Pros: When I bought this, I wanted a thin and light 15-incher with small footprint (read: small bezels, thank you Dell XPS line), Thunderbolt 3, good screen, good keyboard, and a dedicated graphics card powerful enough to play eSports titles and occasionally some Triple-A titles while on the go. I'm also not the type that ever uses the number pad on a laptop and I would prefer the keyboard and touchpad to be centered on the body. This laptop has all of that. I couldn't imagine a laptop with a more comprehensive feature set for my needs. It's also a beautiful machine with the black aluminum and copper/dark gold accents. The hex-core i7 processor has taken everything I've thrown at it in stride and come away smiling. SteelSeries keyboard is very nice to type on and very quiet, which I like. Speakers are surprisingly good. The screen is nice enough and the 144Hz refresh rate is a very nice bonus. I'm not much of a creator-type, so I can't say whether this screen stands up to design tasks or anything, but it looks as good as I could ever wish for. The full-fat GTX 1060 drives games like Rocket League without breaking a sweat and handles prettier titles very well. Port selection is fantastic. You've got pretty much every modern display output you could want, several USB 3 ports, and even a full-size Ethernet jack. Power supply is nice and compact. Battery life is as good as can be expected from a thin-and-light gaming machine (between 4 and 6 hours as far as I've used it) and I'm very satisfied. I also really like the cooling strategy MSI has used here. There are vents above the keyboard as well as on the bottom to suck cool air in from both sides and the heat is all vented out the back and the back portion of both sides. Thunderbolt 3 was a must-have for me because I intended to use this machine with an external graphics box at home. I have AOC's 35-inch ultrawide monitor with a 100Hz refresh rate and 3440x1440 resolution, so that takes some serious muscle to game on and I've got Gigabyte's Aorus 1080 Gaming Box to do it. I can report that it all plays very nicely with this machine after a bit of setup and I'm happy as a clam.

Cons: Far and away my #1 gripe is build quality. I'm generally very careful with my electronics, so I'm not super worried about damaging it, but the aluminum shell is very thin and very poorly put together on the base. if you run your fingers around the bottom edge on every side, you can clearly feel where the two panels come together. The panel that makes up the keyboard deck wraps around the edges and makes up the sides and front as well, but the bottom is a separate panel and the edge of the top panel is not smoothed out in any way. To me, it almost feels sharp and I am a little worried that if I hold it just right and it slips a little, that edge might even cut me. The thin aluminum flexes on the keyboard deck and on the bottom, especially where the vent holes are punched through and the lid flexes as well under just a little pressure. Again, I'm not worried about damaging the thing, but if you're the type of person that handles your electronics with a little less care, you might want to watch out. My #2 gripe is bloatware. Windows is mostly to blame, but MSI doesn't help. There are a lot of utilities installed that I won't ever use and they also ship you the cancer that is Norton for no extra cost. I uninstalled a bunch of the stuff that I would never use and lived with it for a couple of days, but it just felt slow and dirty, so I wiped it and installed Windows afresh. Much better afterward. #3 is thermal management. I did mention that I like the cooling system and it does a fair job, but this much power in a small, thin aluminum frame is just not easy to manage. Under load, my lap gets somewhat warm and if you push it a little, the fans get pretty noticeable pretty fast. I kicked the fans to 100% using one of the installed utilities just for the fun of it and they were deafening. Heaven help you if you ever have to push this thing that hard in a warm environment. All that said, when not under any significant load, this thing stays cool as a cucumber and pretty much silent, so your mileage will definitely vary. #4 is a really minor nitpick at the power supply. The port is right in the middle of the right side and it uses a 90-degree plug so you either have to flip it backwards and put it right in front of an exhaust vent or flip it to the front and lay it over/under any Thunderbolt or USB cables you have plugged in there. I would have preferred a straight cord so that there were no overlap issues.

Overall Review: I realize that I've rated this 3/5 and written an epistle on the cons, but the bottom line is that I would recommend this laptop to anyone who is still reading this despite the cons I've mentioned. If the gripes that I have aren't absolute dealbreakers, the rest of the package is absolutely top notch and it's worth your money. I wish I could rate it 3.5/5 because I feel that 3 is a little harsh, but 4 is generous. I don't give 5's unless something absolutely blows me out of the water, so you can use that to baseline your own rating scale against mine. Hopefully, this all helps inform your decision. Cheers!