The MSI GE75 Raider Laptop Review: Core i9 and RTX 2080 Performance

Final Words

MSI has been laser focused on the gaming market for several years, and have been one of the manufacturers to see the growth potential that the gaming market provided. Their laptops share a similar design philosophy, and offer one of the most premium takes on the gaming laptop market around. The GE75 Raider continues that trend, offering much of what the GT series provides, while coming in at hundreds of dollars less than the GT range, and offering a laptop that is much more portable than the GT lineup, which is MSI’s desktop replacement lineup.

The aluminum top shell and keyboard deck provide the premium metal feel you’d expect, while the plastic bottom doesn’t get in the way since most of the time you’ll never see it. The red accents on the lid, coupled with MSI’s dragon logo, are subtle enough that the styling works quite well, while still keeping this laptop looking like it is cut from the same cloth as MSI’s other gaming systems.

Opening the lid, the GE75 Raider sports the modern thin bezel design, and features on the of the best keyboards around, with per-key RGB backlighting and plenty of customization. The SteelSeries keyboard offers great feel, and while the key caps could be better, it still offers a great experience, especially coupled with the generously sized, and accurate, trackpad.

Gaming laptops are all about performance, and the GE75 Raider delivers in spades. It features the first eight-core CPU we’ve ever tested in a notebook, and even the base model ships with a very stout six-core unit. The Core i7-9750H and Core i9-9880H both provide plenty of grunt to keep the GPU fed.

NVIDIA’s latest GPU lineup for laptops doesn’t offer the same performance jump from the previous generation that we’ve come to expect, but the RTX 2060, 2070, and 2080 offered in the GE75 Raider still provide the most single-card performance available in a laptop. MSI’s GE75 Raider is large enough that they don’t need to use the Max-Q designs either, meaning you’re seeing more performance than you’d see on thinner and lighter gaming laptops, with of course the tradeoff of mobility.

The 1920x1080 144 Hz IPS display is a masterpiece, offering some of the best color accuracy we’ve seen on any laptop, and MSI’s True Color software lets you easily customize it as needed for practically any scenario. The one missing feature is G-SYNC though, with MSI choosing Optimus over G-SYNC, and in a gaming laptop, that’s likely the wrong choice. Gaming is still smooth, thanks to the 144 Hz display, but variable refresh rate is a wonderful technology that is sadly missing here.

The tradeoff of G-SYNC should be better battery life, but MSI only outfits the GE75 Raider with a 65 Wh battery, and as such the battery life is middling at best, which is expected in something targeted at gaming. The Optimus isn’t enough to overcome the smaller battery, especially when the competition from Acer offers the user a choice of G-SYNC or Optimus through a hardware multiplexer, which is a solution any gaming laptop manufacturer should emulate.

But the overall GE75 package is solid. The performance is top-notch. The design is pleasing and functional. The keyboard customization is wonderful. MSI tends to charge a premium for their machines, and that trend does continue here, but thanks to the wide range of options, the GE75 Raider fills a pretty wide range of budgets, from $1799 at the bottom end to $3399 at the top, and even the bottom end of the range still comes with a respectable 512 GB of NVMe storage, a Core i7-9750H, and 16 GB of DDR4. At the top, the pricing is high, but MSI continues to showcase their excellent design and execution, with the GE75 Raider being a worthy contender.