MSI Bravo 17 C7VFK-046MY Laptop Review – A Standing Ovation For An Affordable Gaming Laptop

The MSI Bravo 17 C7V laptop is one of the latest products for MSI’s ever growing lineup of gaming laptops, with its NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 8GB GDDR6 mobile graphics card.

Specifications

Appearance

The MSI Bravo 17 C7V has a clean design where the entire laptop is painted with a sleek black colour scheme, highlighted with the Thunderbird logo, giving the whole device a smart and modern look.

The laptop weighs at 2.7kg with a thickness of 25.2mm and you’ll be able to easily open the lid with just one hand. One minor gripe I have in terms of the design of the MSI Bravo 17 C7V is that its lid is made of non anti-fingerprint material, meaning that fingerprints can be very prominent.

The I/O ports are abundant; In addition to the regular network port, power port, HDMI 2.1 video output port, and 3.5mm headphone jack, it also provides two USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A ports, one USB 2.0 Type-A port, and one USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-C port, which all come in handy if you’re looking to connect to multiple peripherals at the same time.

Keyboard and Touchpad

Considering that the MSI Bravo 17 C7V is a 17″ laptop, it comes with a numeric keypad along with a 4 zone RGB backlighting for each keys. The black keycaps have the same colour scheme as the rest of the laptop, and because the hollowing out at the text is done with precision, it makes the backlighting show off the flashy colours relatively well.

The “WASD” keys have a semi-transparent design, which not only make the RGB lighting effects more visible, but it also gives a nice contrast with the other keys.

The keyboard on this laptop has good key travel and feedback which makes for an overall good typing experience. But in order to incorporate all the keys into the laptop, some of the key are quite small and the overall key placement are slightly different from the standard keyboard layout, so you might need some time to get used to it.

Meanwhile, the touchpad on this laptop is on the smaller side and is placed slightly to the left, so if you’re used to working with a touchpad, you’ll find it a little less convenient to operate. On the bright side with having a smaller touchpad is that users won’t accidentally touch it while playing games.

Screen and Audio

As with the screen, the MSI Bravo 17 C7V comes equipped with a 17.3″ FHD IPS-level narrow-bezel screen with a resolution of 1920×1080. The refresh rate of the screen is up to 144Hz, which allows users to enjoy smooth gaming graphics without any lag, along with the narrow-bezel screen which improves the immersion.

In addition, support for AMD FreeSync Premium technology provides users with a better visual experience that minimises the possibility of screen tearing. Meanwhile, the upper bezel of the laptop is designed with a HD camera and microphone pickup to meet the basic needs for doing internet video calls or meetings.

As for the audio, the laptop offers 2 hi-fi speakers and is equipped with the “Nahimic 3” audio system, as well as “Hi-Res Audio” support and certification. With headsets on, you can really hear the good bass feedback, especially with explosion scenes in games and movies.

The sound volume is also sufficient, as it’s easy to cover an entire room when your crank up the volume to max. While I previously mentioned that the bass is pretty good with headsets on,  it’s unfortunately not as good without it.

Performance Test

The MSI Bravo 17 C7V comes with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 8GB GDDR6 mobile graphics card, AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS processor, two NVMe M.2 SSD by PCIe Gen4 x4 and DDR5-4800 RAM. This laptop also brings in the MSI GPU Switch technology, which allows users to switch between full-performance GPUs, or at high endurance performances while gaming.

Users can also use the in-app software MSI Center to change the laptop performance, and its designed to serve as MSI’s all-purpose tool for tracking hardware status, switching power profiles, and other tasks.

Aside from that, the MSI Bravo 17 C7V also comes equipped with AMD Wi-Fi 6E wireless network, which allows for stable high-speed network without worrying about latency problems.

3DMark –  20,036

PCMark 10 – 7,040

Cinebench – single core 1,812, multi core 22,313

The MSI Bravo 17 C7V battery has a capacity of 53.5Whr and is supplied with a 200W charger. In our actual test for battery life performance, internet browsing and other daily tasks can last you for about 5 hours, while playing a movie for a long time would only last you for about 3 hours.

Additionally, the laptop also comes with built-in application tools to help users stay on top of their laptops, offering a wide range of tuning options to give users the flexibility to choose the performance that suits their current needs.

Gaming Test

We tested out three different titles on the MSI Bravo 17 C7V, with each games tested at 1920×1080 resolution on both highest and lowest settings.

Apex Legends

• High Settings: 81.9 FPS average, 114.7 FPS high, 53.2 FPS low 1%
• Low settings: average 125.6 FPS, maximum 144.9 FPS, minimum 1% 78FPS

Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon

• High setting: 35.5 FPS average, 51.2 FPS high, 23.5 FPS low 1%
• Low setting: 69.9FPS average, 72.7FPS high, 45.8FPS low 1%

Hogwarts Legacy

• High setting: average 31.3FPS, maximum 36.3FPS, minimum 1% 10.4FPS
• Low setting: 41.5FPS average, 45.9FPS maximum, 11.7FPS minimum 1% 11.7FPS

Cooling System

In terms of cooling, the MSI Bravo 17 C7V utilises the Cooler Boost 5 cooling module that features two powerful cooling fans with six sets of copper heatpipes, which can efficiently remove excess heat from the internal part of the laptop in real-time, ensuring that the processor and graphics card work as stable and efficient over a long period of time.

More importantly, the pivot of the laptop is also designed with cooling holes, effectively enhancing the body of the internal hardware work of the heat generated by the rapid diffusion, not only to enhance the cooling performance of the body, but also give a neat aesthetic touch.

However, when the system fan is running at full speed with full performances, the fan noise will be more or less noticeable, but you won’t notice it if you use a headset.

Verdict

The MSI Bravo 17 C7V comes with high-performance hardware that not only provides a great gaming experience, but also produces beautiful graphics. Aside from that, the efficient cooling design, sleek backlit keyboard, and modern design of the laptop accentuates the clean design of the device.

Priced at RM5,399 , I personally think it’s on the affordable range and a good value for money, so if you’re looking to get a gaming laptop with low profile but have enough power to run games, you can totally consider the MSI Bravo 17 C7V.

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