The MSI GE76 Raider is a high-performance gaming notebook with a price tag to match. It’s a real head-turner with its big, bold, RGB-enhanced design and has enough power to handle even the most demanding games. But all that performance comes at the cost of size, temperatures, and a high entry price. It’s a great gaming PC, but it has enough caveats to potentially scare some people away.
MSI has long offered top-notch gaming laptops with impressive hardware and sleek, slim designs. The company’s GE76 Raider series, in particular, was first recommendation for big-budget gamers. Recently, the company announced the GE76 refresh, this time with Intel’s 12th-gen Alder Lake mobile CPUs. The device recently hit the Indian market and costs a whopping 2,85,990 rupees when equipped with Intel’s 12th-gen Core i7 12800H CPU and NVIDIA RTX 3070Ti GPU.
Understandably, the MSRP of the GE76 Raider is not for the faint of heart, and with the market full of competition, it’s important to see if the notebook’s high price is justified. In this detailed review, we will try to answer that very question. MSI has been one of my favorite gaming laptop brands. The company offers gaming laptops in all shapes and sizes. While some of their offerings have a sleek design for energy efficiency, devices like the MSI Raider GE76 12UHS are designed to provide the best possible cooling solution for sustained peak performance.
Design
The GE76 Raider is an RGB showcase that combines a light bar that runs along the cheap keyboard tray with a full-size SteelSeries keyboard that offers customizable per-key lighting. The Raider is otherwise a fairly generic slot: sharp angles and the MSI badge evoke a sports car aesthetic, accented by large grilles on the sides to help fans disperse the heat. The 17.3-inch, 360Hz, 1080p display lacks touch support, which is fine for a slot machine.
But while most of the machine feels solid, the display jumps worryingly when we tilt it back and forth. The Raider is 15.6 x 10.6 x 1.08 inches. It’s also relatively heavy at 6.39 pounds: this could be a problem if you intend to lug it around extensively, but it’s really designed to live on a desk and has everything from a selection of ports supporting multiple monitors and Encouraging a wired internet connection, to the point of The meager battery life and comically large power brick underscore that fact. The lighting will also be a matter of taste.
Keyboard and Touchpad
The GE76 Raider’s touchpad is smooth and responsive; it handles Windows 10 gestures well and is large and comfortable enough to handle daily use with ease. Since this is a gaming notebook, you’ll be using a proper mouse, but it’s always nice to have native hardware up to the task. The keyboard, designed in partnership with SteelSeries, is the most important part of the package; we’re happy to say it’s great. The size of the unit means there’s room for a number pad, and each key is evenly spaced and a comfortable size. The keys are responsive and provide a decent amount of travel with each press, making for quick and accurate typing.
But we are here for the light show, aren’t we? Perks like key lighting are completely foreign to me, but the range of customization options is a bit intimidating. We tried flexing my creative muscles, if only for photos, but we gave up and used the keyboard shortcut for windows to switch between lighting presets, because of course there’s a dedicated lighting button. The lack of media keys is a bit of a shame, but a dedicated button to maximize fan power probably makes more sense for this device’s target audience. We will get into keyboard customization later, but even if you turn off all the lights, you will not be disappointed but will use the tools offered here.
Display
The 17.3-inch display of the model is equipped with a 360 Hz display with 1920 x 1080 pixels. It offers an average brightness of 319 nits in our tests and reproduces 73.3% of the DCI-P3 color gamut. In practice, that’s not bad: colors pop, and while not as vivid as other machines we have tested, images and video were pleasing to the eye. For a 1080p display.
We personally opt for a higher refresh rate over a 4K resolution, but dialing down to 1080p feels a step too far, while the 360Hz refresh rate feels like overkill. This is subjective, of course: competitive gamers who regularly dial down settings to achieve optimal frame rates will find plenty of headroom for responsive gaming. For people of my skill level, MSI offers variants of the GE76 Raider at 120Hz with the 4K resolution, or 165 and 240Hz at 1440p.
Audio
These speakers, much like the Raider, are simply magnificent. They effortlessly fill a room with rich, full sound without distortion, even when turned up. The frenetic vocals and booming instrumentation of Aesop Rock’s Spirit World Field Guide were reproduced clearly . The soundscape of Cyberpunk 2077 is similarly well rendered, and while we wouldstill prefer the headset if only to muffle fan noise, these speakers do not disappoint.
Graphics and Gaming
For many potential buyers, the graphics card will be the big highlight of the GE76 Raider. Nvidia’s new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is a real performance monster that – as known from the other Ampere GPUs – can perform very differently depending on the TGP setting. MSI does not compromise and uses the maximum TGP of 175 watts for the RTX 3080 Ti. This means that the GE76 beats all previous laptops in our benchmarks, but the advantage over the RTX 3080 with high TGP settings is not very large in the 3DMark tests.
We ran a number of DX11, DX12, and Vulkan titles with the default Extreme and Silent profiles, as well as the Extreme Tweaked profile with an underclocked processor and overclocked GPU. We also tested FHD (internal display) and QHD (external monitor) resolutions. Since the internal display is directly connected to the Nvidia GPU of the GE76 Raider, there is no Optimus to affect the performance in titles with higher FPS.
So, you can use the full power of the RTX 3080 laptop GPU while playing games either on the laptop’s main screen or on an external monitor without any noticeable difference between the two modes. Ideally, we should have also tested 4K gaming performance, where this 150+W 3080 implementation really shines over the lower-powered 3080 models, but we no longer have a 4K monitor available, so we only tested QHD resolution.
Performance
In the synthetic benchmark GeekBench 5.4 Multicore, the GE76 Raider achieved 8,388 points. This puts it ahead of rivals like the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro (7,527), the Asus ZenBook Pro Duo 15 OLED (7,028), or 11th-gen variant of the Razer Blade 15 Advanced (6,924). It completed the Handbrake video encoding test in just 7 minutes, and the 1 TB NVMe SSD outshone all others with a transfer rate of 1,310 MB/s.
Gaming performance is similarly excellent: the weakest performance was the 72 frames per second in Metro – Exodus when set to Extreme, followed closely by 77 frames per second in Red Dead Redemption 2. In my own tests with Cyberpunk 2077, we saw an average of 75 frames per second, which even dropped to 69 at maximum settings when the action got particularly hectic. However, the device’s native display is limited to 1080p.
Yes, the Core i9 CPU, 32GB RAM, and Nvidia 3080 are capable of incredible performance, but once you pair the device with a higher resolution display, those results will drop. As it stands, this is the machine to beat if you’re looking for performance approaching that of a desktop in terms of sheer “power.”
Battery Life
It used to be that a big, thick gaming notebook like the MSI GE76 Raider would give up the ghost within an hour or two – but that’s not the case here. Of course, that doesn’t mean you can carry this notebook around all day and use it without a charger, but it’s still enough to get a few hours of work done.
In the PCMark 10 battery test, the notebook lasted 5 hours and 31 minutes. That’s not ultrabook-worthy, but it’s still long enough to survive a short flight. We get a similar result in video playback, where the notebook lasts about 5 hours and 58 minutes. Not earth-shattering, but enough to survive a short Netflix binge.
Heat
Gaming PCs get hot, and GE76 Raider is no exception, Temperatures peaked at 133.5 degrees Fahrenheit while gaming underneath the machine. That would be downright uncomfortable on the lap, but given the size and low battery life, I imagine that scenario isn’t too likely. For myself, the device did get warm during extended use, but never hot enough to be uncomfortable on our laptop, and the limited battery life meant we never had the device there for very long anyway.
The fans, on the other hand, were an almost constant companion. They reached their maximum volume when playing games and the like, but occasionally whirred when streaming a TV show or even writing, a testament to how much heat the device has to dissipate even under everyday conditions.
Price and Availability
The MSI GE76 Raider will be launched in March 2021 and will start at $1,499. For that you get an Intel Core i7-10750H, 16 GB RAM and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060. However, for such a strong notebook you need a little more power under the hood. You can upgrade your GPU to an RTX 3070 with 32GB of RAM for $1,999, and that’s probably the sweet spot for this particular laptop. We wish there was a configuration with the RTX 3070 and only 16GB of RAM – 32GB is overkill for most people, but it’s not like the extra RAM hinders anything, it just makes it more expensive.
However, if you want the full configuration listed on the right, expect to pay a hefty $2,899. It’s probably not the most efficient way to spend your money, but you are getting really top-notch performance for the price. While it may seem expensive, it’s a reasonable price that’s in the range of what we see on most of the best gaming laptops out there. So if you place more value on performance than carrying your gaming notebook around in your backpack, you could do significantly worse.
Final Words
We hope you like and understand this article MSI GE76 Raider Laptop Review. As one of the world’s leading gaming brands, MSI is the most trusted name in gaming and eSports. We have dedicated countless hours and numerous resources to the eSports community to support the world’s most aspiring gamers and use their gaming expertise to optimize our product design.
MSI has integrated all the features gamers covet into its gaming rigs, eliminating the hassle of trial and error and pushing performance beyond the limits. The determination to surpass previous achievements has made MSI a “True Gaming” brand throughout the industry.
