MSI GE76 Raider (17.3-Inch, 2021)

Fantastic gaming performance Super-fast video editing Lots of ports 1080p webcam MUX switch included Good thermals

Thick and heavy Poor touchpad Low battery life

“The MSI GE76 Raider is an old school gaming laptop with new-school PC parts inside.”

Category-topping game performance ; Huge port selection ; Webcam is actually good

Holy cow, it’s expensive ; 1080p screen ; Short battery life ; It’s big and heavy

MSI’s new GE76 Raider, powered by Intel’s brand-new Core i9-12900HK. It blows last year’s gaming laptops out of the water. But those results may not necessarily transfer to thinner and lighter devices at more affordable price points.

Ready for high-end 1080p gaming with RTX 3080 GPU ; GPU is powerful enough to push the 300Hz display in competitive esports titles ; Customizable chassis and keyboard LEDs ; Multiple configurations, including some better values than our review model ;...

Big and bulky, but no faster than smaller competitors ; RTX 3080 not clearly worth its added cost ; So-so battery life

The MSI GE76 Raider is a powerful big-screen gaming laptop with all the advanced features you could want, but it's bulky by modern standards, and its mid-level configurations are better values than our top-end test unit.

Full frontal RGB flair ; Blistering 155-watt GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU ; Surprisingly good battery life

If you don't want RGB, this isn't the laptop for you ; CPU performance is slightly slower than that of its peers, much slower than Ryzen ; All the fan noise you've come to expect from a gaming laptop

The display is a 17.3-inch, 16:9 AU Optronics panel with a 300Hz refresh rate. We measured a maxium brightness of about 270 nits, with an asterisk: That brightness is attained only with the screen set to the Microsoft Hybrid Graphics mode, also known...

We’ve been waiting months to get a better idea of whether the Ryzen 9 5900HX or the 11th gen Core i9-11980HK is the better gaming CPU. From what we can see today, at least, we’d have to give it to the 11th-gen Core i9, which generally has a...

Incredible overall and gaming performance ; Comfortable keyboard ; Solid battery life ; Blazing fast transfer speeds

Cost prohibitive ; Display could be brighter and more vivid

Boasting Intel’s new 12th Gen processor and Nvidia’s latest RTX 3080 Ti GPU, the MSI GE76 Raider is bursting at the seams with power.

Stunning external aesthetics ; Nifty SteelSeries keyboard with per-key illumination ; Fantastic fast refresh-rate screen ; Decent speakers ; Reasonably quiet fans ; Excellent IO options

Gets a little hot on the lap ; Frustrating wobbly trackpad ; Battery life isn't amazing

A beast of gaming machine that not only looks great on the outside but packs some serious specs on the inside.

Fast ; Has a full array of connectors ; Decent battery life for a 17-inch gaming laptop

Expensive ; Loud fans ; Doesn't incorporate Nvidia's Advanced Optimus ; Relatively small touchpad ; Not crazy about the keyboard feel