MSI Vector GP68HX Has Just About Everything Except A Decent Webcam

Last Of The 13th Gen Laptops?

The MSI Vector GP68HX which was sent to TweakTown for review uses Intel’s i9-13950HX and might be the last new model with that generation of chip.  It ships with a somewhat disappointing 16GB of DDR5-4800, but can be upgraded to 96GB; happily the RTX 4080 has 12GB of VRAM to help the base model’s performance.  Your 1TB of storage is PCIe 4.0 and the networking is 1GbE along with Wi-Fi 6e.  The USB is impressive, two 3.2 Type-A ports, two USB-C 3.2 Gen 2, which both support DisplayPort and one supports USB-PD and finally a proper Thunderbolt 4 port.

The 16″ IPS display can handle up to 144Hz, so gaming on the native monitor will certainly be smooth.  Overall it came out near the top in every benchmark, offering more than acceptable performance for it’s $2200 price tag.  It does represent an interesting dilemma though, should you go with the benefits of the mature design the 13th Gen Intel based MSI Vector GP68HX has, or should you hold off for a Raptor Lake based model and hope it doesn’t melt?