Summer in the UK is here - albeit a bit of a wetter summer than many of us were hoping for - and that means that the back-to-school season is looming. With many learners about to head off for university or college for the first time, it’s the perfect opportunity to pick up a new laptop for school - and MSI is currently running a big July laptop sale featuring some stellar discounts.
Anyone looking to buy a student laptop right now has a few key criteria they ought to consider, and the four MSI laptops listed below meet (and even exceed) these requirements. First up, naturally, is performance: a laptop for university needs to be fast and responsive, as well as being capable of handling the demanding workloads of creative or scientific courses - think STEM modeling software or 3D animation and rendering, both of which are comfortably managed by the NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs found in these laptops. A nice side effect of this is that you can also run all the latest games in your downtime!
You’re also going to want long battery life, a bright, sharp display, and of course, value for money. Getting plenty of bang for your buck is especially important for education, since a laptop is often the single biggest purchase new university students make. It should be considered an investment, something that can carry you through three or four years of lectures and assignments. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the best laptop deals in MSI’s current sale.
1. MSI Cyborg 14
With a formidable CPU and GPU combo, the MSI Cyborg 14 is an excellent choice for anyone looking for a current-gen entry-level 14-inch gaming laptop. With a stylish semitransparent design to show off those internal components, it’s currently down from £1,149 to just £949 at Currys - a stellar deal that makes it cheaper than much of the competition.
CPU: Intel i7-13620H
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 Laptop GPU
Storage: 512GB SSD
RAM: 16GB DDR5
Display: 14-inch, 16:10 FHD+ (1920x1200), 144Hz, 100%sRGB
Now, if you heard ‘gaming laptop’ and thought ‘that’s not for school’, don’t panic. Thanks to its compact and lightweight design (as well as the competitive pricing), this is a great choice of laptop for any student on the go, easy to toss into a backpack or laptop bag to take with you to lectures or even out to a coffee shop for some peaceful essay-writing.
It doesn’t skimp on specs despite that ‘entry-level’ badge though: with the latest NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 Laptop graphics card, this laptop can handle the latest games and use hardware acceleration to provide speedy performance in rendering, photo editing, modeling, and mathematical software. That 14-inch display is also very nice, with 100% sRGB color gamut coverage and a 144Hz refresh rate, making it great for animators and digital artists.
2. MSI Stealth 14 AI Studio
A more serious laptop for the user who prefers refined aesthetics and an emphasis on performance, the MSI Stealth 14 AI Studio is part of MSI’s first wave of AI-powered laptops, featuring some beefy internal specs despite its sleek and compact magnesium alloy chassis - all the better to take advantage of the newly-added AI tools found in Windows 11 and many other popular programs right now.
CPU: Intel Core Ultra 7 155H
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU
Storage: 1TB SSD
RAM: 32GB DDR5
Display: 14-inch 16:10 2.8K (2880x1800), OLED, 120Hz, 100% DCI-P3
Down from £1,899 to £1,549 at Currys right now, the Stealth 14 AI Studio is still technically a gaming laptop, in that its NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU can easily handle all the latest triple-A games. But it’s capable of so much more than that: the NVIDIA RTX Studio drivers and high-end components including 32GB of DDR5 RAM make it a beast for powering through resource-intensive workloads like video editing and MATLAB calculations.
With a full terabyte of speedy local SSD storage and a gorgeous 2.8K OLED display featuring 100% DCI-P3 color space, this feels more like a professional laptop than a student laptop - but it’ll still cost you less than a mid-spec M3 MacBook Pro, and it’ll run quieter too thanks to the dual vapor chamber cooling solution.
3. MSI Sword 16 HX
Looking for something with a bit more power under the hood? The MSI Sword 16 HX is a large-screen laptop with an unapologetic gamer aesthetic, packed with a 24-zone RGB gaming keyboard, including translucent WASD keys. With a GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU and the latest cutting-edge 14th-gen Intel HX gaming processor, it’s an excellent deal at just £1,099 at Currys, £400 off its retail price.
CPU: Intel Core i7-14700HX
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU
Storage: 1TB SSD
RAM: 16GB DDR5
Display: 16-inch, 16:10 QHD+ (2560x1600), 240Hz, 100% DCI-P3
The display cuts no corners either: this is a QHD+ panel with a whopping 240Hz refresh rate, meaning that you’ll never be constrained by your monitor when it comes to hitting crisp framerates in games (especially with NVIDIA DLSS boosting your performance). That 14700HX processor is unlocked for overclocking too, letting you push your performance even further.
Of course, the Sword 16 HX is a bit chunkier than the other laptops in this list, so it’s a good option for anyone who isn’t too concerned about portability and would rather have a laptop with a bigger display as a desktop replacement system. Still, it’s actually not that heavy, weighing in at just 2.25kg despite that 16-inch display!
4. MSI Cyborg 15 (RTX 2050)
If you’re shopping on a tight budget, you shouldn’t count out some of MSI’s entry-level offerings. This MSI Cyborg 15 model comes with a 12th-gen Intel Core CPU and NVIDIA RTX 2050 Laptop graphics card, but it’s still a respectable choice of laptop - and at just £629 at Currys right now, it’s by far the most affordable laptop on this list.
CPU: Intel Core i5-12450H
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2050 Laptop GPU
Storage: 512GB SSD
RAM: 16GB DDR5
Display: 15.6-inch, 16:9 FHD (1920 x 1080p), 144Hz, 45% NTSC
AI hardware acceleration is the name of the game right now, and even a card like the RTX 2050 is a hugely superior option versus many of the currently available laptops at the same price point that utilize integrated graphics instead.
The key difference is that the 2050 is a dedicated GPU, rather than an on-processor graphics solution: that means a big step up in performance, but also the ability to let the GPU and CPU operate independently to improve efficiency. You also get NVIDIA’s NVENC video encoder, which guarantees you stutter-free livestreaming - and despite its 20-series naming, the RTX 2050 is actually built on the same Nvidia Ampere microarchitecture as the RTX 30 series, meaning that it also packs extra features such as DLSS, Nvidia Reflex, and Nvidia Broadcast.
