With its Katana GF76 laptops, MSI offers accessible and powerful machines, ideal for getting started in the world of PC gaming. The price of the 2021 versions of these PCs are falling. Here is everything you need to know about these machines capable of running the majority of current games without problem.
MSI released a few weeks ago its latest generation of Katana GF76 gaming laptops equipped with 12th generation Intel processors. Main consequence: the previous generation, equipped with 11th generation processors, sees its price drop.
This is excellent news, because they haven’t lost any of their performance.
A complete gaming laptop
MSI is a recognized and reputable gaming PC brand. In its range of laptops, the Katana series is the most accessible. This means that this machine benefits from all the know-how of the brand in terms of assembly, choice of components and materials. But it makes some concessions on the finishes.
Concretely, the MSI Katana GF76 are portable gamers with large screens of 17.3 inches. The screen was at the center of MSI’s attention: on the GF76, it is a Full HD definition IPS panel with a refresh rate that goes up to 144 Hz.
A responsive screen, perfect for playing competitive games like Rocket League Where Apex Legends. It is a matte slab, with good contrast and benefiting from an accurate colorimetry. The concessions are at the screen edges, a little wider than what is found on very high-end PCs.
The MSI Katana GF76 all have an RGB backlit keyboard, with a numeric keypad. The keys are prominent and the typing is pleasant. This is where we recognize the touch of MSI: even if it is a rather heavy gaming PC (2.6 kg) it is a portable PC that is pleasant to use in a situation of mobility.
Connectivity side, it’s flawless. The right edge offers 1 USB-A 3.0 port, 1 USB-C 3.2 port, 1 HDMI 2.0 socket, 1 Ethernet port and a Jack socket for connecting headphones. The MSI Katana GF76 are also compatible with the Hi-Res audio standard.
On the left side are 2 USB-A ports. You can therefore easily transform this laptop PC into a mini-tower gamer to connect an external screen, a keyboard and a mouse and connect it to the Internet with an Ethernet cable. Regardless of the version of the MSI Katana GF76, WiFi 6 is offered as standard.
Under the hood: GeForce RTX 30 and 11th Gen Intel processors
The MSI Katana GF76 are equipped with 11th generation Intel Core processors. These are processors that were announced at the end of 2020 and equipped the majority of laptops in 2021. On MSI’s PCs, these are either Core i7 11800H (2.3 GHz) or Core i5 11400H (2 .7GHz). These processors were particularly noticed during their benchmarks, because they marked the return of Intel against AMD in its race for performance.
Depending on the version, the MSI Katana GF76 are equipped with Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 or 3060 graphics cards. If these two cards belong to the latest generation of graphics cards, the uses between the 3050 and the 3060 are quite different.
- The RTX 3050s are entry-level graphics cards. They are perfect when it comes to running creative software (Adobe Premiere, Photoshop, Blender), but are struggling with recent video games.
- The RTX 3060s, on the contrary, are the graphics cards with the best price-performance ratio of the moment. As long as you run the games in Full HD, you’ll have no problem playing Elden Ring Where Halo Infinite with high details and at 60 frames per second.
These graphics cards benefit from the latest Nvidia technologies: support for Ray-Tracing, DLSS, Resizable BAR or Dynamic Boost 2.0.
To finish on the technical sheet of these MSI Katana GF76, note that all these laptops have at least 16 GB of RAM, a 512 GB NVMe M.2 SSD and above all Cooler Boost 5 cooling technology.
It’s a good time to buy the MSI Katana GF76
The MSI Katana GF76 – those equipped with an 11th generation Intel processor, therefore – are currently seeing their price drop on the official MSI website.
Two references are currently available. One with a GeForce 3050 and another with a GeForce 3060. Both PCs are the same price: 1399 euros.