so far the AMD based notebooks that we've taken a look at have been geared
towards specific purposes it all started with the ROG g14 which was geared
towards folks who are willing to pay a little bit more for a compact form
factor that can pull double duty for both greater focus tasks rendering tasks
as well as gaming as well then there was the TUF A15 which was a slightly
larger laptop but it was loads more affordable and it came with a Ryzen
sound 4800 H and in RTX 2060 feel like those were a really good balance of GPU
and CPU horsepower and then there's this the msi bravo 15 i'm not really sure who
this is targeted towards because on one hand it can be the highest performing
budget notebook that i've ever seen but at the same time it struggles in some
key areas msi says that it's a gaming laptop but it sort of isn't at the same
time this one was a really tough laptop to evaluate guys so let's take a deep
dive and see where this stands in the current notebook market after this the
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alright so I'm gonna start with pricing which is really good actually for the
whole series starting at 929 you get a Ryzen 5 4600H 8 gigs of ram 5 tall gig
SSD and an RX5500M with eight hundred twenty Hertz display adding $70 to that
brings you to our sample featuring the 8 core 16 thread 4800H twice the memory
but it still sticks to that rx 5500 M the thousand dollar gaming notebook
category is super competitive these days we expect at least a gtx 660ti level
graphics at that price even with AMD cpus there's an rx5600M in the g515 SE
which you know will hit a grand in Dulce frequent sales while asus is
offering gtx 660ti in their thousand-dollar A15 let's start with
exterior impressions and I'm just going to say it's pretty
decent for the price don't expect an aluminum construction it's mostly a
plastic chassis with brush textures on the lid which I don't like because two
or three months down the road that's not gonna look like the day you unboxed it
the hinge is pretty strong in fact if my memory serves me well this feels
stronger than the TUF A15 I didn't experience any wobble I mean this thing
is it's pretty amazing for the price I gotta give it to him aside for that the
interior space is pretty low profile which I like but I really wished if they
went with a sandstone finish and just can't vouch for how long this brush
texture would last with skin oil or other things that make contact with it
so that's something to look out for the keyboard layout is pretty standard
weirdly a lot of the function keys up top don't have any secondary functions
they're just blank I mean it would have been nice to see all the media playback
buttons or controls mapped to those function keys but that could just be me
the keys themselves are good the child distance is short but to my surprise I
got use of them really quickly personally I prefer them over the TUF
A15 and if you type a lot or game a lot these will do the job just fine
it is backlit with red LEDs unfortunately there is no RGB lighting
so you can't tweet the colors brightness levels are okay
I have nothing to complain here however my biggest frustration with this
notebook is the trackpad it is a plastic smooth finish which is okay and has
support for Windows precision drivers but it isn't secured properly and what
do I mean by that well if you're clicking on something you'd either tap
or press the primary left or right buttons but in this case tap works okay
but if you press it doesn't actually register you'd have to like press it
even harder to get something to work it's almost like a two-step process I
feel like something is or the track by itself is sort of loose and that to me
was pretty annoying and frustrating I think you guys have to listen to this to
actually get a feel of what I'm talking about
so this is the webcam test on the Bravo 15 now the video quality is okay I mean
we can't really expect anything greater at this point the microphone is decent
there is a bit of compression with my voice but ironically it sounds way
better than the GS 66 stealth that checked out recently which costs you
know twenty five hundred dollars it's significantly more expensive than this
laptop they plays the microphone where it's supposed to be you don't hear any
fans which is great so there should be fine for casual Skype or zoo meetings
the speakers are bottom facing it's a classic move by MSI so don't expect them
to blow your mind away in fact for the same price point I feel like the TUF
A15 has a better speaker system than this one because it suits some really
interesting design tweaks within the chassis to enrich the sound signature
now moving on to ports most of them are located on the right hand side which I'm
sure is gonna be a problem when you use an external Mouse now supposedly MSI did
this to make sure that the hot air exhausts from the left hand side which
is away from your typical you know external mouse position but if you're a
left-hand user that would be a bit of an issue so there's that on the right hand
side you get a Kensington lock LAN port two USB 3.1 genuine type-c ports which
is very surprising for a thousand-dollar laptop another two USB Taipei's and an
audio jack switching over to the left you get power in an HDMI do note that
all USB ports are genuine foggy bits per second so it's not the fastest out there
I think this is gonna be a regular occurrence on lower end AMD notebooks
the display is fifteen point six inches it's 1080p IPS level with a refresh rate
of 120 Hertz unfortunately MSI's IPS level marketing is not really accurate
because this is bad like really bad as you can see it only covers 61 percent
srgb 45 percent Adobe are and 45% tcpip 3 so if you value color
accuracy don't even think about getting this the screen doesn't get brighter at
the max that it can achieve is around 219 its which is pretty poor for outdoor
visibility and finally there's that 120 Hertz refresh rate it's pretty awesome
for gaming you can certainly get away with it if you're coming from a 60 Hertz
display it's a welcoming upgrade in terms of upgrade ability you have quick
access to the two RAM modules maximum support capacity is 64 gigabytes the
primary nvme SSD is right over here and there's an additional MDOT two slot for
expansion which is pretty cool i really like this layout it looks organized in
my opinion the drive speeds are good but they're not crazy fast especially when
you're compared to the A15 or even the more expensive notebooks like the blade
15 or the GS66 stealth from MSI the battery capacity is 51 watt hours but to
our surprise when we ran our light low test it lasted longer than our GS 66
stealth which has almost twice the capacity in an r/t x27 a supermax cue
switching gears to our heavy load tests and well that smaller capacity does come
at a disadvantage with it only lasting for about an hour
moving on to performance starting with Cinebench and right away it looks like
something really interesting is going on even though the bravo 15 technically has
the same Ryzen 7 4800H and 16 gigabytes of ram just like the A15
it's losing by a pretty significant amount in the multi-core tests while
single core seems pretty much identical let's dive a bit deeper to see what's
going on now remember that just like every other notebook we test them in the
highest performance modes and so for the Bravo 15 is the highest performance
setting that can be enabled through the Dragon Center starting with an all core
load of Autodesk Maya it looks like MSI's extreme performance
mode fluctuates clock speeds in an effort to hit predefined temperature
targets that results in temperature shooting right up to 95 c1 the frequency
is all over the place from 3.3 v all the way up to 3.5 gigahertz during this time
the CPU package power was around 50 watts which is close to the top of AMD's
54 watts back then around these seven and a half minute mark CP power cuts to
45 watts which both frequencies and temperatures diving
down a bit further you can see that there's about a 200 megahertz difference
between balance and the extreme performance mode on the Bravo 15 but
that's quickly cut to about a hundred megahertz later in the test but how does
this compare to the ASUS TUF a15 well on that notebook both turbo mode and
balanced start much much higher and then balance mode takes a nosedive pretty
early and events out to a lower speed than MSI turbo mode continues on a bit
further and then eventually levels out to a high level than the Bravo so what
this tells us is that their highest performance modes like we test or in
shorter bursts in balance power mode the A15 will beat the Bravo in sepia focus
tests however if the test is longer the MSI in balanced mode will probably have
the edge I'll be going over the expected temperatures and behaviors of these AMD
CPUs in in other videos so definitely stay tuned for that but for now let's
finish off the rest of the real-world benchmarks in blender you can see that
the Bravo 15 being edged out again which is completely in line with our
expectations in Premiere which uses AMD's discrete card for acceleration
it's pretty obvious that the 5500 M causes a pretty big performance penalty
in rendering versus something like an RTX 2060 even when it's paired with a
super-fast cpu DaVinci Resolve shows this too but make no mistake about it
either the 4800H really helps things out here
handbrake meanwhile is a super CPU intensive test
so the Bravo 15 gets pretty good results honestly it's amazing to see a
thousand-dollar notebook with a 4800H overcoming a $2,500 windows-based
machine like the Aero 17 X WinRAR isn't anything surprising either since the SSD
on this isn't the fastest before getting into gaming benchmarks let's first see
how the Bravo 15 behaves when both the CPU and GPU are under load in doom
eternal as temperatures increase the CPU frequencies are all over the place with
a variance of 1 gigahertz even as it hits just above 90 degrees
meanwhile the CPU package power has between 35 and 38 watts what's probably
happening here is a meze boost algorithms are simply trying to maximize
clock speeds in a more lightly threaded environment GPU temperatures are hotter
than we expected for a supposedly efficient
design but that could be due to the bio 15 cooling design another possibility
for the higher temperatures are those clock speeds MSI pushes them to just
over 60 and 60 megahertz which is actually higher than Amy's maximum boost
frequency of 1645 megahertz so technically you could consider that as a
mild overclock now before I get into the gaming benchmarks I do want to talk
about my gaming experience with the Bravo 15 because trying to get some
games to run on this machine was a nightmare for instance Red Dead
Redemption 2 failed to run on this laptop there were other games like Far
Cry 5 and Jedi Order that engaged the integrated GPU instead of the discrete
graphics card now this isn't MSI's fault in fact it's more along the lines to do
with AMD's drivers and how they work within Windows as of the latest update
you see most of the control over the eye GPU and the discrete GPU switching has
been added over to Windows which means the operating system can get confused
sometimes as to when it needs to switch between one or the other
especially when a game launches without exclusive full-screen mode
keep in mind that this only happens when an AMD GPU and an AGP is detected not
when an nvidia card is installed the only way to get around this is to
manually set which graphics processor is used and that isn't done in AMD's
control panel anymore you'll need to get into the windows graphic settings make
sure classic app is selected and then browse to the game's executable files
once that's found you can override the windows default and associate that app
with the high performance and discrete card I really really hope that this gets
fixed soon because it's a mess right now but luckily this was only an issue that
we encountered with a few games speaking of which the results were decent but I
think the most interesting aspect of these frame rates is that there are only
a few FPS better than the Zephyrs GA 502 T you that I reviewed last year that
thing has a pretty slow Ryzen 7 3750h CPU that was probably a bottleneck for a
gtx 660ti this notebook has a deep other way around
it has a massively powerful 4800H backstopping a pretty weak graphics card
so gaming isn't really the brow Dean's strength at least not for the
price MSI is charging for it the acoustic performance was respectable it
didn't sound like a jet fan like the GS 66 stove so that's welcoming okay so I'm
gonna wrap this up quickly the Bravo 15 from MSI isn't really a gaming laptop
because when you look at the 4800H it's a good option for people who value CPU
processing instead of playing the latest titles and comfortable frame rates
because when you're building out a gaming laptop you're looking for
something that has a balanced CPU and GPU horsepower you want to make sure
that both offers you know relatively good performance but in this case its
weakest point is that graphics card the RX 5500M it just it's a weird
combination to pair with an 8-core 16-minute processor I think the best
analogy is you're trying to you know let it literally retrofit a Ferrari with
bicycle wheels I hope that made sense with that being said I have to give
credit to MSI for what they've achieved with the Bravo 15 because it offers
pretty good build quality for the price the keyboard is nice the trackpad it's
loose but I think it's just my sample but if you are in the market looking for
a thousand dollar gaming laptop you shouldn't get this you should definitely
look somewhere else so on that note thank you so much for watching I hope
you were able to take away something from this video stay safe
spend responsibly and I'll talk to you guys in the next one