MSI GE76 Raider Laptop
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 is certainly large and in charge, a 17.3-inch system packing a blazing Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 “Ampere” GPU configuration. This model is loaded with deluxe options including a 16GB of memory, and a 1TB solid-state drive.
Come for the Big Screen, Stay for the LEDs
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.
