MSI has always presented itself as a brand for gamers, so it's no surprise that they have the largest range of gaming laptops of any manufacturer. In 2021, the well-known Thin, Leopard and Stealth laptops were joined by the new Katana and Sword laptop series. These entry-level and mid-range laptops are built exclusively with the latest 11th generation Intel Core processor series and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3000 series graphics cards. In the new company hierarchy, they follow MSI's flagship GP Leopard laptops and mid-range models from the Pulse GL series .


Thanks to competent pricing and the use of hardware that is optimal in terms of price and performance, Katana and Sword laptops can be safely recorded as competitors for the Acer Nitro and ASUS TUF series. Most often they use six-core Core i5 Tiger Lake processors, less often more powerful Core i7 from the same 11th generation Intel Core. Video cards are usually modern, but simpler - RTX 3050 or RTX 3060, less often RTX 3070. The amount of RAM is usually 16 GB to keep up with the times. Purebred M.2 SSDs with a capacity of 512 – 1024 GB are used as drives.

Displays are most often built using IPS technology and overclocked to 144 Hz, but are limited to Full HD resolution. For a 15- or 17-inch display, this is just right, from our point of view, it is better to save the resources of the graphics card for better graphic settings or everyone's favorite ray tracing. Considering their modest status, the Katana and Sword are equipped with simple solid-colour backlighting. The charcoal black Katana devices have a red illumination, while the white Sword models have a blue backlit keyboard. In fact, both laptops differ only in colour and little things like the Bluetooth version. Otherwise, these are absolutely identical laptops built on the same chassis and made according to the same pattern.