Unlike Alienware’s x17, MSI’s GE76 Raider ($3,399 as tested) is a big-screened gaming laptop that doesn’t try to be thin. Its size gives it thermal muscle that helps it run quietly while gaming, and it offers solid connectivity and a better-than-average webcam and speakers. But those are the only real charms of this 17.3-inch rig, which otherwise struggles to impress. Its performance is good but not great, especially in esports; its high-refresh screen is too dim; and its build quality doesn’t dazzle. Our recommendation for an elite big-screener remains the Asus ROG Zephyrus S17; if you crave superior performance, consider the 16-inch Lenovo Legion 7i Gen 6.
Bold and Brash
At a portly 1.08 by 15.6 by 10.6 inches and a hefty 6.39 pounds, the GE76 Raider’s chassis is unchanged since we reviewed it in March 2021. The Alienware x17 is thinner (0.84 by 15.7 by 11.8 inches) but even heavier at 7.05 pounds. Both are considerably chunkier than the Asus ROG Zephyrus S17 (0.78 by 15.5 by 10.4 inches, 5.73 pounds).
Design-wise, the Raider’s angular hinges, large cooling vents, and multi-zone RGB lightbar clinch its gaming-laptop status. The lightbar and the per-key RGB keyboard backlighting are configurable in the provided SteelSeries app.
When it comes to quality, the GE76 Raider satisfies but doesn’t stand out. The lid and palm-rest surround are aluminum, but the rest is plastic, and the laptop’s thickness makes it feel hollow.
The keyboard also misses an opportunity to elevate the system; its membrane keys have ample travel but a somewhat mushy feel. A mechanical keyboard would have been aces on a laptop this big, and MSI has offered one before (the 2018 GT75 Titan comes to mind). The layout is also awkward; there is no left-side Fn key, and the Home and End keys are doubled with the Page Up and Page Down keys.
As for the buttonless touchpad, it’s appropriately sized but physically clicking requires pressing too deeply.
360Hz, But None Too Bright
Full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) screen resolution and a blazing 360Hz refresh rate bracket the GE76 Raider for fast-paced esports. However, our review unit never came close to 360 frames per second in any game; its best showing was 268fps in Rainbow Six Siege at low settings, despite carrying Intel’s top-shelf Core i9 HK-series processor and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 GPU. (See the benchmarks for an explanation.) The screen also lacks Nvidia G-Sync to eliminate frame tearing.
More disappointing is the picture quality. The screen is dim—it registered just 173 nits in our testing, less than half of the brightness we’ve previously seen in this laptop class—and has merely average color coverage, spanning 95% of the RGB gamut and 71% of Adobe RGB. The one high point is an anti-glare surface that minimizes reflections.
The GE76 Raider does better in physical connectivity. Along its sides are three USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports, a USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 Type-C port, a full-size SD card reader, and an audio combo jack.
Meanwhile, the rear edge offers HDMI and mini DisplayPort video outputs, a 2.5Gbps Killer E3100 Ethernet jack, and a Thunderbolt 4 USB-C port.
The power adapter also connects here to keep it out of view. Inside, the GE76 Raider uses a Killer AX1675x card supporting Wi-Fi 6E.
The GE76 Raider gets a nod for including a sharp 1080p webcam instead of the usual 720p fare, though it lacks a privacy shutter. There are no biometric features, such as an IR camera for facial recognition or a fingerprint reader, for Windows Hello logins. But when it comes to entertainment, its built-in Dynaudio-tuned speakers are impressively full and loud.
Testing the MSI GE76 Raider: Big Laptop, But Big Numbers?
The $3,399 GE76 Raider model 11UH-053 reviewed here is very well equipped with Intel’s flagship eight-core Core i9-11980HK CPU, a 16GB Nvidia RTX 3080 GPU, 32GB of RAM, a 1TB solid-state drive, and Windows 10 Home. The standard warranty is one year. The price is in line with what you’d expect to pay for a laptop with such high-end components; the Lenovo Legion 7i Gen 6 goes for $3,269 similarly equipped.
Few laptops offer the Core i9-11980HK processor and fewer implement it to its full potential; unfortunately, the MSI isn’t one of the latter. Unlike a normal 45-watt Intel H-class CPU, such as the Core i7-11800H seen in some GE76 Raider models, the Core i9-11980HK can be uprated to 65 watts, but the Raider still limits it to 45 watts. This means it runs at a base clock of 2.6GHz instead of 3.3GHz, noticeably reducing its performance.
At least its GeForce RTX 3080 is rated for a healthy 155 watts; the only laptop we’ve tested with a higher GPU rating is the Legion 7i Gen 6 (165 watts). MSI also deserves a shout-out for including a PCI Express Gen 4 solid-state drive, the latest in storage technology.
The GE76 Raider’s fans are unusually subdued for a gaming laptop. It also runs slightly cooler than thinner, all-metal gaming laptops I’ve tested, such as the Legion 7i Gen 6 and MSI Delta 15. The below FLIR One Pro image taken during a 3DMark Time Spy stress test shows a maximum surface temperature of 113 degrees F, which is about as high as you’d want to see, and that was in an area you wouldn’t normally touch while gaming. The plastic keyboard keys were closer to room temperature.
Inside, the RTX 3080 hovered around 86 or 87 degrees C, which is on the high side, though my GPU-Z logs showed no performance throttling. The Core i9-11980HK fared better, in the low 70s C.
For our performance benchmarks, I compared the GE76 Raider to four other high-end gaming laptops. The Alienware x17 is the only other 17.3-inch machine we’ve put through our new benchmark regimen. The 15- to 16-inchers are the all-AMD MSI Delta 15, the latest Razer Blade 15 Advanced Model, and the abovementioned Lenovo Legion 7i Gen 6, which will be the Raider’s strongest competitor. (See more about how we test laptops.)
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
Our first test is UL’s PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and includes a storage subtest for the primary drive. The GE76 Raider scored especially well in the storage test thanks to its PCIe Gen 4 SSD.
Three other benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs’ Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
Our final productivity test is Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s famous image editor to rate a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It’s an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
These tests clearly show the effect of the Raider’s limiting the Core i9-11980HK to 45 watts—the Lenovo’s 65-watt implementation performed much better. In fact, the Raider’s Core i9 was usually outrun by the Alienware’s Core i7-11800H. (If you’re interested, a GE76 Raider model 11UH-245 with the Core i7-11800H is $300 less than our test system.)
Graphics and Gaming Tests
For Windows PCs, we run both synthetic and real-world gaming tests. The former include two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for systems with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). Also looped into that group is the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which we use to gauge OpenGL performance.
Moving on, our real-world gaming testing comes from the in-game benchmarks of F1 2021, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege, representing simulation, open-world action-adventure, and competitive/esports shooter games respectively. On laptops, we run Valhalla and Siege twice (Valhalla at Medium and Ultra quality, Siege at Low and Ultra quality), while F1 2021 is run once at Ultra quality settings and, for Nvidia GeForce RTX laptops, a second time with Nvidia’s performance-boosting DLSS anti-aliasing turned on.
The Raider performed as well as it should have in the synthetic tests. Its real-world gaming scores are objectively good, too, but they’re hard to differentiate from the Alienware’s, and the Legion 7i’s faster CPU and slightly higher-wattage GPU put it far out in front. The big MSI’s 45-watt CPU likely limited its frame rates in Rainbow Six Siege at low settings, where I was hoping to make full use of its 360Hz display.
Battery and Display Tests
PCMag tests laptops’ battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with screen brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100% until the system quits. Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting are turned off during the test.
We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its software to measure a laptop screen’s color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its brightness in nits (candelas per square meter) at the screen’s 50% and peak settings.
You wouldn’t think a big 17.3-inch gaming laptop would last more than a few hours on battery power, but the Raider’s nearly six hours is pretty good. To be sure, our video rundown isn’t very demanding; expect far shorter runtime if you decide to do some gaming. (Like all gaming laptops, the GE76 Raider is incapable of maximum gaming performance on battery, so be prepared to take its 280-watt AC adapter with you.)
As I noted, screen quality is one area where the GE76 Raider falls flat. Its dismal brightness is unforgivable; the Alienware’s panel is more than two and a half times as bright.
Some Good Qualities, But Ultimately a Pass
The MSI GE76 Raider isn’t the ultimate 17.3-inch esports laptop it sets out to be. Its admirable qualities—quiet cooling fans, a fast PCI Express Gen 4 SSD, good connectivity, decent speakers, and a sharp 1080p webcam—are outweighed by larger issues.
Our review unit’s Core i9 HK-series CPU and GeForce RTX 3080 didn’t perform as well as expected in our esports testing, which is hard to accept given this laptop’s size. Its dim screen is perhaps the biggest letdown. The Asus ROG Zephyrus S17 and Alienware x17 are both better 17.3-inch options, and the 16-inch Lenovo Legion 7i Gen 6 can outrun them both.
