// PC GAMER — GAMING
MSI Katana 15 HX B14W gaming laptop review
If you're in the UK, the Katana is an all round solid machine, capable of delivering respectable frame-rates and decent-ish CPU performance too, especially for the price. Build quality is okay, and there's a lot of connectivity to take advantage of too. However, that's the problem with this latest edition: it's just okay. There's nothing about it that stands out from the crowd, and when you've got such healthy competition from the likes of Asus and Lenovo nipping at its heels, it's hard to justify in this starved-by-AI hardware age.
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"A union divided cannot stand," reads a famous quote from a famous man. But only now can we finally know why Abraham Lincoln said what he said. There's no shadow of a doubt in my mind he was (in this journalist's opinion), predicting the rise and fall of MSI's Katana 15 HX B14W 2026 edition. Clearly irate with the apparent division it has between its US and UK pricing. This thing is, no word of a lie, $500 more expensive in the US, and that's even before we add sales tax into the equation. Best gaming laptop? Not in the land of the free, that's for damn sure.
In ol' blighty, in the realm of the surprisingly good cooking and cheap dental care, it's a whole other story. What you get for a meagre £1,300 first looks quite solid. And although, yes, that's probably three days of heating this coming winter, if you forgo the soothing warmth of your radiators for a bit you can net yourself an RTX 5060, Core i7 14650HX, and 16 GB of (gloriously dual-channel) 5,600 MT/s DDR5 RAM, all paired nicely with a crisp 2560x1440 "IPS-level" display flickering along 165 times every single second.
For that outlay, I wouldn't blame you in thinking that this is a surprisingly tempting proposition, especially as Black Friday is right around the corner. But it's not without fault, and there's some curious side-effects as a result of the cooling design, that you need to be aware of before you pull the trigger and tell grandma to grab another coat to keep warm.
✅ You're after a cheap UK deal for a versatile laptop: It's not the ultimate gaming machine, no, but MSI's packed a lot of solid quality hardware in here, and for just shy of £1,300 it does beat out the competition spec for spec.✅ You're a big fan of DLSS: That RTX 5060 does lead the field when it comes to ray tracing performance compared to its competition at a similar price point.
❌ You're not a fan of the "gamer" aesthetic: It's big bold and ostentatious, with a hexagonal screen bezel, and overall body design. Everywhere you look, it clearly states itself as "for the gamer", so if you're taking this into a business meeting, look away.❌ You want a CPU and GPU combo that's fully unlocked: The Katana 15 HX technically has a 115 W TGP, but it often taps out at half that, with flailing clock-speeds as a result, we suspect due to CPU bottlenecking.
If you're in the UK, the Katana is an all round solid machine, capable of delivering respectable frame-rates and decent-ish CPU performance too, especially for the price. Build quality is ok, and there's a lot of connectivity to take advantage of too. However, that's the problem with this latest edition. It's just "okay", there's nothing about it that stands out from the crowd, and when you've got such healthy competition from the likes of Asus and Lenovo nipping at its heels, it's hard to justify in this AI hardware starved age.
So, we've covered the basics already, chunky GPU that kinda pairs nicely with the 2560 x 1440 "IPS-level" display, 115 W TGP which should give the card a bit of leg room to clock-up nice and high. Should. You get WiFi 6E, and Bluetooth as standard. As well as three USB Type-A ports, a USB-C, Ethernet, 3.5 mm audio, and HDMI out too. That's not a huge amount of connectivity; you may need a USB hub o