goal of keeping costs down while maintaining gaming-ready parts, it’s in an acceptable size range—this is the type of laptop we saw a lot of in the 2010s.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)While some plastic builds can trend cheap or flimsy, the Katana at least feels sturdy. You’ll feel little to no flex, and unlike those laptops of a past era, MSI didn’t go overboard with visual design elements. A few embellish the black plastic chassis—some industrial-style bolts or line embossing here and there—but it’s mostly plain. Budget-laptop buyers are often looking to buy their one and only PC, so I’d rather something that blends in (and is, at worst, a tad boring) than a laptop you’d be hesitant to take to a cafe or college classroom.
Inputs, Display, and Connectivity: Decent Enough Features for the Price
The rest of the physical build doesn’t drop the ball on quality. The touchpad is big enough and pans smoothly, which isn’t a given, as we’ve seen many a chintzy input square at this tier. To be clear, it doesn’t stack up to the best, like a Razer Blade or an Apple MacBook touchpad, but you likely won’t think twice about it, which is a win at this price. The same goes for the keyboard: It has surprisingly pleasant key travel and feedback for a budget model. The space bar feels somewhat shallow compared with the rest of the keys, but that’s a nitpick.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)With a relatively plain design, much of the flair comes from the keyboard’s RGB lighting. It’s exciting to have this on a budget laptop, though it’s across four zones beneath the keys, rather than programmable per key. The WASD keys are also translucent, highlighting their importance to PC gaming. You can alter the key lighting within the MSI Center software, where you can also find hardware monitoring, scenario modes, and other settings.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)The display, meanwhile, is merely passable. Our model's 1080p resolution and 144Hz refresh rate are a no-brainer standard for a budget gaming laptop. This resolution is the default for most laptops, so it’s not impressive on its own, but it’s easier to run games at this pixel count compared with higher-resolution screens. Given the more modest components in this system, that’s a decent match, and 144Hz is a realistic best-case target for frame rates.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)The downside is that the display is fairly dim, even at maximum brightness—not enough to be a deal-breaker, but even a quick glance will tell you it’s not particularly luminous. The first thing I did when powering on the laptop was check to see if it was at maximum brightness (it was), which should tell you that it was noticeable. The panel has no glass or reflective finish, so it’s at least not particularly prone to glare. Nothing will stop you from using it, but this display is not a strong point.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)MSI’s connectivity is a plus, however, putting this thicker chassis to work with plenty of ports. The left edge is home to dual USB Type-A ports, while the right side holds another USB-A connection (all USB 3.2 Gen 2), a USB Type-C port (also USB 3.2 Gen 2), an HDMI 2.1 connection, an Ethernet jack, and a headphone jack. More than one USB-C connection would be nice these days, but this is a useful array of options, generally speaking. Ethernet is a welcome plus for downloading games and playing online if you have a wired option. The Katana also features Wi-Fi 6E and a merely passable 720p webcam.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Performance Testing: Surprisingly Smooth Gaming Frames
To gauge the performance of this budget system, I put it through our benchmark test suite and compared the results against those of the following laptops.
Gathering an ideal batch of systems we have test data for at this time is challenging—we just haven’t seen many like-for-like RTX 50-series laptops in this price range yet—but this array of RTX 40-series laptops demonstrates how the RTX 5050 stacks up to the last generation. The HP Victus 15 ($1,199.99 as tested) represents the previous-generation equivalent GPU, while the Acer Predator Triton Neo 16 ($1,599.99 as tested) and HP Omen Transcend 14 ($1,699.99 as tested) bring RTX 4060 GPUs to the party in two different screen sizes. Finally, the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 ($2,299.99 as tested) is a markedly pricier laptop that’s included to show how a new-generation budget GPU compares to a midrange last-generation GPU.
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
Our primary overall benchmark, UL's PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC's storage throughput.
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Three more tests are CPU-centric or processor-intensive: Maxon's Cinebench 2024 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs' Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.
Finally, workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Creators rates a PC's image editing prowess with a variety of automated operations in Adobe Photoshop 25.
On the processing front, the Katana 15 HX could serve you well if intended to be your only and do-it-all PC. It wasn’t the quickest of this group by any means, but at minimum, the Katana can easily handle daily processing, while its effectiveness at media workloads is at least serviceable. As long as we’re not talking about highly demanding professional content-creation work, the Katana 15 HX proved it can do the job, and it’s more than up for daily multitasking, home-office work, and most school workloads.
Graphics and Gaming Tests
We challenge all systems’ graphics with a quintet of animations or gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite. The first two we use, Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K), stress the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. The next pair, Steel Nomad's regular and Light subtests, focuses on APIs more commonly used for game development, like Metal and DirectX 12, to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. Last, we turn to Solar Bay to measure ray tracing performance in a synthetic environment.
Our real-world gaming testing comes from the in-game benchmarks of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and F1 2024. These three games—all benchmarked at the system’s full HD (1080p or 1200p native) resolution—represent competitive shooter, open-world, and simulation games, respectively. If the screen is capable of a higher resolution, we rerun the tests at the QHD equivalent of 1440p or 1600p. Each game runs at two sets of graphics settings per resolution for up to four runs total on each game.
We run the Call of Duty benchmark at the Minimum graphics preset—aimed at maximizing frame rates to test display refresh rates—and again at the Extreme preset. Our Cyberpunk 2077 test settings aim to push PCs fully, so we run it on the Ultra graphics preset and again at the all-out Ray Tracing Overdrive preset without DLSS or FSR. Finally, F1 2024 represents our DLSS effectiveness (or FSR on AMD systems) test, demonstrating a GPU’s capacity for frame-boosting upscaling technologies. The capacity of these frame-rate boosts changes with the version of frame-generation tech available, with DLSS 2 and 3 stitching in one AI-generated frame for every originally rendered frame, and DLSS 4 inserting up to three additional frames. (FSR can generate up to four new frames per original, while XeSS can only stitch in one new frame per original frame.)
Looking at the synthetic tests to start, the RTX 5050 performed well. It cleared some lesser RTX 40-series systems, narrowly beat the Triton in some cases, and didn’t fall too far behind the RTX 4070 laptop.
The real-world game tests are where results get more interesting. While you’ll notice moderate raw horsepower gains with the RTX 50-series, its real trump card is its efficacy at resolution upscaling, launching alongside DLSS 4. The superior performance over its predecessor was on full display on F1 2024, with the Katana’s DLSS (with frame generation) score soaring past the older laptops. While the DLSS off run also shows modest raw gains, the newer GPU generation’s ability to upscale and generate artificial frames takes even a budget system to new heights.
That’s a big deal for entry-level gaming laptops, which—as you can see by the 57fps score on the DLSS off run—struggle to run some games on high settings at 60fps without DLSS. Caveats regarding DLSS’s impact on visual quality—some ghosting or fuzziness is possible—aside, the feature enables affordable laptops to run cutting-edge games at playable frame rates, which they often couldn’t before. For budget shoppers who can’t splurge on a fancy laptop, that’s a big win, even if DLSS's machine learning is what makes the difference. F1 2024, like many titles, also has adjustable levels of DLSS fidelity versus performance, and toggles for using DLSS 4 without frame generation. You can find the balance you prefer with some trial and error.
Outside of this DLSS-focused test, the Katana 15 and its RTX 5050 were surprisingly adept at Cyberpunk 2077 (with ray tracing and DLSS off). A 75fps rating on the highest visual preset short of the killer, maxed-out ray-tracing setting is excellent for the price, and it simply wasn’t possible on an entry-level laptop not long ago (as evidenced by its testing group). The more difficult run on the brutal Ray Tracing Overdrive visual preset was far too demanding for this (and most) machines, but you can deploy DLSS to solve the problem.
Last, competitive multiplayer titles like Call of Duty are more than playable on this laptop, and you can lower the visual settings to push closer to the screen's 144Hz ceiling. This laptop reported respectable frame rates for its price; considering this is just the entry point for the RTX 50 series, it’s pretty promising.
Battery Life and Display Tests
We test each laptop's battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
In addition, to gauge display performance, we use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
The Katana’s battery life was not a letdown by any means, which is always a fear with gaming laptops. The others in this batch did run longer, but this passes the minimum we’d like to see to call it useful enough when away from a charger.
The screen-testing numbers did back up my eye test. The display is just a bit dull, both in its luminance and color coverage, and closest in this lot to the panel on the HP Victus 15 (2025). The maximum brightness was notably lower than the others, as I noticed when using the system right away. It’s just not a high-quality panel, one of the concessions made in keeping costs down.