MSI Crosshair 16 HX E14W Review: Beating the RAMpocalypse Requires Compromise

When we’re discussing budget laptops to buy in 2026, we would normally try to emphasize a minimum expectation for specs. If you’re gunning for a gaming machine, you want a certain amount of memory to go along with it. At least, that was before the RAMpocalypse. The last few years of laptop designs have improved on a few concepts we had come to expect as routine. More fool us. New chips have supplied better battery life than you would normally expect, even in a laptop with a discrete GPU. You can throw all that out the window with the MSI Crosshair 16, specifically the E14WFK-036US model. It’s running on 16GB of RAM, the Nvidia RTX 5060 laptop GPU, an older Intel Raptor Lake chip—the Core i7 14560HX—and a measly 512GB of storage. Let me tell you right now, you’re not getting even a sliver of your Steam library on this laptop alone. MSI's low-end, relatively affordable gaming laptop loses out on memory but can still pack a punch. But you shouldn’t dismiss the Crosshair out of hand. You can forgive a lot for a gaming laptop that you can find for $1,300 (this specific model is only available through Walmart). A year ago, that price point would seem perfectly achievable with these specs