 There are really only two kinds of gaming laptops that I get personally excited about. The massive, power-hungry, mind-blowingly fast, supercar class ones like this dual GTX 1080 Monster from Sega that I reviewed recently, and the lightweight, thin but still potent class that seems to have emerged as a direct response to the original Razer Blade back in 2013. And this one is part of the latter family. Meet the MSI GS63 VR. FreshBooks is the super simple invoicing solution that lets you get organized, save time, and get paid faster. Click now at the link in the video description to try it for free. Okay, specification time. The GS63 VR, as MSI not so subtly implied right in the name, rocks a VR-ready, enthusiast-grade configuration, including an Intel Core i7 6700HQ quad-core processor, 16 gigs of DDR4 memory, a 128 gig NVMe SSD, and a GeForce GTX 1060 with 6 gigs of GDDR5 VRAM. And as expected, they crammed all of this into the same chassis as the GS63 VR's GTX 970M-equipped predecessor. That means a 1080p 60Hz IPS display whose deep black levels look good, but fail to help it stand out from the crowd with any wow features like touch, higher refresh rates, or G-Sync, a large speaker grille with a bottom-mounted subwoofer that both sound decidedly okay, and a 720p 30fps webcam that falls squarely in unexceptional territory. Let's talk I.O. now, and I'll be making a lot of comparisons here to my daily driver Razer Blade. The GS63 VR has a bigger screen, so it's both larger, though not as much as you might think thanks to its smaller bezels, and thicker than the Razer Blade. But, while this slightly greater Z-height means that MSI can't take sexy pictures of it next to dimes, it does allow it to have a built-in Ethernet port. That's one less accessory to buy and carry around, to go along with its otherwise also fairly complete loadout, including standalone Nehemic 2 powered headphone and microphone jacks, three USB 3.5 gigabit ports, an SD card reader, and killer gigabit Ethernet on the left, with a power button, USB 2, weird right? USB Type-C Thunderbolt, HDMI 2.0, and Mini DisplayPort 1.2 on the right. Which I guess leads to my first complaint. I get that MSI is dedicating pretty much the entire back third of this notebook to cooling vents, but the effect that this has on mousing space is not a desirable one. The power brick thankfully terminates in a right angle connector, but if you were to plug in, oh I don't know, an external Thunderbolt drive or an external monitor of some sort, expecting to use the included keyboard, you'd likely find yourself pretty annoyed by how much room you have for your mouse. Which leads then to complaint number two. The GS63VR's power brick delivers 10% more power than Razer's brick while being way bigger. This isn't important on massive gaming beasts, where I generally don't even mention them unless they come with two or something like that, but it's the kind of thing for a machine that you expect to carry around every day, maybe in a brief case, that actually matters, because the must-carry accessories are part of the whole package. And since I'm on a bit of a complaint role here, let's talk bloatware. Why is WinZip on here? Norton? Really? And what the hell is Magix? There was so much junk preloaded on this thing that I had no idea to whom my super angry letter about the 100% CPU usage reporting bug should be addressed. I thought maybe the culprit was the killer networking suite, but removing that didn't help, the Windows 10 anniversary update didn't help, and even after a factory reset, the behavior persisted. So I emailed the manufacturer, it turns out it is a feature of Dragon Suite that fools Windows intentionally to keep it from entering a lower power state to speed up data transfers over SATA, M.2, and USB. IMO, that should be disabled by default, and come with a warning when you turn it on, because I spent about an hour tearing my hair out trying to fix it. Anyway though, the good news is that was a simple software toggle, and the rest of that stuff can be fixed with a good old-fashioned add-remove program's purge. So I'm going to get back into the hardware now. The keyboard is RGB with three lighting zones and SteelSeries engine software to handle your macro and key rebinding needs. Having a number pad again is awesome, but I'm still going to give the keyboard a B. It is quiet, but I personally prefer a sharper tactile bump. Even so though, with a little less deck flex and function up-down arrow reassigned to page up and page down instead of brightness up and brightness down, I would increase that to a B+. With the touchpad falling into a pretty similar category, two-handed operation works like a charm, and the surface feels good, but I really don't like their acceleration algorithm, and the Elan software doesn't offer much in the way of tuning options out of the box. Let's move on to performance. When Luke said at the GTX 10 series notebook GPU launch event that he was disappointed they wouldn't let him benchmark the 1060, which he thought was the most interesting of the bunch, I think he nailed it. My points of comparison for this video, since this is my first 10 series single GPU notebook, are the GTX 970M in my daily driver Blade 14, the last-gen thin gaming GPU of choice, and the GTX 980 desktop version in MSI's GT72S Anniversary Edition. And the performance here blows me away, and it should do the same to you, that in a single generation, we've cut the difference between this and this in half. And this is all while showing off some very impressive thermal performance. It's hard to say how much of this is thanks to the GTX 1060 until I get some more samples, and how much is thanks to MSI's approach to cooling, which you can see with our internal shot has them really taking advantage of the extra area inside the GS63 VR with three fans and many heat pipes on an unusual upside-down motherboard configuration, but it works, and MSI even managed to squeeze user-upgradable sodium slots in there. They aren't easy to get at, but they're in there. So this machine is quieter than most and much cooler to the touch than any other thin and light gaming machine that I've used yet. The weird moleskin covering on the bottom actually seems to help, too. It slows heat transfer to your skin when you have it resting on your lap. It's kind of a nice touch. And the positives keep coming. Battery life ain't too shabby either. One and a half hours while running Crysis 3 is nothing to sneeze at, considering I didn't even crank the brightness down. So bottom line, then. While MSI's GS63 VR might not be the thinnest or the smallest thin and light gaming machine, it utilizes its extra size very well to deliver more I.O., including Thunderbolt 3, a bigger display, beefy cooling, and a number pad for folks who work as well as play. And thanks to its magnesium-lithium alloy chassis, it's slightly lighter even than the Razer Blade. That is to say, if we ignore the obnoxious power brick, while also costing less. I'm not a huge fan of the 120 gig SSD, 1 terabyte hard drive config in this particular unit. Larger SSDs not only hold more, but they also perform better, substantially better, like I noticed it. But throw a bigger SSD in there, and the GS63 VR is a really solid platform that will make a lot of gamers happy. 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