Taiwanese IT company, MSI, is jumping right into the slimming gaming laptop trend, and with a big bang, with its new GF63, featuring a slimmer-bezel look, and up to 8th Gen Intel Core i7 CPUs. The biggest excitement about this new laptop might just be its price, starting at just $999 and up. In the gaming world, this isn’t the cheapest, but it is relatively expensive, enough to be stoked for. In fact, this impressively strong MSI machine weighs a mere 3.9 pounds, a slimmer option than both major competitors- the Acer Nitro 5, weighing in at 5.9 pounds, and the Dell Inspiron 15 7567 gaming notebook, also at 5.9 pounds. Hence, here is more than a sneak peak, here’s the full story of the MSI GF63, as announced at Computex in Taiwan, and further revealed in depth ever since.

The MSI GF63 features a 15.6-inch IPS 1920 x 1080 LCD screen, with the option of 4K, or even QHD for the same price tag ($999). With thin bezels on the sides, measuring just .19mm thick, the entirety of the machine measures just 0.85 inches. It sports a black and red physique, a color pallet pretty average for gaming notebooks. MSI designed the lid and keyboard area with brushed-aluminum and black metal, housing a SteelSeries set of keys, backlit, and with a red glow. The only major difference between this new model and MSI’s higher-ranged gaming laptops is the lack of adjustable RG lighting, as well as not dispersing the black metal to the bottom of the GF63. This area is made of plastic instead, however, have no worry of this laptop being made from shabby materials to make that $999 price tag.

Taking a look underneath the hood, the gaming laptop may be configured with up to an 8th Generation Intel Core i7 processor, and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti graphics with 4GB of GDDR5 RAM. It also offers a free M.2 2.5-inch drive bay for expandability, and an SSD configured from 128GB to 512GB. For ports, two USB 3.0s are included on the right side of the GF63, along with a USB Type-C, Ethernet, a security lock slot, and a microphone/headphone jack. On the left, there’s an extra USB 3,0 port, a power input port, and on the rear of the machine, an HDMI port.

Well known for making gaming laptops, MSI kept its sleek and powerful features on the GF63, without making it as expensive as most of its other gaming rigs in this form-factor. Don’t get discouraged, thinking that the $999 price will disappoint by not having everything you’d expect from MSI. Even if the SteelSeries keyboard doesn’t offer the tricked-out customizable option for backlighting (as it only glows red), only the gamers with intense needs of self-expression via laptop coloring will find this to be a downfall. MSI, overall, delivers, and delivered quite well with the GF63, by providing all the necessities for gamers. With a design so svelte, this is most definitely a good choice for a portable gaming laptop. Although easily configured to be entry-level, that hexa-core Intel chip and great graphics mean MSI stuffed its GF63, yet in the lightest and cheapest way it could. MSI continues its track record for producing great gaming computers, and this new addition makes thin and light gaming more mainstream.