This MSI laptop hits the gaming sweet spot at a price you can’t ignore this Black Friday
An RTX 5070 GPU is the modern gaming laptop baseline, and this MSI has one for cheap
In case you’ve had your head buried in the sand, the cost of gaming laptops is set to go stratospheric in 2026. Blame the tech world’s obsession with AI and the effect that’s having on flash memory prices. So with Black Friday in full swing, I think that makes the MSI Katana 15 the machine of the moment.
This 15in notebook is possibly the cheapest way to bag an Nvidia RTX 5070 right now, at just $1370 in the US and £1299 in the UK. I’ve got one in my desktop gaming rig, and while the laptop version isn’t quite so potent, there’s still enough oomph here to run most games at the Katana’s 2560×1440 native resolution – while also making the most of its 165Hz refresh rate.
Having used other laptops with this graphics setup, I’m confident the Katana can handle Cyberpunk 2077 at playable frame rates with fancy ray tracing effects enabled once you switch on DLSS. Anything lower and you’re probably not going to be able to max out the detail settings on newer titles. And while you can get older machines with RTX 4000- or 3000-series graphics for even cheaper, they don’t support Nvidia’s newer upscaling tech, so won’t have as long a shelf life before you’ll need to upgrade again.
Black Friday Week is here, and you can find all the best offers over on Amazon US and Amazon UK.
UK shoppers should head to Laptops Direct, which is selling the MSI Katana 15 for £1299 – a whopping £500 off the normal retail price. Other retailers only seem to have the model with 512GB of storage, which will quickly get swallowed up by a few large game installs, while Laptops Direct has the 1TB version.
Headline specs include a 16-core Intel i7-14650HX processor and 16GB of RAM, a 15.6in LCD screen that covers 100% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut, and a four-zone RGB illuminated keyboard. The chassis may not be the thinnest or lightest in its class, but the subtle styling means you’ll be able to use it in public without alerting everyone nearby to its gaming credentials. It’s not short on connectivity either, with multiple USBs, HDMI video out and an Ethernet port for lag-free multiplayer matches.
At 2.4kg it’s luggable enough to take on the move, and should manage a few hours of battery life away from the mains – as long as you can refrain from getting your game on until you find a power socket.
In the US, Amazon is selling an even more powerful version with a Core i9-14900HX processor and 32GB of RAM for $1370 – a 17% reduction from the usual $1650 asking price, making it one of the best value 5070 laptops I’ve seen this Black Friday.
Tom Morgan-Freelander
Deputy Editor 
