The MSI GS40 6QE Phantom ($1,599.99) is a 14-inch midrange gaming laptop with the power to run games smoothly at, or near, the highest settings. You won't get performance at 60 frames per second (fps) the way you will with the $2,100 MSI GT72 Dominator Pro G-1438 ( at Amazon) , and the screen is smaller, but it's more portable and less expensive, plus it offers plenty of storage and features for its size. The Nvidia GeForce 970M graphics card can run games at 30fps today, but it will continue to become less effective going forward. If you're looking for a system to last well into the future, the GT72 is our Editors' Choice for its superior, more future-proof performance, but the still-capable Phantom is slimmer if you're looking to spend a bit less.

Design and Features
The Phantom ( at Amazon) is a smaller gaming laptop that shares many of the design cues of its larger cousin, the MSI GE72 6QD Apache Pro ($1,399.99 at Office Depot® & OfficeMax®) . The body is all black, made of plastic on the bottom and brushed aluminum on the lid and keyboard deck. As with the GE72, there are muscle lines on the lid, along with a metallic red stripe and red MSI logo. With its 14-inch display, the Phantom is much lighter and thinner than your average gaming behemoth, measuring 0.86 by 13.5 by 9.6 inches (HWD) and weighing 4.07 pounds. This is much closer to the ultraportable Razer Blade ($1,999.99 at Razer CA) (0.7 by 13.6 by 9.3 inches; 4.26 pounds) than 17-inch gaming laptops, which are much chunkier and often weigh more than 8 pounds.

Build quality is strong overall here, but its SteelSeries keyboard could be better. You can change lighting colors across the keyboard, but typing doesn't feel great, which is unusual for SteelSeries. The keys feel a little mushy and are raised a good amount, so pressing them isn't very satisfying. The touchpad is nice, though, and the smooth surface is definitely preferable to the brushed plastic texture used on the GE72.

The 14-inch 1,920-by-1,080-resolution display provides a sharp picture, and uses In-Plane Switching (IPS) technology for wider viewing angles. The colors are pretty vibrant, and I had no complaints with the screen during the testing period. The 1080p resolution is still ideal for gaming laptops unless you have a very powerful system, as the frame rates during games would suffer too much on higher resolutions given the power of current mobile graphics cards. The 2016 Razer Blade features a 3,200-by-1,800 (QHD+) touch display, but that hampers performance, so it's better to lower the resolution anyway if you want to run games on higher settings.

Port options aren't as expansive on the Phantom as on some larger laptops, but there's still a decent selection. MSI managed to squeeze in an Ethernet port on the left side, along with a USB 3.0 port, an SD card slot, and headphone and microphone jacks. On the right, there's an HDMI port, another USB 3.0 port, and a USB-C port with Thunderbolt 3. The Phantom gets top marks for storage: It includes both a 128GB solid-state drive (SSD) and a 1TB 7,200rpm hard drive—a rare combination on a laptop this size. The latest Razer Blade, for example, includes a 256GB SSD only, which is pretty tight for installing a lot of games. MSI supports the laptop with a one-year warranty.

Performance

The Phantom is equipped with a 2.6GHz Intel Core i7-6700HQ processor, the 3GB GTX 970M graphics card, and 16GB of memory. This resulted in a fine score of 3,307 points on the PCMark 8 Work Conventional productivity test, beating the Razer Blade (2,886) and the Acer Aspire V 15 Nitro (VN7-591G-76JG) ( at Amazon) (2,704), but falling short of the Acer Predator 15 (G9-591-74KN) ( at Amazon) (3,382) and the MSI GT72 (3,726). It did decently well on the multimedia tests too, coming in just a little slower than the GT72 overall thanks to its speedy Skylake processor.

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As for where it really matters, in 3D and gaming tests, the Phantom provides good bang for buck, scoring 19,616 points on 3DMark Cloud Gate and 2,818 on the more demanding Fire Strike Extreme. This stacks up fairly well against the Blade (19,892 on Cloud Gate; 3,349 on Fire Strike) and beats the Nitro (15,476 on Cloud Gate; 1,971 on Fire Strike), but Fire Strike really demonstrates the gap with more powerful systems, as the GT72 was able to score 4,296. The Phantom respectively pumped out 99fps and 85fps on the Heaven and Valley gaming tests at medium quality, and comfortably sat above 30fps on both at higher detail settings. The Blade peaked at 17fps on the higher-quality tests thanks to its high native resolution, but is capable of similar numbers if you lower the resolution to 1080p. With results closer to 60fps on these tests, the GT72 is much more appealing for high-end gaming, if you're willing to pay up.

As for battery life, the Phantom fares better than larger laptops. It lasted 4 hours, 47 minutes, on our rundown test, just shy of the Blade's time of 5:04, and longer than the GT72 (3:25) and the Nitro (2:59), while the Predator 15 topped the group at 6:38. The nearly 5-hour battery life gives you some room for travel and portability; it won't last you all day, but you'll probably be plugged in while gaming regardless.

Conclusion

The MSI GS40 6QE Phantom is a good gaming laptop, boasting a good array of features and components, and it doesn't have any glaring weaknesses. Its GTX 970M card is capable of 30fps gaming at 1080p on the highest settings for most games (though the newest, demanding titles will challenge this number), and there's a lot of storage—an especially notable offering for a 14-inch laptop. Although it won't hit 60fps on maximum settings the way the MSI GT72 Dominator Pro G-1438 will, it does cost $500 less. It's a good value, but nothing about it stands out as excellent, and the graphics card will begin to show its age sooner rather than later with the latest games. The 980M in the GT72 is getting older too, but it will have a less difficult time running new games for longer, plus you get a bigger screen. For that reason, it remains our Editors' Choice for midrange gaming laptops.

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