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The MSI Katana 15 HX (2025) makes a solid 1440p gaming laptop form just a little more accessible. It’s not the most powerful or flashiest option on the market, but it delivers where it counts for those who are not quite ready to drop $2,000 or more on something to run the latest AAA titles at the absolute highest settings.
So, for gamers looking for a gaming laptop with a limited budget, the MSI Katana 15 HX (model B14WGK-016US) is among the best to pick from. There are a few compromises, however – the styling is a little too familiar and the battery life isn’t the best around. However, the overall package delivers a good quality gaming experience, where you won’t feel like you’ve sacrificed too much or received too little when it comes to PC gaming.
After all, even the best gaming laptops out there tend to have a flaw or two, but most try to strike the best balance between design, performance, and price. And, the MSI Katana 15 HX (2025) delivers exactly that, making it ideal as a replacement for an aging gaming desktop PC or for anyone upgrading from an entry-level gaming laptop.
MSI Katana 15 HX Specs
- Processor: Intel 14th Gen Core i9-14900HX
- Graphics: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070
- Memory: 32GB RAM
- Storage: 1TB NVMe SSD
- Display: 15.6-inch, 2560 x 1440, 165Hz, IPS
- Wireless: Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3
- Battery: 75 watt-hours
- Weight: 5.29 pounds
Design & Features
Gaming laptops have come a long way in terms of design, portability, and performance. However, they’re yet to catch up with their productivity counterparts, but we’ve seen some truly spectacular gaming laptops like the Alienware M18; otherwise, most gaming laptops are more about raw gaming power and less about design and looks. The MSI Katana 15 HX rocks a fair design over its predecessor, but it just ends there; nothing outstanding to compete with the HP Omen Transcend 14 – the sleekest gaming laptop we’ve reviewed this year.
For the Katana 15 HX, MSI uses the all-familiar plain design – an all-black, plastic exterior. Outside a few lines on the case, some angles, and a few flourishes, this gaming machine means business. We’re used to the MSI logo illuminating with RGB lights, but on this machine, it has been replaced with a blacked-out tactile patch. MSI says this lid has a matte, fingerprint-resistant finish, but in real-world use, it does pick fingerprints quite easily.
Opening the lid, you’re welcomed by a four-zone RGB keyboard that’s perhaps the main highlight on this laptop’s design; plus, it’s something you rarely get at this price point. Typically, most gaming laptops get single-zone lighting. Otherwise, beyond the fairly thick top and bottom bezels, this laptop looks pretty basic, just like the MSI Katana A15 I reviewed a while back. The MSI B14WGK-016US weighs 5.29 pounds and is 0.98 inches thick, making it fairly portable, but you’ll still feel it in your backpack.
The display here is a better version of the screen on previous Katana 15 gaming laptops: A 15.6-inch 1440p (2560 x 1440) panel with a 16:9 aspect ratio. It’s not going to blow you away, but it will do what it’s supposed to well. It comes with a speedy 144Hz refresh rate for smooth gameplay in competitive games and covers 100% DCI-P3, should you decide to use it for productivity tasks.
The Katana 15 HX has cooling exhausts on the back and sides, and the thick chassis gives enough room for ports. On the left side, there’s a pair of USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, and the right side has a third Type-A port, alongside a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port, HDMI 2.1, Ethernet, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Unlike most gaming laptops, it doesn’t have any ports around the back.
Gaming and Graphics Performance
The MSI Katana 15 HX B14WGK-016US combines an Intel Core i9-14900HX processor with Nvidia’s mid-tier current-gen mobile graphics card, the Nvidia GeForce RTX, alongside 32GB DDR5 RAM and 1TB NVMe SSD storage. Here, we’re comparing the Katana HX to the previous model, Katana A15, with an RTX 4070, so you should expect significant gains.
The Nvidia RTX 5070 is a giant leap above the RTX 4070 and 4070Ti, capable of great 1440p performance with some decent 4K there, too, particularly with the help of DLSS. It is a mobile graphics card in the Blackwell family, based on the GB206 chip featuring 4,608 shader/CUDA cores that are clocked at between 908-2520MHz depending on the model. The RTX 5070 uses 8GB GDDR7 with a 128-bit memory bus and features 36 RT-cores and 48 ROPS. This is enough resources to drive most modern titles at high settings.
In benchmark tests, the MSI Katana 15 HX runs Civilization 7 (2025) at 105 fps, matching the screen’s 165Hz refresh rate, and all details maxed out at 2560 x 1440. It maintains the above 100 fps figure across all gaming scenarios while gaming online, even when a lot of action is taking place on the screen.
The MSI Katana 15 HX is a gaming laptop that has a lot of muscle for work and play at a very reasonable price.
The same impressive performance is replicated in the Call of Duty Black Ops 6 benchmark tests, whereby the MSI B14WGK-016US maintains a lead over its closest rivals at 1080p Ultra with 98 fps, edging out the Gigabyte Gaming A16 (Core i7-13620H, GeForce RTX 5070), while the Asus ROG Strix G16 (Core Ultra 9 275Hx, GeForce RTX 5080) leads the pack with 153fps at 1080p.
Running Cyberpunk 2077 on Ultra graphics settings at 1080p results in an average frame rate of 74 frames per second (fps). Enabling ray tracing cuts the framerate in half, but 38 fps still isn’t bad considering the price. Using DLSS makes the frame rate jump to 108 fps without ray tracing and 78 fps with ray tracing enabled. Cyberpunk 2077 is a challenging game, so a card that runs above 60 fps simply highlights the potential it has on other modern titles.
When playing games with DLSS support, such as Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Metro Exodus, quality mode upscaling can generally improve performance by 30-50 percent and even more, and the resulting image quality can compete well against native rendering. Where DLSS 3 Frame Generation is supported, frame rates sent to your display can be boosted by 50-100 percent, but it causes additional latency.
Gaming laptops tend to struggle with battery life, and the B14WGK-016US is no exception. It lasts slightly more than four hours, which isn’t terrible but still not enough to manage a full workday or a cross-country flight. In that case, you’ll want to pack the power brick.
MSI Katana 15 HX B14WGK-016US Review: Bottom line
The MSI Katana 15 HX is solidly under $2,000, making it cheaper than many of the laptops we get to test these days. Plus, it packs an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 graphics card that, while not the most powerful in this line, delivers solid 1440p gaming performance with very few bottlenecks. The screen MSI is using is identical to the one it used in last year’s model, and it wasn’t great back then. You will need to pump up the brightness as far as it can go, and it looks a little dull, especially if coming from a brighter display panel. Also, you’re still getting a 720p webcam in 2025.
Overall, if you’re looking for a laptop with a new GPU for much less than the competition, the MSI Katana 15 HX will play most games decently with the right performance settings. And down the road, when you need more oomph, you can add more storage and RAM to extend its usability. But when you’re not using it on the road, you may want to plug it into a high-resolution gaming monitor.
Price Comparison
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