Then again, I'm not a budding esports player, which is the key demographic MSI and other laptop makers are aiming for. The idea is that having smoother gameplay and more responsive screens could give you an advantage during heated multiplayer matches. And while that's true to a point, there's also clearly a diminishing rate of returns. 120Hz and 144Hz screens looked dramatically better than the 60Hz displays we've been staring at for years. But the leap to 300Hz (and arguably even 240Hz) is something that'll only benefit the most obsessive gamers and actual esports pros.

Aside from the refresh rate, the GS66's display is crisp and colorful. While you're not buying a machine like this just to watch Netflix, streaming video still looks great. (It's a shame there's no HDR support though.) As with every high refresh rate screen, doing just about anything on the GS66 feels incredibly smooth. It doesn't matter if you're scrolling through webpages or plain text documents. It's like using a hot rod to get the groceries -- it's definitely overkill, but it sure feels cool.

Devindra Hardawar/Engadget

The GS66 feels a bit like a hot rod when it's under pressure too -- the keyboard area gets noticeably warm while gaming, and the undercarriage sometimes becomes too hot to touch. It’s something you’ll definitely want to keep far away from your lap after any Overwatch session. It's pretty clear that's a result of cramming powerful gear into a very thin case. At least it stays pretty cool internally though: the CPU and GPU rarely went beyond 80 celsius at full load.

PC Mark 10 3DMark (Sky Diver) Handbrake 4K transcoding ATTO (top reads/writes) MSI GS66 Stealth (Intel Core i7-10750H, NVIDIA RTX 2070 Super Max-Q) 4,778 38,062 1:03 CPU / 0:44 NVIDIA 1.8 GB/s / 1.8 GB/s ASUS Zephyrus G14 (AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS, NVIDIA RTX 2060 Max-Q) 5,436 32,555 00:38 (AMD) / 00:35 (NVIDIA) 1.7 GB/s / 1.67 GB/s Razer Blade Stealth 13 (2019, Core i7-1065G7, NVIDIA GTX 1650 Max-Q) 4,095 16,201 N/A 2.8 GB/s / 1.8 GB/s Surface Laptop 3 15" (AMD Ryzen 7 3780U Surface Edition, Radeon Vega RX11) 4,124 9,909 1:47 (AMD) 1.9 GB/s / 801 MB/s HP Omen X 2S (2.6-4.5GHz Intel i7-9750H, NVIDIA RTX 2080 Max-Q) 5,972 35,732 N/A 2.8GB/s / 2.67GB/s

Under the hood, you'll find the latest and greatest hardware, including Intel's new 10th generation chips and NVIDIA's RTX graphics. Our review unit featured a Core i7-10750H, an RTX 2070 Super Max-Q and a healthy 32GB of RAM. Yes, it screams. I saw between 200 and 275FPS in Overwatch with high graphics settings, and around 100-130FPS with "epic" quality. Esports players typically favor higher framerates over graphical fidelity, so that performance disparity shouldn’t be a huge deal. In Destiny 2, I clocked between 100 and 140FPS with both high and medium graphics settings. That puts it above the Zephyrus G14, but that's no surprise since that machine had a slower RTX 2060 GPU.