The MSI Katana 15 B13VEK is a gaming laptop with a footprint of 359 mm wide by 259 mm tall and a thickness of 24.9 mm, giving it a relatively slim profile for its category. It weighs 2,250 g and has a total volume of approximately 2,315 cm³. The chassis is not weather-sealed and does not use a fanless cooling design, which is typical for a machine built around active thermal management. A backlit keyboard is included, while the warranty period covers one year from purchase.
The laptop features a 15.6″ IPS, LED-backlit panel running at a 1920 x 1080 resolution with a pixel density of 141 ppi. A 144Hz refresh rate makes it well-suited for fast-paced content, and an anti-reflection coating helps reduce glare during use. The display does not support touch input, and the system can drive up to four connected displays simultaneously.
The system is equipped with 32GB of DDR5 RAM running at 5,200 MHz across two memory slots, with a maximum supported capacity of 64GB. The CPU operates at 6 cores clocked at 2.4 GHz and 4 cores at 1.8 GHz, reaching a turbo frequency of 4.9 GHz across 16 threads, and is built on a 4 nm semiconductor process with multithreading enabled. Storage is handled by a 1TB NVMe SSD connected via PCIe 4.0, using flash-based technology. On the graphics side, the GPU carries 6GB of GDDR6 VRAM, a base clock of 1,605 MHz boosting up to 2,370 MHz, and delivers 12.13 TFLOPS of floating-point performance alongside a texture rate of 204.8 GTexels/s and a pixel rate of 113.76 GPixel/s, with support for DirectX 12 Ultimate and 64-bit operation; XeSS is not supported.
In PassMark testing, the laptop achieves an overall score of 23,805 and a single-thread score of 3,569, reflecting the CPU's per-core processing capability. The GPU records a PassMark G3D score of 17,148, indicating its capacity for graphics-intensive workloads.
The laptop's wired port selection includes one USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C port, two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports, one USB 2.0 port, and a single RJ45 Ethernet jack for wired networking. Video output is handled by one HDMI 2.1 port, while DisplayPort, mini DisplayPort, and VGA outputs are absent. There are no Thunderbolt 3 or 4 ports, no USB 4 connections, and no external memory card slot. On the wireless side, the machine supports Wi-Fi 6E along with Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 5, and Wi-Fi 4, paired with Bluetooth 5.2; AirPlay is not supported.
The laptop does not include sleep-and-charge USB ports, meaning connected devices cannot be charged while the system is powered off or in sleep mode. It also does not use a MagSafe power adapter for charging.
The laptop includes stereo speakers, a 3.5 mm headset jack, and a single built-in microphone, though Dolby Atmos and S/PDIF output are not available. A front-facing camera is present and voice commands are supported, while biometric options such as a fingerprint scanner and 3D facial recognition are absent. On the graphics feature side, the system supports both ray tracing and DLSS, expanding its capabilities for rendering and upscaling tasks. Motion and location sensors — including a gyroscope, accelerometer, compass, and GPS — are not included, and there is no optical disc drive or stylus bundled with the machine.
The CPU carries a clock multiplier of 24, a TDP of 115W, a maximum operating temperature of 100 °C, and uses big.LITTLE technology alongside an NX bit for security; the multiplier is not unlocked. It has 9.5 MB of L2 cache and 24 MB of L3 cache, operates across two memory channels with a maximum RAM speed of 5,200 MHz, and supports instruction sets including SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, AES, FMA3, F16C, and MMX. Integrated graphics are present alongside the discrete GPU, and Intel Resizable BAR is supported. The discrete GPU is based on the Ada Lovelace architecture and features 2,560 shading units, 80 texture mapping units, 48 ROPs, and 64 execution units, with a memory speed of 2,000 MHz, an effective memory speed of 16,000 MHz, a 96-bit memory bus, and a maximum memory bandwidth of 192 GB/s; it supports ECC memory, double precision floating point, multi-display output, and stereoscopic 3D, but does not include LHR. The system contains approximately 18,900 million transistors and is compatible with OpenCL 3, OpenGL 4.6, and supports two memory channels.
