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When we was younger (particularly in college), a hulking PC like MSI’s GE76 Raider would have been ideal. hefty and with a meager battery life? It hardly ever leaves my desk. incredibly loud fans? Good luck trying to block out the noise coming from down the hall. I could quickly finish courses that required an Intel Core-i9 CPU, 32GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 3080 if I had the Raider.
Of course I’m referring to gaming. The GE76 Raider is one of the greatest gaming laptops for people who have the money but don’t want or have room for a gaming PC since it offers maximum performance in a “portable” form factor. You won’t be able to find a laptop with a higher performance, even with its inherent disadvantages (and high price). It is designed to handle the most demanding games and apps.
MSI GE76 Raider review: Design
The Raider GE76 is not particularly unique in its design. In our opinion, that is a good thing, especially when you consider the fact that the majority of gaming laptops have garish, “gamery” appearances that can be rather unpleasant. This does not imply, however, that MSI has rendered the notebook entirely uninteresting. The manufacturer has integrated an LED strip inside the chassis to dress up the GE76’s basic design. The SteelSeries GG program allows you to modify the cool-looking strip.
We’ll now talk about the ports, and we’re happy to say that MSI hasn’t missed any.
There is an audio jack, a USB Type-C port, and a USB Type-A port. Two additional USB Type-A connections and a full-sized SD card slot are located on the right. A Power Adapter port, a full-sized HDMI, an Ethernet jack, a Thunderbolt 4 port, and a Mini Display Port are all located on the back of the device. The Raider GE76 is really well constructed. It feels substantial, sturdy, and able to withstand some abuse, just like it appears to. The keyboard deck and screen bend very little or not at all because of the aluminum construction. You can buy this laptop from its official website
MSI GE76 Raider review: Keyboard and touch board
It makes sense that Intel would showcase these components on the GE76. Its 17.3-inch chassis weighs 6.39 pounds and is little over an inch thick. There is enough space for some powerful cooling, such as MSI’s “phase-change liquid metal pad,” which the OEM asserts may boost a system’s performance by up to 10%. There are many connectors, a large display, an LED light bar, and a colorful keyboard.
The GE76 Raider is the place to be if you’re the most potent chip on the market looking to exhibit your full might. And the good news for Intel is that the Core i9-12900HK is functioning remarkably well in the GE76 Raider. However, you, the potential laptop purchaser, should be aware that this setup gives Alder Lake some significant power and aggressive cooling, where it has so far flourished. It does not necessarily provide information on how the chip will function in more transportable and more cost-effective areas.
MSI GE76 Raider review: Display
However, there is much to be said about a gaming system that is small enough to take to a friend’s house without being so light that it cannot be upgraded nearly as much over time and heats up to intolerable levels. Therefore, the true query is: Will the MSI GE76 Raider still be relevant in 2021?
The price of this gaming laptop, which includes an RTX 3080 graphics card and a 10th-generation Core i7 processor, starts at a staggering $2,899 (about £2,110, AU$3,810). That’s a lot to ask, particularly since you can purchase a Razer Blade 15 with identical specifications for the same price, but with a slightly slower 240Hz display.
MSI GE76 Raider review: Audio
These speakers are outstanding, much like the Raider. Even when turned up loud, they can easily fill a room with full, rich sound without distorting. Fun fact: The Raider’s battery lasts about as long as the CD player. The frantic vocals and pounding percussion of Aesop Rock’s Spirit World Field Guide came through crystal clear. Although I’d still prefer a headset, if only to block out the fan noise, the soundscape of Cyberpunk 2077 is similarly well captured by these speakers, which do not let me down.
MSI GE76 Raider Revireviewew: Graphic and gaming
How the Intel Core i9-12900K and the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti interact with one another is the main concern for those looking for a gaming laptop with the newest and greatest technology. Even if the difference won’t really change your life if you have 11th Gen Intel and the RTX 3080 from last year, it’s still a powerful combination. I played Halo Infinite’s campaign on the Raider with the ultra fidelity setting. The game often ran at a frame rate of 130 fps at 1080p (the display’s native resolution), but it may occasionally reach 160 fps.
When I switched to multiplayer, I changed the setting to low and pushed the frame rate to about 200. The new Raider G76 ran Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 112 frames per second on the benchmark at 1080p resolution, up six frames from last year’s model, which included an Intel Core i9-11900HK and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080. Additionally, it outperformed the Ryzen 9 5900HX-powered Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 G733 and the Alienware x17 R1 with a Core i7-1800H and RTX 3080 (77 fps) (92 fps). With the Raider, Grand Theft Auto V ran at 139 frames per second at very high settings in 1080p.
MSI GE76 Raider review: Performance
The performance improvement of the MSI Raider GE76 over the S17 isn’t as significant as I had personally anticipated, as you can see from the screenshot. In tests where the GE76 performed better, there has been an improvement of about 10%, which is a welcome improvement but not what I had anticipated. Performance benefits are greater for the Blade 14 (which used an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX).
We used the GE76 every day for the past few weeks, and although it might have been a placebo effect, I felt like things moved much more quickly. I didn’t notice any lag when running many apps at once, and multitasking wasn’t anything I had to consider.
MSI GE76 Raider review: Battery life
The battery life is not very good, boy. With Battery Saver active and the GPU off, I was able to multitask in Chrome for slightly over four and a half hours on this device. In all respect to MSI, these aren’t very out of the ordinary results for 17-inch gaming laptops at this level of performance.
However, this Raider only has a 1080p screen and costs $4,000; I’ll say it again. Moving to a hybrid architecture was supposed to be done in order to get exceptional battery life. Alder Lake’s e-cores were put to the test, and they failed miserably; this is well below what the M1 is capable of.
Aside from battery life, the display on the GE76 Raider is my only significant criticism. You’re talking about some sizable pixels on a 17-inch panel, 1920 by 1080 resolution. Although I’m sure you’d grow used to it, everything seemed a little blurry to me as I browsed the internet. The screen’s maximum brightness is 306 nits, and it reproduces just 96% of the sRGB gamut, 72% of Adobe RGB, and 71% of P3 with average accuracy. My games didn’t necessarily look horrible, but on something this large, a good QHD panel certainly makes a difference.
MSI GE76 Raider review: Heat
Time Spy focuses more on the performance of traditional DirectX12 games, thus we used 3DMark’s Port Royal test to evaluate ray tracing performance. If you didn’t know, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti GPU has around 20% more ray tracing cores and CUDA cores than the standard GeForce RTX 3080 GPU. We see a 23 percent advantage over the next fastest laptop in our ranking when the MSI GE76 Raider’s higher power and heat constraints are taken into account.
Real games matter too, so for our next test, we run the now-outdated Rise of the Tomb Raider in DX11 mode at 1080p resolution. This older game probably uses the CPU a little more than a newer game, but the GPU still powers it to a large extent. Unsurprisingly, the GE76 Raider handily outperforms other laptops, including a stack of GeForce RTX 3080 GPU laptops, thanks to its GeForce RTX 3080 Ti laptop GPU.
MSI GE76 Raider review: Configuration options
The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti replaces the GE76 Raider because it doesn’t nearly impress as much. On paper, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti increases everything from shader cores to ray tracing cores by 20%, but in practice, the increase is only between 4 and 12%. That’s OK, but it lacks the punch that some would have hoped for.
The cost is one issue that is definitely worthy of complaint. The GE76 Raider 12UHS pushes $4,200 thanks to its 4K UHD 120Hz panel, 12th generation Core i9, GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Laptop GPU, and 32GB of DDR5/4800. That is a significant amount of money. In the end, even though we believe the GE76 Raider needs an upgrade, we can’t be upset with a laptop that currently offers a significant performance improvement over the model sold just two years ago.
MSI GE76 Raider review: Conclusion
I haven’t given a dedicated gaming laptop much thought in a very long time, and the MSI GE76 Raider doesn’t change that. With a computer that has all the shortcomings of a desktop and none of the flexibility of a laptop, you are spending roughly what you would for a very good desktop.
The GE76 Raider, on the other hand, is unquestionably top of the line, forgoing portability and battery life to give pure, unadulterated power for a very specific niche. I’m not a fan of the Raider. However, it would be difficult to find a device with more performance that is theoretically portable; when used in conjunction with an external monitor (for higher resolutions), this computer is a desktop replacement that actually lives up to its moniker.