MSI Creator 15

Pros: Fast CPU, though wish it had a Ryzen chip Great GPU Great build Second m2 slot The included SSD is VERY fast Cons: Touch pad is finicky. Disabled all the swipe motions, cranked up sensitivity to max, and it’s still not reliable. Fans are noisy and laptop runs hot, especially when the GPU is in use. A keyboard number pad would have been nice. Bios options to adjust voltages would have been nice. Overall Review: Overall a great laptop. Loud and hot if gaming, but I usually wear noice cancelling headphones and use a laptop pad with fans, so not a deal breaker.

Pros: – power to spare – display quality – keyboard layout is easy to type on – trackpad is very responsive Cons: – screen flickers constantly. it’s truly awful – peak brightness is lower than expected. color profiles aren’t as nice to look at as other OLEDs (although they may be truer) – battery life is about 3 hours doing light web and typing tasks – small trackpad height makes pinch/zoom difficult Overall Review: unless you need a portable desktop, this is not a terribly useful package. I’ll be sending this back due to the flickering, which appears as though the screen is turning off and on and happens anywhere from once per minute to several times per second.

Pros: -Gorgeous 4k HDR Screen -Fast 8-core processor -RAM upgradable, multiple SSD expansion slots -Super Fast SSD Cons: -Takes some work to get things up and running correctly (see full review for how I was able to). -Wish it could be purchased with more RAM off the shelf. -Laptops body is somewhat prone to showing smudges. -Based on its reviews you have to be willing to take a bit of a risk, but Im glad that I did! Overall Review: I was in the market for a laptop to edit drone photos and videos and maybe do some moderate gaming. I have a fairly high-powered HP desktop for this but at times Id like to be free to move around the house while editing. After looking at numerous refurbished computers I came across this PC randomly. It seemed to be everything I wanted at a price I could afford (on sale for $1199 currently). However, the negative reviews about screen flickering made me apprehensive as almost every negative review made mention of it. So, I did some research on various forms and seen that some owners had been able to correct the issue. I decided to take the risk and purchased it, fully expecting the screen to flicker upon receiving it. Upon its arrival, I turned it on and was blown away with how good the screen looks. It is sharp and crisp, ultimately it looks like it should be apart of a much more expensive PC. I didnt notice any flickering until I activated HDR and immediately the screen began to flicker badly. I turned off HDR and went to work to see if I could fix it. I then took the following actions: 1. I went to MSI support page for this specific PC which can be found here: https://www.msi.com/Content-Creation/Creator-15-A11UX/support?sub_product=Creator-15-A11UE 2. On that site, I selected drivers and downloads from the drop down menu and downloaded the latest BIOS, and downloaded it to a formatted USB drive. 3. I then installed the newest BIOS. It is fairly straightforward but Id have never done it, so Googling MSI BIOS had multiple pages with instructions. 4. I then returned to the link listed above and downloaded both the Intel UHD and GeForce GPU drivers and unzipped them. Opening each folder I found several sub folders but opening the main folder in each brought up a .exe for one and another type of install file for the other. I clicked on these and installed both of these drivers direct from MSI. 5. I restarted the computer and activated HDR with absolutely NO flickering and it has not reappeared. I later downloaded Windows 11 installer assistant from Microsofts site and had Windows 11 running within about 20 minutes. The computer as been running like a beast ever since. It does a fine job as both an content creating PC and a gaming laptop. With all of that being said, it does take more than what most people imagine when they think about setting up their new PC, but at this price point, I feel its a small price to pay. Other brand new laptops with similar specs are going to be much higher priced. I dont typically leave reviews or guides but I felt like I had to explain how I fixed this issue and how much I like this laptop so someone who was on the fence might have some confidence to buy it and make it work for them. You can see from my benchmark test above that it performs well enough for most people. (I believe the flickering issue comes as a result of Windows applying the standard drivers for the GPUs as an update so the flickering takes place because of an incompatibility. I think the drivers directly from MSI might be tweaked just enough to make them compatible with their display.)