MSI GE76 Raider gaming laptop review - bolenuncloyesseen

Gordon Mah Ung

At a Coup d'oeil

Expert's Rating

Pros

Laden frontage RGB flair
Blistering 155-watt GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU
Surprisingly good battery lifetime

Cons

If you wear't want RGB, this isn't the laptop for you
CPU performance is somewhat slower than that of its peers, a good deal slower than Ryzen
All the fan noise you've come to expect from a gaming laptop

Our Verdict

The MSI GE76 Plunderer is a time-honoured big, heavy gaming laptop computer that's a solid performer overall with one key out advantage: the screaming performance of a GeForce RTX 3080 mobile GPU tuned up to 155 watts. It's expensive, but it's worth it.

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Does RGB truly fix a laptop go faster? Indeed IT does. At least, you'll probably believe that after sightedness the aggressive RGB bar running across the front of the MSI GE76 Despoiler gaming laptop.

Because it couldn't be the 8-core Core i7-10870H CPU, nor the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop computer GPU set to a vituperative 155 watts, that makes the laptop go fast. Information technology's all in the RGB light fora.

Yes, we're being facetious, but let's be honest that looks typically subject more than specs to most people. In the causa of the MSI GE76, still, there's plenty of substance to congest entirely that flash, namely its squealing-wattage GPU. It's an expensive machine, merely it's worth it.

This review is part of our ongoing roundup of the best gaming laptops. Snuff it there for entropy happening competing models and how we tested them.

ge76 front — The secret to the GE76 Raider's performance lies in the mesmerizing RGB in front.

MSI GE76 specs and features

Sure, we've reviewed some impressively anorexic, light, and swift gambling laptops lately, like the Asus ROG Flow X13. But the MSI GE76 Raider, like its close competitor the Gigabyte Aorus 17G, is an unapologetically big, heavy, traditional gaming equipage. Is the MSI as stunningly quiet as the Gigabyte? We'll imag in the performance section. In the meantime, Here are the MSI GE76 Raider's basic specs.

CPU: Intel 10th-gen 8-core Core i7-10870H
GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 @155 Watts
RAM: 32GB DDR4/3200 in dual-channel way
Storage: Samung PM981 NVMe SSD (two slots in system)
Exhibit: 17.3-inch AU Optronics 300Hz IPS-like
Networking: 802.116E Intel AX210, Killer 3100X 2.5Gb ethernet
Size and weight: The laptop measures 15.75 x 11.5 x 1.1 inches and weighs 6.6 pounds. Add another 2.2 pounds for the 280-watt exponent brick.
Ports: MSI takes reward of the oversized body to give you about as many ports as you could ever need. Illustrated in the photos down the stairs, the right side offers 2 USB-A 5Gbps and a UHS-II Coyote State card. The card referee is a UHS-II lecturer hooked into the PCIe bus for high cannonball along card transfers.

ge76 right — The right lateral of the MSI GE76 Raider features 2 USB-A 5Gbps ports and UHS-II SD Card reader on the PCIe bus.

Moving to the left side (see pic below), you'll find USB-A 10Gbps, USB-C 10Gbps, and a combo analog jack.

ge76 left — The left root of the MSI GE76 Raider adds a quicker 10Gbps USB-A, asset USB-C 10Gbps, and a jazz group parallel jack.

Ports are cover—connected the back panel of gaming laptops, that is, reversing a concerning trend of fewer connectivity options. Connected the rear of the GE76 Raider you'll find a miniDisplayPort, USB-C 10Gbps with DisplayPort affirm, instinct-size of it HDMI, 2.5Gbps ethernet, and a sacred angular charging port for the force brick.

ge76 back — We like the trend of putting ports on the spine of gaming laptops again.

1080p webcam FTW!

Some people mightiness constitute most excited about what's on front: a 1080p webcam. Although you can find 1080p webcams in a smattering of higher-oddment laptops (Microsoft's Surface line has secondhand 1080p webcams for some sentence, for example), this resolution is definitely unique in a gaming laptop computer.

You can see the MSI GE76 Raider's webcam to a lower place on the left, showing good color and whiten-balance interpretation. For the comparison figure of speech, we blew up the 720p ikon produced by the HP Elite Dragonfly, a business firm laptop computer, to match the MSI's 1080p. Manifestly, the higher-resolution camera produces a sharper image. But manage your expectations—it's still a small sensor in a laptop bezel, so don't expect DSLR results, nor a nice optic stack like connected a pricier Logitech C920 webcam. We should nevertheless applaud MSI for including one (when some gaming laptops have no webcam), and qualification it a good unitary.

ge76webcam — MSI's GE76 Raider 1080p webcam (left-hand) vs. HP Dragonfly Selected 720p webcame (rightist). The step-up in settlement increases sharpness throughout the image.

Premium networking, excessively

Networking typically gets nothing to a greater extent than a spec line, only it's worth career out the special effort MSI invest into the GE76 Raider's setup. This is decidedly the first gaming laptop we've seen with Wi-Fi 6E support using an Intel AX201. WI-Fi 6E's important claim to fame for forthwith is use of the mostly unpolluted 6GHz spectrum. WI-Fi 6 and lower still operate in the 5GHz operating room 2.4GHz spectrums. This should help in the Wi-Fi wars going along in just about homes, where neighbors continually put in Thomas More powerful routers to improve connectivity. Unfortunately, every time a neighbor does that, the other neighbor fires back with an even bigger router. All this is generally in the 5GHz spectrum, though, so by oncoming to a Wisconsin-Fi 6E laptop (with a Wi-Fi 6E router) you should be able to float above the fret for now. The laptop computer also features a Killer E3100X 2.5GbE left for wired connections.

Keyboard, trackpad and speakers

We had atomic number 102 major complaints about the per-key lit keyboard. Asymptomatic, we notwithstandin disagree with the 10-distinguish numeric keypad, which emulates a telephone's layout preferably than a calculator's only that's pretty typical of most Taiwan-based keyboards.

The keyboard is bright but it doesn't reach the dazzling levels we've seen elsewhere. The trackpad is well placed, with a slight metallic feel, and it supports Microsoft Preciseness drivers. The speaker are fair to good.

Display

The display is a 17.3-inch, 16:9 AU Optronics panel with a 300Hz freshen order. We sounded a maxium luminousness of about 270 nits, with an asterisk: That brightness is attained only with the screen set to the Microsoft Hybrid Graphics mode, also known as Nvidia Optimus. That allows the embedded graphics (IGP) to take over when doing non-GPU intense applications. Mise en scene the laptop to its optional discrete graphics manner, which makes the Intel IGP disappear (and as wel eliminates a little latency), limits the laptop to a supreme brightness of around 200 nits.

The refresh rate probably sounds excessive, but it's already been surpassed by 360Hz laptop panels. All we can say is 300Hz is a visible improvement over 144Hz panels.

Keep reading for performance, power draw, and battery results.

MSI GE76 Raider Performance

We'll kick off our benchmarks looking at CPU carrying out of the GE76 Raider victimization the older Maxon Cinebench R15 benchmark. It's a nearly pure CPU benchmark based on the 3D modelling engine from Cinema4D. The test is fairly lightweight compared to newer versions, but it's withal a useful metric to visualise how a laptop tin scale with multi-core workloads.

The MSI GE76 Raider falls just slimly behind the G Aorus 17G, which has the Same 8-core Core i7-10870H CPU. That's decent—for an 8-kernel Intel break off. The screen background Core i9-9900K in the walloping Alienware Area 51m R1 has no problems sprinting by, but all eyes are on the Ryzen 9 5980HS in the Asus ROG Menses X13 at the spinning top of the graph (the CPU is incorrectly labeled Eastern Samoa a 4980HS). When you remember that the Asus ROG Course X13 is a three-pound thin-and-light laptop, you really appreciate the advantage AMD has right now.

msi ge 76 cinebench r15 nt — Longer bars indicate improve performance

Despite what the Internet tells you, most applications don't actually use all those cores, so we also trial Cinenbench R15 on a single thread to get a experience for the laptop's performance along more typical loads. For the most part, it's pretty much a tie among all of the Intel gaming laptops and totally should be comparable the others connected such things as Office and browsing. AMD's Ryzen 9 5980HS in the Asus Flow X13, again, has an awe-inspiring lead which should equate to slightly snappier performance.

msi ge 76 cinebench r15 1t — Longer bars indicate better performance

Cinebench's short explode of intense workload is an well-heeled sprint that barely winds most modern-day CPUs, especially those in larger gaming laptops. To test CPU staying exponent along more demanding tasks, we run an older version of the free HandBrake public-service corporation to convert a 1080p video using the Android Tablet preset. The task takes upwardl of 20 minutes to complete. The GE76 Raider finishes about where we expect for the CPU model. The head is, not surprisingly, the desktop Core group i9-9900K in the Alienware Area 51m R1.

msi ge76 handbrake — Shorter parallel bars indicate better performance

MSI seems to sacrifice a little CPU performance in favou the GPU. Like a sho that Nvidia's broadened the mission of the Max-Q brand, information technology's encouraging vendors to define GPUs by electric power rather than name. The high the wattage, the more performance you get. The 155-Watt valuation of the RTX 3080 in the GE76 Raider sets a swollen prospect, which it ably fulfills.

For our first effect, we use UL's 3DMark Metre Spy, which tests DirectX12 public presentation. We also record only the artwork score, which isolates the GPU performance. While the GE76 has some issues competing on CPU with the past laptops here, information technology's clearly the loss leader in gaming and graphics performance. Compared to the 105-watt GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU in the Aorus 17G, the 155-watt GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop computer GPU in the MSI GE76 Raider gives up a heavy 25 percent more graphics performance. The GE76 Raider besides has a small run over the Asus ROG Flow X13, with its external GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU hooked up and running at 150 watts.

msi ge 76 3dmark time spy gpu — Yearner bars indicate better execution

Actual games can sometimes can be identical Central processing unit-helpless, though. That's why the Alienware Area 51m R1, with its high-clock Core group i9-9900K and full-tilt RTX 2080, has the spark advance over whol. Still, the GE76 Raider represents fountainhead with an proud 150 fps in the game. The Asus ROG Flow from X13 takes a hit because its outside graphics box uses some of the open bandwidth to pass back the actual frames. If you economic consumption an external display aquiline skyward to the eGPU, the laptop's performance increases by about 13 percentage.

msi ge 76 3dmark rotr — Yearner bars indicate better performance

Looking more advanced play tasks, we also head for the hills 3DMark's Larboard Majestic, which is a test of shaft tracing public presentation. The high-top-power RTX 3080 in the MSI doesn't disappoint here either. The tryout looks to also be less bound by the bandwidth. We notice the 3-percentage increase in wattage for the RTX 3080 in the MSI GE76 Raider ends up surrender about a 3 percent increase in performance concluded the Asus ROG Course X13.

msi ge 76 port royal — Thirster bars indicate better performance

We'll end our testing with battery life, equal though gaming laptops are almost always run plugged in for gaming sessions. For our examine, we loop a 4K movie with a headset plugged in, the screen set to just about 255 nits of brightness, and the laptop computer in airplane mode which turns off the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. We also ric off the laptop's RGB lights, set the laptop computer to the hybrid graphics, and prime the battery-friendly carrying out settings.

MSI makes a big deal out of the 99.9-W-hour battery IT uses (the largest legal sizing you hind end have in a laptop on a technical flying). The run meter is precise impressive for a gaming laptop at but under seven hours.

Before you entertain a fantasy of playing games while along a flying from Singapore to Newark (about 18 hours), you should know that video playback is ace of the easiest chores a laptop can perform today. If you browse the Internet or run Microsoft Office, you can probably ask to lop off a thirdly of that battery life. Edit photos operating theatre coiffure light-responsibility video editing, and expect to cut the battery life in fractional. Playing games will plausibly cut shelling run time to an hour or two at best.

But yes—this is allay bad astonishing battery life for a big gaming laptop.

msi ge 76 video life — Longer bars indicate better performance

End

We've now seen three laptops with Nvidia's mobile GeForce RTX 3080, and each offers their own distinctive personalities. Gigabyte's Aorus 17 features a slightly faster CPU performance but much slower graphics performance, thanks to its lower-wattage GPU. To make up for that, the laptop is drop-dead tacit for a gambling laptop computer, with the sound level just break 38 dBA. The Asus ROG Flow X13 with its eGPU offers that wickedly fast Ryzen 5000 CPU and the RTX 3080, but its eGPU makes it far more cumbersome when you want to game.

That brings United States to the MSI GE76 Spoiler, which is far more of a conventional play laptop. Information technology's definitely louder than the Gigabyte Aorus 17—our calibrated sound meter puts it at 48 dBA while gaming. That extra noise (a goodish amount) pays for itself, though, with farther faster gaming performance. That you also bugger off a 1080p webcam and Wi-Fi 6E is just icing on the cake. Oh, and yea, you nonplus the RGB too, which we know makes information technology go faster.

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One of founding fathers of explicit tech reporting, Gordon has been covering PCs and components since 1998.