Are you in the market for a laptop for when we have load shedding(yes the pains of being South African) so you can at least play some games, catch up with the latest hacks or just do some teams meetings? Well MSI can help you there with their new Cyborg 15 A12VF gaming notebook.
The MSI Cyborg 15 A12VF sports a 12th Gen Intel Cpu, and our test unit has the Intel i7-12650H processor(10 total cores and 16 total threads) a not-so-shabby processor if I may say so myself. Our test unit also came standard with 16GB DDR5 ram and a 512GB M.2 SSD. These two parts of the Cyborg 15 are user upgradable and you can push the ram up to 64GB(two 32GB DDR5-4800 Sodimm’s) for the storage side you have a spare open M.2 slot that supports PCIe 4.0 NMVe drives(great for installing a 2TB drive so you can download all your Game Libraries). For powering the 15″ display, which is a 1080P 144Hz IPS screen, MSI went with the latest Nvidia chipset, the Nvidia RTX 4070 mobile processor.
The Cyborg 15 also features USB 3.2(two x Type-A and one Type-C). The USB 3.2 Type-C port doubles as a Display Port as well and can be used to output up to 3Amp’s of 5volt power(when the Cyborg is plugged in). Speaking of connections the Cyborg also has a dedicated Gigabit Lan connector and supports WiFi 6. For Bluetooth, the MSI Cyborg has Bluetooth V5.2.
Yes, the MSI Cyborg A12VF does have some go specs technology-wise; however, that is not the thing that sticks out for me. For me, it’s the actual design of the Cyborg. MSI went with a translucent design in the chassis construction. Using a Glass fibre (that’s what the material looks like to me) construction that lets you see into some of the workings of the notebook. Now this is not looking through the air vents to see components, no this is looking through the material!
What’s more, is that you would expect a notebook that uses material like this and weighs less than two kilograms to have shoddy hinges, well I can tell you that you can lift the screen with one finger(smoothly) and it won’t raise the whole notebook with it. It’s not just the body that features translucent material but the keyboard as well, a gamer’s favourite part WASD. The whole keyboard is also backlit with a light blue/cyan colour LED. The other thing I love about the Cyborg is that it has a numb pad as well(some gaming laptops forgo this extra on them mainly because of space). MSI cleverly incorporated the num pad into the keyboard layout, it’s not your normal size but it’s at least there(Goldielocks won’t approve of it as it would be too small).
Overall I am pleased with the MSI Cyborg A12VF. Coming in at roughly R32000(retailer special dependent) it is a good buy(for what you are getting). Thanks to the i7 12th Gen CPU, the RTX4070 GPU and DDR5 ram you can expect to play the latest games with the Cyborg on Medium to High settings(game depended). It at least features some User upgradability which is always a plus.
