MSI Stealth 16 AI+ review: This stealth gaming laptop is a graphics and AI beast

Try and keep it on the down low, but the MSI Stealth 16 AI+ isn't what you'd normally call a business laptop. Sure, it has the charcoal grey metallic exterior of the kind of laptop you'd normally see in boardrooms or executive lounges, but it's no slim-and-light executive toy, or even a portable workstation. Instead, the Stealth 16 AI+ is primarily a gaming laptop that happens to be disguised as a professional device. It might be low on massive vents or glowing, rainbow-colored LED bars, but inside it has the kind of spec that's built to run AAA titles at 120Hz frame rates with all the latest ray-tracing, frame-generating, upscaling tech. It also has a gorgeous, high-refresh rate OLED screen to match.

Curiously, this makes it a good buy for some business use cases too. Why? Well, the specs, the screen, and excellent usability make it a strong option for creative users. It'll run Adobe Photoshop and Premiere as capably as it will Doom: The Dark Ages, and it's a natural for 3D design apps, video-editing apps and more. It can even work with NVIDIA's Studio drivers where compatibility and reliability trump raw performance. With its Intel Core Ultra 9 processor and 16GB RTX 5080 graphics card, it's also a very capable AI machine, with the power to run small and many large language models locally for inferencing, or even fine-tune and refine models. It's too big and way too expensive for your average user, but could easily make sense as a power-user's main machine.

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MSI Stealth 16 AI+: Design and usability

This is a large and heavy laptop, nearly 20mm thick and weighing in at close to 2kg. Yet there's something quite elegant about it, especially in comparison to many gaming and creator laptops, with its almost black finish, set-back hinge, concealed vents and etched patterns on the aluminium lid. There's barely any flex anywhere in the likewise aluminium chassis, and while there's some fan noise while running intensive apps (or games), it's practically silent in general use. The fans push heat out from the rear, with vents on the base, below the hinge and just above the keyboard, though some warmth builds up in the base over time. Shorts and skirt-wearers take note.

The keyboard features pulsing rainbow backlighting by default, but five minutes work with the MSI Center utility is all it takes to switch this to a more sedate solid color of your choice. Beyond that, it's a top-quality keyboard, with large, flat keys, a quiet but springy action, and a spacious layout, made more so by the fact that there's no numeric keypad squeezed in. I could moan about the undersized function keys at the top and small Ctrl key, but there's not much else wrong with it. MSI even shows attention to detail by placing the power key to the left of the Delete key, so that the latter stays just where your fingertips expect it.

This is another 16in laptop with an absolutely whopping touchpad, measuring 160x100mm. This makes sense with the screen size on a laptop where you're likely to be running creative applications, giving you more space for detailed selections or moving objects around the on-screen workspace. There's no sense that it impedes you when you're typing, and it's super-smooth and responsive while in use.

The size and thickness of the chassis means there's ample space for ports and sockets, and you have two Thunderbolt 4 ports, both with DisplayPort and USB-PD power delivery, on the left-hand side, plus a single USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type A. There's one more of those on the right, along with an audio jack, an HDMI 2.1 output and a 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet port. That should cover you for desktop setups and even multiple displays, while you have Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 for wireless networking, mice and headphones on the move. What looks like a third USB-A port on the left-hand side is nothing of the sort; it's the input for the power supply. Still, it's a lot more solid than the usual barrel-pin connection, so who's complaining?

MSI Stealth 16 AI+: Display

Whether you're gaming, streaming video or editing and color-grading footage of your own, the screen on the Stealth 16 AI+ is just superb. It's bright, reaching 468cd/m2 in SDR mode, and the combination of OLED contrast and the 2560 x 1600 pixel OLED touchscreen makes for a spectacularly sharp and detailed image. It's VESA DisplayHDR True Black 600 certified, so perfectly capable of showing a full range of HDR tones, while its color depth is hard to fault. It covers 100% of the sRGB gamut with a 149% volume, and 99% of DCI-P3. Color accuracy is equally strong, with an average Delta-E of just 0.81.

The size, clarity and squarer 16:10 aspect ratio lends itself well to complex creative apps and in-depth image editing, while HDR video and games look just as good as you could hope for.

The speaker system is well above average, too, with two down-firing woofers to deliver a thumping low-end and two upfiring speakers either side of the keyboard providing mid-range and high-end detail and a wide stereo spread. It's great for soundtracks and background music, but also clear and directional in meetings. However, while the 1080p camera captures decent well-exposed video in bright conditions, the output can be blurry or subject to smearing in low or artificial light. Still, we'll forgive it this one weakness, if only because the IR sensor allows for quick and flawless Windows Hello sign-in.

MSI Stealth 16 AI+: Performance

With a 16-core Panther Lake Core Ultra 9 386H CPU and the RTX 5080, there are no questions at all around the Stealth 16 AI+'s performance. Geekbench 6 puts it slightly behind devices based on the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme for single-core and multi-core performance, with scores of 2793 and 15802, but otherwise it's right up there with the fastest laptops we've tested. It's an absolute monster on 3D rendering tasks, with scores of 120 (single-core) and 1215 (multi-core) in Cinebench 2024. Only the Asus Zenbook A16 with the X2 Elite Extreme has demonstrated more number-crunching power.

But it's the GPU performance that's really compelling. We don't review gaming laptops, so there's not a huge amount of competition, but this is the fastest laptop we've seen in 3D Mark's Steel Nomad test by some margin, with a score of 4367 where previous contenders scored in the mid 2000s. And while this matters for gaming (this thing roars in Doom: The Dark Ages) it also has a huge impact on AI performance.

It's comfortably ahead of anything we've tested in Geekbench AI's GPU benchmarks, and it delivered impressive scores in the more advanced Procyon AI benchmarks, with a score of 2494 in the AI Image Generation test running Stable DIffusion 1.5, a score of 25367 in the same benchmark with the Stable Diffusion 1.5 Lite model, and a score of 3303 in the AI Text Generation test running the Phi 3.5 Mini model. We've yet to run these tests on enough devices to make meaningful comparisons, but the average score for the SD 1.5 Lite image generation benchmark on an NPU is between 3000 and 5200. The Nvidia GPU is an AI powerhouse, and it has the 16GB of video RAM to run worthwhile large language models as well as enterprise-tailored small language models. Also, don't forget there's a 50 TOPS NPU there for processes where energy efficiency matters more than raw compute grunt.

The one area where the Stealth 16 AI+ doesn't triumph is battery life. In our standard test, with video playing and the display set to 170cd/m2, the battery lasted 10 hours and 2 minutes before giving out. This is pretty standard or even above average for a laptop in this class, and given that you want it plugged in to get the best performance, shouldn't be considered a deal breaker.

MSI Stealth 16 AI+: Is it worth it?

Here we come to the biggest question mark over this machine. While there's a version available with a 12GB RTX 5070Ti for around £2600, our review spec comes in at £3349 inc VAT. It's hard to blame MSI when it's facing the same supply chain issues and RAM costs as the rest of the PC industry, but that price tag is going to put this high-spec, high-performance laptop out of reach for many buyers, and even the most demanding power users might struggle to make their case. Yet in the current climate, this is still an exceptional laptop with enough CPU, NPU and GPU speed for any application. It's a big investment, but it could still be worth it for the right use case.

MSI Stealth 16 AI++ (B3WI-033UK) specifications