At a first glance, the Stealth Pro will surely remind you of the Razer Blade gaming laptop for its sleek and elegant design, the black aluminum chassis really adds up to the sturdy build, that ensures it will have a better durability, it even has an illuminated red dragon emblem on the front cover for that added cool factor. Having a slim build (at 0.85 inch) and being light weighted (2.66 Kg) provides better portability but at a cost of omitting an optical Blu-ray drive; which can be a letdown to some users who would utilize this feature for their HD movie entertainment.

The Stealth Pro has a large 17.5 inch display monitor which gives a great experience for HD gaming and movie entertainment. Watching 1080p HD movies were impressive as the details of the video are sharper and the colors are more vibrant. It also has an anti-glare finish to the display that will help gamers enjoy their gaming with the obstruction of reflections from sunlight or intense lighting conditions, and what’s interesting is that even with the coating, it doesn’t affect the overall quality of the display output. We tested some movies to check how the display would turn out, and it managed to provide sharper details with CG movies like Big Hero 6 and the colors were really vibrant from animated movies like Redline and Macross Frontier. For its price tag, it would have been a sweet deal if they added a touchscreen function to the display so it can utilize the Windows 8 OS touch functions.

In terms of audio, MSI has step up its game with the inclusion of the Dynaudio speakers above the keyboard and subwoofer located below the laptop and SoundBlaster Cinema 2 software, the speakers produce a louder audio compared to other laptops but there are still some flaws commonly found in conventional laptop speakers, as its still can’t give that intense bass and some parts of the audio feels flat despite being able to produce a louder audio, but in terms of acoustics, it can provide great output. But once you switched into your favorite headset, things start to change as the quality of both bass and treble were astounding thanks to the SoundBlaster Cinema 2 drivers. After testing with different kinds of music, from EDM to metal to epic movie soundtracks, the audio was impressive. It even added more punch with its 7.1 surround function to maximize your audio pleasure especially in watching movies and playing games.

One of the upgrades for the GS70 Stealth Pro was the SteelSeries keyboard, for you are those who enjoy everything with lights on it, then you are in for a treat as the GS70 featured customizable multicolored lights. With a few tweaks from the SteelSeries Engine application, you can change the lighting effects from its different options, such as breathing, wave or dual color effects. As for the input, the keys are responsive through our number of tests, another great feature is the custom profile that can be set for specific applications as well as the macro function that is easy to configure thanks to the SS Engine application.

For a slim laptop, it carries a ton of ports. Boasting with four USB 3.0 ports, the Stealth Pro is very generous to those that needed a lot of ports for their peripherals, you can hook up an external drive, a gaming mouse and a headset and it still has room for another device such as a gamepad or a USB cable to hook up your smartphone or tablet. It also offered more options for additional display output with two Mini-DisplayPorts and one HDMI port, both supports 2K and 4K resolutions, for audio, it has the headphone/mic port and a line-in port. It also included an SD slot where it can read both HC and XC SD cards. And last but not the least, it includes an Ethernet port.

For wireless solutions, it featured an 802.11 ac wireless LAN and Bluetooth 4.0. We tried surfing on the net and using the in-home streaming feature on our Steam client through wireless network and we noticed not much lag in terms of latency.