msi Katana A15 AI Gaming Laptop 15.6” QHD 165Hz – Ryzen 9-8945HS, RTX 4070, 32GB DDR5, 1TB SSD, Cooler Boost 5, Windows 11: Black B8VG-450US

I had another laptop previously and it just wasn't sparking joy. I wanted this one but it was a bit heavier so I opted for the other. I regretted it. It was so buggy. So I sprung for this one. Beautiful, fast, no problems out of the box. Love it.

The Katana A15 AI B8VG is a capable gaming laptop once you get past the blue screens. On set-up just keep letting it fix itself while updating BIOS, downloading the Microsoft updates, and graphics drivers. You will have to let it restart several times. It took about 25 mins but became stable once everything was up to date. A mild inconvenience but still annoying. I caught it on Amazon Day which knocked off almost a few hundred bucks making it completely worth the price tag. I use mine for gaming and business without any issues. I love the way the keys feel. The 4070 does its job well enough for the time being. - 1 star: The main drawback to this laptop in my experience is the battery life. You will only get a few hours out of it tops unless you stay in power saving mode which gives me another 2 hours. I bought another charging cord to keep at work, but the whole point of a laptop is to be mobile. So, if you can't be tethered to an outlet a couple times day, it may not be for you. Overall, it's a good mid-range gaming laptop that puts you on a bit of a leash.

I felt like I did plenty of research going into this computer purchase, compared benchmarks and hardware to ensure I was making a choice in product that would last 3-5 years. Let me tell you, this laptop isn’t it for my application. I needed a laptop to be mobile and edit content, primarily graphic design and 1-5 minute video editing. This includes using the entire Adobe suite with either one or multiple programs (not all at once). I found my experience with this laptop to be subpar at best. Right away I was leery of the AMD processor, I much prefer Intel. I cannot prove that this CPU was the root cause of all my issues, but I have a feeling it was a contributor. I was very disappointed with the lack of reliability, and it seemed every time I needed to use the laptop, there was some issue. And then of course if I gave it a little time it would finally come around, just enough for me to question if I could “make it work” in the long run. It got to the point where I started documenting the issues 2 days in and noted weird things I was finding since this laptop just didn’t feel right. Below were several of the things I noticed in just over a week of owning and using daily. Keep in mind I came from a M3 Pro MacBook Pro prior to this. Delivered: 9/20/24 Issues with laptop: Google chrome opens first search with bold text every time, super annoying. Incognito mode does same thing so doesn’t seem to be an account setting/issue Initially opened using Yahoo as search engine with brand new Google Chrome download. Could have been an issue with previous extensions that I had, since I had logged into google first before searching anything 9/23 Laptop was at 10% and went into power saver, keyboard dimmed and brightness went down. Plugged it in for an hour, go to turn it on, black screen. Plugged into other outlet (neither outlet is switched) and it finally fired up 10 minutes later. 9/25 Got home and opened laptop, won’t connect to home WiFi, which it’s been connected to for almost a week and has remembered. Turned WiFi off and on again, and now says No Wi-Fi Networks found. Need external WiFi adapter to use internet now. 9/26 Plugged in hard drive (offline) to work on project, computer won’t read hard drive. Previously Norton wanted to run a scan every time I plugged in, so not sure if that’s why it’s not recognizing the drive but I wasn’t able to do work off the SSD until I had WiFi again 9/26 Was editing a project with computer, closed lid for 15 minutes, came back and screen is black. Won’t turn on or restart… 20 minutes later it turns on after deciding it wanted to be shut down, and tabs are now all closed and unsaved work lost… not cool. 9/28 Finally used Adobe Premiere Pro for the first time on this device, playback is CHOPPY, it will play forward when previewing, then chop back a few frames, then play forward, they chop back a few frames. Not a clean simple playback to review my timeline and see how my project looks… Trackpad pinch to zoom doesn’t zoom-in on timeline in Premiere… throws off typical workflow, VERY annoying 9/29 Perfectly on que… blue screen of death “Recovery” while turning on… time to get a MacBook. Another odd thing: EVERY time the computer restarts MSI Center and Xbox re-pin themselves to the taskbar I also added quite a few add-ons to “try” making the laptop feel more like a Mac. I added things like 3 finger drag, spacebar preview, phone link, changed photoshop and Illustrator settings to allow pinch to zoom… and even with all of this to help my workflow feel more like a Mac, the clunky computer workflow and unreliability kept me feeling disconnected from my work.

After a whole lot of research, I came to the decision that this was the best bang for my buck in terms of gaming laptops. I know a 4080 or a 4090 would have been better, and it could’ve used a bit more VRAM. But those laptops were easily at least $500 more and up, and it just didn’t seem worth it imo. And man, does it still do a great job. I’ve played almost every game at Ultra and Maximum settings with little to no issues. If running natively on the laptop screen, it’s buttery smooth. I am using a 34’’ curved monitor, and projecting to two screens at once at 3500 resolution, which can cause some games to lag a little at Ultra settings, but after some minor tweaks I can still run everything great! Overall, this laptop is a piece of art. It’s form is sleek and sexy, it’s relatively lightweight, the screen is great, it’s RGB keyboard looks awesome, and it’s just a total powerhouse, not to mention extremely affordable for what you’re getting. Incredibly happy with my purchase, one month in and I have no regrets. The speakers are nothing special, but the sound quality it outputs is clear. Also, I haven’t really tested out the battery, I hear it’s got a short lifespan, but I keep it plugged in so I don’t really notice. It does get REALLY hot though, and quite easily, even when just using Chrome I’ve clocked it at about 104 degrees Fahrenheit. If you’re thinking about getting this laptop, I would **highly recommend** getting a laptop cooling fan to sit underneath. There are some great brands for reasonable prices on Amazon. I purchased the Kevin Gaming Laptop Cooling Fan (I think that’s its name),, it can go up to 2,800 rpm and keeps my laptop at a nice 90-94 degrees.

Random blue screen crashes do occur, but are all FIXED with the most recent BIOS update.

Overall, I think this is a good laptop for gaming. I was able to run multiple games on max graphics and did not experience any lag. However, when I tried to plug in headphones into the combo audio port to jam out to music, the laptop would not register that my headphones were plugged in (my headphones still work on my old laptop and I tried three different sets). After attempting to go through troubleshooting with MSI, where they asked me to install optional updates and then perform, and doing an EC reset, they determined that it was likely an issue with the hardware. They came to this conclusion after asking me for the serial number on the bottom of the laptop. I'm assuming they found that there was a known nonconformance with the hardware that they were virtually able to search up. Not sure if this is a common occurrence, or I'm just unlucky with the one I received, but I just wanted to raise awareness to potential buyers since this is an expensive laptop, which I think would have been worth it if everything worked.

I've noticed that the people experiencing issues with the blue screen are those who purchased the version with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 instead of the 4070. Perhaps there's a compatibility issue or something that's causing the laptop to work improperly. I bought the 4070 model, and after 3 weeks of use, I still haven't had any problems with blue screens. Warranty: According to an MSI tech agent, the warranty starts the same day that you purchased the computer. Which doesn't make any sense. The warranty only includes software or hardware problems on their part (In other words, manufacturing problems). You can see the warranty section on their page. Camera quality: I had an HP Pavilion laptop before, and comparing both cameras, it seems that this computer has a worse quality camera, but at least you can see yourself. Battery life: Honestly, the battery drains pretty fast, but I think that's just normal for MSI computers. Something that I did additionally was to deactivate the fast boot option in the BIOS because it seems that the computer, although it is already shut down, keeps using the battery to do a fast initialization, and in a day, being shut down, it can drain around 3%. So be careful when you decide not to use your computer for a week or more. To test the battery life without charging, I also played Lofi girl with 50% of brightness, and the computer lasted 5 hrs. Only because I was watching YouTube, but if you have other plans like gaming, it will last like 1 hour if you're lucky. Using battery saver: In the MSI Center, there's an option called "Best for battery". You can find this by going to Features and selecting System Diagnosis. I have it in that configuration to protect the battery, and the thing about this option is that it is supposed to charge up to 60%. When I'm at 53% for example, the computer will not charge to 60% although it's plugged in. It will remain at 53%. When the battery level goes under 50% like 49% that's when it starts to charge up to 60%. So don't worry if you see the computer doesn't charge at 51% or something. Just drop the battery to at least 45% and it will charge automatically up to 60%. Battery light indicator: The little light that appears in most computers that indicates the laptop is charging, in this computer, it shows a white light when it's charging, and when it's fully charged, the light turns off. The manual said that there's another state of the light that appears amber when it's at low battery capacity, but in my case, the light never appeared amber, although it was around 6% of battery. Most computers tend to have this amber or orange light state, just so you can see if it's charging, but this computer doesn't have that. In my case, the computer just has a white light all the time. And btw, if you have the saver mode plugged in, the charging light will always be turned off. Screen sleep: I had to go to the control panel to put everything on "Do not do anything" when the computer enters sleep mode, because if I have the options at sleep, the computer locks itself, and the keyboard stops responding. That was something that I had no problems with before with my HP Pavilion laptop, although they were sharing the same Windows settings. Type C port: It's only for sharing data, but not for charging. I know not all computers have this feature, but if you're looking for one that has this technology, this is not an option. User Manual Missing: In my case, I only received a small user guide with two small pages of info. I don't know if it's a mistake on their part, but having this manual would've helped me understand this computer better. I had to download it online from their official website. I think that covers all the problems that I had in these three weeks. I hope this works if somebody else is struggling with the same problems. But overall, it's a good laptop, but not especially for beginners, since you need to work with some configurations first to avoid problems in the future.

I just got this laptop today. While setting it up I came to the realization that its running at 2560x1440 resolution. The product details say that its native resolution is 2560x1440 - but it says the resolution is 1080p. I totally those thought was a 1920x1080 display, but its actually much better than I expected. Haven't had a chance to use it for games yet, but so far everything seems good.