Popular gaming laptops have gotten thinner and lighter in recent years, but there’s still something to be said for big-screen, big-bore power. The MSI GE76 Raider (starts at $1,499) is certainly large and in charge, a 17.3-inch system packing a blazing Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 “Ampere” GPU in our $2,899 review configuration. For that price, this model is loaded with deluxe options including a 300Hz display, 32GB of memory, and a 1TB solid-state drive. While super-fast, the Raider doesn’t blow away the more compact, RTX 3070-equipped Alienware m15 R4, or outrun more portable (and more attractive) 17-inch options. Still, if you like its design, demand a display larger than 15.6 inches, and want a rig that can go toe to toe with just about anybody’s, the GE76 Raider has the performance and feature chops to satisfy.
Come for the Big Screen, Stay for the LEDs
Though big, the MSI isn’t a behemoth; we’ve tested larger machines (like the hulking Acer Predator Helios 700) over the years. But at 1.08 by 15.6 by 10.6 inches (HWD) and 6.4 pounds, it dwarfs the 15.6-inch-screened, roughly-4-pound gaming rigs we’ve seen by the score recently. It’s also bigger than 17-inch laptops that do try to maintain some portability, like the Alienware m17 R3 (0.88 by 15.7 by 11.6 inches, 6.5 pounds), the Razer Blade Pro 17 (0.78 by 15.6 by 10.2 inches, 6.1 pounds), and the Gigabyte Aero 17 HDR XA (0.84 by 15.6 by 10.6 inches, 5.5 pounds).
The GE76 Raider’s size won’t go unnoticed, but its design has its own visual flourishes too. The lid is a metallic silver color, while the base of the laptop is black—fairly standard here—but there are a few twists that add some flair without overdoing it. The lid bears small geometric corners and an MSI logo that blends in, as opposed to the red and black version we sometimes see…
…while the front edge of the laptop holds a clear plastic bar with customizable RGB lighting inside. The lighting flows through the bar in appealing fashion, an uncommon feature. You can choose from a variety of colors and effects via the provided SteelSeries software (which also controls the keyboard backlighting). That’s about all the visual flair you get from this laptop—the rest is all about features and power.
A Blazing-Fast Display and a Full Suite of Ports
Those features start with that roomy screen, which boasts a 300Hz refresh rate. The full HD (1080p) resolution is more pedestrian, but a good fit for actually reaching frame rates that can take advantage of the fast refresh. You may crave higher resolution to see a sharper picture, but that only makes gaming more demanding, and as you’ll see in the performance section, 1080p play can be daunting enough at the highest image-quality settings. The bezels around the screen are fairly thin, and the picture quality on the whole is clear and bright.
The keyboard is pretty nice to use, as the keys have plenty of travel but are bouncy rather than mushy. The keycaps seem a touch small, which feels wrong given the size of the chassis, though the inclusion of a numeric keypad is likely the reason. The keyboard features per-key customizable backlighting. There’s not much to say about the touchpad, a simple plastic solution that felt neither especially pleasant nor poor.
The good news about this chunky machine is that it has plenty of room for ports. The left side offers a USB 3.1 Type-A port, a USB-C port, and the headphone jack, while there are two more USB-A 3.1 ports and an SD card slot on the right.
The rear edge holds quite a few more: HDMI and mini DisplayPort video outputs, another USB-C port, and an Ethernet jack.
Components and Performance Testing
As mentioned, our MSI GE76 Raider review unit is priced at an eye-watering $2,899. That top-of-the-line outlay gets you an eight-core, 2.2GHz (5.0GHz turbo) Intel Core i7-10870H processor, 32GB of RAM, a 1TB solid-state drive, and the 300Hz screen backed by a GeForce RTX 3080 GPU.
By contrast, the $1,499 base model comes with a Core i7-10750H CPU, 16GB of memory, a 1TB SSD, an RTX 3060 GPU, and a 144Hz screen. That’s a pretty good deal, and the in-between GeForce RTX 3070 models might hit the sweet spot. For example, a Raider equipped just like our test unit except with an RTX 3070 instead of 3080 graphics card is $2,299. Another RTX 3070 unit with a slightly lesser Core i7 processor and 240Hz display is $1,999.
For our benchmark charts, we pitted the Raider against four other high-end gaming laptops. The Alienware m17 R3 ($3,409.99 as configured) is another 17.3-inch system with Nvidia’s best previous-generation GPU. The MSI GS66 Stealth and the Alienware m15 R4 ($2,699 and $2,499 as configured, respectively) bring their own RTX 30 Series GPUs to the comparison, while the dual-screen Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 ($3,699.99 as configured) carries a blazing AMD Ryzen 9 processor into battle against Intel’s best. You can see their basic specs in the table below. (See more about how we test laptops.)
Productivity, Storage, and Media Tests
PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet jockeying, web browsing, and videoconferencing. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system’s boot drive. Both tests yield a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better.
All of these systems are way above the threshold for snappy performance in everyday tasks. If your processor is good enough for high-end gaming, it won’t break a sweat opening multiple browser tabs and several applications at once. Similarly, these laptops’ fast SSDs all help reduce boot and game loading times.
Next is Maxon’s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video editing trial, another tough, threaded workout that’s highly CPU-dependent and scales well with cores and threads. In it, we put a stopwatch on test systems as they transcode a standard 12-minute clip of 4K video (the open-source Blender demo movie Tears of Steel) to a 1080p MP4 file. It’s a timed test, and lower results are better.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image, timing each operation and adding up the total (lower times are better). This test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, so systems with powerful graphics chips may see a boost.
There isn’t much difference between the Intel systems in these tests, while the AMD processor’s performance is clearly superior. These are of course primarily meant as gaming machines, but the Zephyrus can serve as a pro-grade media editing workstation (especially with its extra screen), while the others are capable enough for occasional editing jobs or hobbywork.
Synthetic Graphics Tests
UL’s 3DMark suite measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and lets high-end PCs and gaming rigs strut their stuff. The results are proprietary scores.
Next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes. In this case, it’s rendered in the company’s eponymous Unigine engine, offering a different 3D workload scenario than 3DMark, for a second opinion on the machine’s graphical prowess.
The Raider led the way in these gaming simulations, delivering the most raw graphics power. I will add that, in these and most other tests, this large laptop wasn’t too loud considering its muscle—even using the MSI control software’s top performance setting as I did, the cooling fans were audible but not annoying. The balanced performance setting tones the fans down further, though the system’s never silent.
Real-World Gaming Tests
The synthetic tests above are helpful for measuring general 3D aptitude, but it’s hard to beat full retail video games for judging gaming performance. Far Cry 5 and Rise of the Tomb Raider are both modern, high-fidelity titles with built-in benchmarks that illustrate how a system handles real-world video games at various settings. We run them under DirectX 11 and 12 respectively at 1080p resolution at the games’ medium and highest quality presets.
Here, things are a little less clear. Going in, you’d expect the Raider to win—it’s a relatively thick 17-inch laptop with Nvidia’s top GPU. The Zephyrus and Stealth also have RTX 3080s, but they’re thinner systems and should be more thermally restricted. Instead, the results are a bit of a mixed bag. The Alienware m17’s RTX 2080 Super outperformed several 30 Series competitors, including the Raider, and the RTX 3070-based Alienware m15 beat the Raider in Far Cry 5.
To collect a greater variety of results, I also ran the in-game benchmarks of Metro Exodus and Rainbow Six: Siege. These games give us figures for a demanding title with ray tracing and a high-frame-rate competitive multiplayer title, respectively. Using Metro Exodus’ RTX preset, the Raider averaged 77fps, good for a strenuous AAA game with ray tracing enabled. It’s nowhere near the screen’s refresh-rate ceiling, but it easily exceeds the 60fps that avid gamers demand.
In Rainbow Six: Siege, the Raider averaged 264fps at the maximum preset and 290fps at the low preset (both at 100% render scaling). This is one genre where players often use low graphics settings to maximize performance, and needless to say, the MSI does make good use of its high-refresh screen, and is a dream for competitive gamers.
Overall, there’s a load of variance in performance between games and between GPUs. This isn’t news; in our RTX 30 Series testing to date, we’ve learned that manufacturers’ particular implementations of each individual GPU greatly affects performance, so two RTX 3080s may deliver quite different results or even lose to a lower-tier GPU configured at a higher wattage. Add the thermal layout of each laptop and differences between games, and it’s nearly impossible to assume performance from reading specs on paper.
Bottom line: The GE76 Raider is by any standards very fast and well-suited for high-refresh gaming, but considering its size and price tag, you might hope for a power advantage that doesn’t really materialize. The RTX 3070-based Alienware m15 R4 gives more bang for the buck, and the Zephyrus Duo’s steep price is offset by its exotic processor and dual 4K displays. If you like the Raider’s looks, a less expensive RTX 3070 configuration of it might be your best bet.
Battery Rundown Test
After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test. (We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop in airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the same Tears of Steel short we use in our Handbrake test—with screen brightness set at 50% and volume at 100% until the system quits.
The Raider won’t keep going on a long trip, but it isn’t exactly travel-friendly to begin with. Seventeen-inch gaming laptops aren’t known for great battery life; the MSI’s nearly six hours of runtime is actually quite an improvement from past systems in this class. It’ll give you a modest amount of time off the charger if you want to take it to the couch or sit up in bed, though it’s awfully heavy for your lap.
Big Power at a Big Price
The MSI GE76 Raider delivers what you’d expect: top-end power with a big, fast screen, plus the supporting features, storage, and physical flair to back it up. Look a little closer, though, and its performance proposition isn’t so strong compared to less ponderous alternatives. A less costly configuration will be plenty competent and fast, but the Alienware m15 R4 remains the best high-end gaming value, and among big-screen systems we prefer the Alienware m17 R3 (albeit in a less expensive configuration than we reviewed) and the Razer Blade Pro 17.
