MSI Raider GE76-12UHS Evaluate

Laptops that includes high-end 12^th Gen Intel Core CPUs have began appearing up in retail outlets in India, and avid gamers can get the primary style of this new {hardware} at the moment. With constant festival from AMD over the last few years, plus Apple’s shift to its personal in-house M1 Professional and M1 Max processors, Intel has so much to turn out within the top rate pc area. The largest trade with the 12^th Gen lineup is a transfer to a heterogenous structure with a couple of CPU core varieties. We have already observed how this adjustments issues for high-end desktops, and now it is time to speak about our first enjoy with a pc powered by means of such a CPUs.

MSI is among the first firms to refresh its portfolio of gaming laptops in India with 12^th Gen Core CPUs. The brand new fashions duvet quite a lot of worth issues with other display screen sizes and a couple of CPU and GPU choices. Whilst the trade total is transferring against slimmer and lighter fashions, even within the gaming marketplace, what we’ve with us nowadays is the probably the greatest MSI Raider GE76-12UHS, a beefy gaming pc with specifications that max out nearly each conceivable parameter, and a worth that could be exhausting for most of the people to abdomen.

If you wish to have a gaming pc and do not wish to compromise even a bit of bit on efficiency, this evaluation offers you a style of what a vast finances can get you in 2022.

Prime-end {hardware} calls for substantial cooling, making the Raider GE76 rather cumbersome

 

MSI Raider GE76-12UHS worth in India

MSI has introduced a couple of variants of the Raider collection with a variety of specs. The Raider GE66 fashion quantity signifies a 15.6-inch display screen whilst GE76 method you get a 17.3-inch display screen. In India, the MSI Raider GE76 begins with a 12^th Gen Core i7 CPU and GeForce RTX 3070 Ti GPU for Rs. 2,85,990 whilst a Core i9 CPU and GeForce RTX 3080 Ti GPU will push the fee as much as a blistering Rs. 4,81,990.

The Raider GE66 is priced at Rs. 2,79,990 and Rs. 4,47,990 for a similar two variants. Those are all authentic costs and retail listings are available slightly decrease. Obviously, those laptops don’t seem to be for the faint of middle. Alternatively, now not all diversifications and mixtures of {hardware} seem to be to be had in India – extra on that during a second.

The Titanium Blue external of the MSI Raider GE76 does not have compatibility the everyday gamer aesthetic however appears just right

 

MSI Raider GE76-12UHS design

To start with, the Raider GE76 is is among the biggest laptops I have observed in a very long time. Whilst maximum producers are pushing thin-and-light choices within the gaming marketplace, MSI has long past with an absolutely unapologetic manner that prioritises top-end elements plus the cooling they’re going to require.

Nonetheless, it is not as cumbersome and heavy as top-tier gaming laptops was only some years in the past, and MSI has used the distance neatly – for instance, the 17.3-inch display screen spans just about all of the width of the lid; there is not a lot plastic round it making the Raider GE76’s frame any wider than it must be. In spite of its look, the Raider GE76 weighs handiest 2.9kg (now not together with the massive energy brick) which is not up to what maximum on a regular basis 15-inch laptops weighed now not too way back. You should in truth raise it round on a daily basis with out an excessive amount of hassle if you wish to.

The lid is steel with an icy silver-blue end that MSI calls Titanium Blue. That is relatively ordinary for a gaming pc, nevertheless it appears rather just right – the one problem is that smudges are extremely visual. MSI has have shyed away from the most obvious “gamer” aesthetic although the hinges and corners are reasonably pronounced, and there are huge vents at the rear. The MSI dragon badge is a bit of garish however that is the handiest branding you can see any place.

While you flip this pc on, on the other hand, all subtlety is going out the window. MSI has selected to put into effect a big RGB LED bar throughout all of the entrance lip of the GE76 Raider. By way of default it cycles thru jewel-toned purple, inexperienced, and blue. This can also be customised thru MSI’s instrument nevertheless it surprisingly is not built-in with the keyboard’s lights results and there is no method to flip it off briefly when staring at a film, for instance.

MSI has long past all in on lights results with per-key RGB illumination and an enormous bar at the entrance

 

The keyboard has per-key RGB LED backlighting, and MSI has long past for a reasonably muted, frosted tone fairly than the brilliant colors chances are you’ll be expecting. The impact is crowd pleasing, and you’ll transfer patterns or flip it off briefly the usage of Fn key shortcuts.

As for keyboard format, not one of the keyboard keys are too small or cramped. There is a full-sized quantity pad however no paging block. The Fn shortcut secret’s to the suitable of the spacebar, which may take some being used to. Shortcuts for quantity and display screen brightness adjustment are at the arrow cluster fairly than the Fn row. The facility button within the top-right nook is slightly stiffer than the others to make it tougher to press by accident.

As a result of this keyboard was once designed by means of SteelSeries, you get the corporate’s GG app which helps you to synchronise RGB settings and shortcuts throughout other equipment. A number of video games and apps strengthen customized RGB results. You’ll be able to monitor stats corresponding to well being, mana, teammates, spawn time, and buff timers in League of Legends, or compass instructions and power sturdiness in Minecraft, for instance. Sadly the app pushes you to join an account to be able to seize and proportion gameplay clips, and there may be additionally a number of undesirable promotion for different Steelseries merchandise.

The trackpad turns out tiny on this sort of massive frame however is in truth a good measurement. It is aligned to the keyboard’s house keys, now not the chassis, which is just right. I felt a bit of an excessive amount of friction when swiping round. It’s kind of of a marvel that there are not any bodily buttons, however the mechanism is ok for informal use. You’ll be able to have a mouse for severe gaming anyway.

The MSI Raider GE76’s keyboard is spacious however has a couple of format quirks

 

MSI Raider GE76-12UHS specs

MSI lists two choices for Indian patrons, one with a 12^th Gen Intel Core i7 CPU paired with Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, and the opposite with a Core i9 CPU and GeForce RTX 3080 Ti GPU. The unit I’ve for evaluation was once equipped by means of Intel and MSI, and there are some slight diversifications in comparison to what is on sale right here, although this mustn’t impact efficiency. The Core i9-12900HK CPU, which is that this era’s top-end cell section, has six P-cores with Hyper-Threading operating at as much as 5GHz and 8 single-threaded E-cores operating at as much as 3.8GHz. The nominal TDP is 45W however this can also be driven manner as much as 115W if a pc’s energy and cooling design permit it. It does have built-in graphics features according to Intel’s Iris Xe structure for low-demand utilization.

There are a couple of show choices – full-HD at 360Hz, QHD at 240Hz, and 4K at 120Hz. Each and every choice represents a tradeoff, and there are naturally other video games and duties that would get pleasure from both mixture. Making an allowance for the 17.3-inch panel measurement, I would lean against the upper resolutions to stability productiveness and gaming, however I will be able to see how some twitch-style avid gamers need the quickest refresh fee imaginable and don’t seem to be going to push past full-HD in video games anyway. The evaluation unit has the 1080p 360Hz panel. All of those are described as “IPS-level” presentations.

RAM strengthen is going as much as 64GB of DDR5-4800 and there are two user-accessible slots. There also are two M.2 slots fed by means of PCIe 4.zero lanes so upgrading should not be a lot of an issue. The evaluation unit had 32GB of DDR5 RAM and two 1TB Samsung OEM SSDs. Retail gadgets have just one 1TB SSD. There may be Wi-Fi 6e and Bluetooth 5.2. The 99.9Wh battery was once selected to max out the capability that is allowed on industrial flights, and also you get a hefty 330W charger within the field.

Many of the ports you’ll want regularly are at the aspects of the MSI GE76 Raider

 

Ports are positioned at the aspects and again of the Raider GE76. Beginning with the left, there are USB 3.2 Gen2 (10Gbps) Kind-A and Kind-C ports (the latter of which helps DisplayPort 1.Four video output), plus a three.5mm audio socket. At the appropriate are two USB 3.2 Gen1 (5Gbps) Kind-A ports and an SD information card slot. The rear has the DC energy inlet, HDMI 2.1 and Mini-DisplayPort 1.Four video outputs, a unmarried Thunderbolt Four Kind-C port, and a 2.Five Gigabit Ethernet jack. 

There is a 1080p webcam however no face reputation or perhaps a fingerprint sensor. The Raider GE76 has stereo 2W audio system plus dual 1W woofers designed by means of Dynaudio. The keyboard has Steelseries branding. MSI has used six heatpipes two lovers, one for the CPU and one for the GPU, which it says are higher than prior to.

You’ll be able to get Home windows 11, which is had to take complete good thing about Intel’s Thread Director characteristic which assigns duties to the precise form of core. There may be some preloaded instrument too – MSI Heart means that you can arrange on-device noise cancellation, backups, fan profiles, lights results, and extra. App Participant makes use of Bluestacks’ generation to permit you to play Android video games. There may be additionally a non permanent Norton Safety subscription.

Huge vents exhaust sizzling air out the rear, and extra ports are positioned right here too

 

MSI Raider GE76-12UHS efficiency

Let’s first speak about on a regular basis utilization. The show on my evaluation unit was once non-reflective and normally delightful to paintings with. Content material on display screen wasn’t particularly sharp, taking into consideration the 1920×1080 solution at 17.Three inches, and I’ve observed higher. Colors are slightly punchy and staring at movies was once stress-free sufficient. HDR is not at the spec sheet however this panel can get rather vibrant. The audio system fire upwards and sideways, growing a large soundstage. They are able to get loud sufficient to fill a small room, and it is advisable to simply watch movies with a pal or two at a substantial distance from the display screen. Sound is obvious, particularly voices, however is usually a bit shrill at excessive quantity.

The keyboard is slightly spongy however the keys do have just right go back and forth. The format takes some being used to, particularly having the Fn key to the suitable of the spacebar. One neat contact is that whilst you cling the Fn key down, your backlight impact is paused and all to be had combo keys illuminate in purple. The trackpad is fortunately centred to the keyboard. It really works neatly sufficient and its click on mechanism feels crisp.

Now it is in spite of everything time to check Intel’s newest and biggest, within the type of the MSI Raider GE76 gaming pc. After all, we commence with PCMark 10, which measures efficiency throughout a couple of real-world use instances. The usual run produced a ranking of seven,172 whilst the Prolonged run controlled 9,948. The brand new UL Procyon check is extra specialized – its Place of business Productiveness suite confirmed a results of 7,278 whilst the Picture Enhancing benchmark ranking was once 8,198. In comparison to the just lately examined Asus ProArt StudioBook 16 OLED, which is according to an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX CPU, the 12^th Gen Intel Core i9 confirmed vital beneficial properties.

The browser-based WebXprt Three and Basemark assessments produced 344 and 1,247.37 issues respectively. Cinebench R20’s single-core and multi-core rankings have been 634 and 5,614. POVRay’s default benchmark scene was once rendered in 49s whilst V-Ray confirmed CPU and GPU render rankings of 16,226 and 554 respectively. The Blender 3-d benchmark took 2 mins, 56 seconds to finish the acquainted BMW render, 7 mins 54 seconds for the School room check, and seven mins, 58 seconds for the Barcelona Pavilion scene.

To be had shortcuts are highlighted whilst you cling the Fn key down

 

In real-world assessments, the MSI Raider GE76 was once ready to compress a three.24GB of various information the usage of 7zip in 1 minute, 12 seconds, whilst Handbrake took 36 seconds to transcode a 1.3GB AVI document to H.265. On this latter check, the Ryzen-based pc had an enormous benefit because of its upper choice of tough cores operating in parallel. CrystalDiskMark measured sequential reads and writes for the main SSD at 7,031MBps and 5,116.7MBps respectively, whilst random reads and writes got here in at 2,827.6MBps and 1,381.3MBps.

Coming to graphics and gaming efficiency, which is what everybody needs to learn about, we once more get started with artificial assessments. 3DMark’s DX12 Time Secret agent Excessive check ranking was once 5,881, whilst the Port Royal check with ray tracing controlled 7,940 issues. The Nvidia DLSS characteristic check confirmed rankings of 36.86fps with DLSS off and 85.63fps with it enabled. Unigine’s Superposition benchmark was once restricted to 1920×1080, however with pushing high quality as much as the Excessive preset, the common efficiency was once 46.32fps.

We begin our in-game assessments with Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which averaged 134fps at 1920×1080 on the Easiest high quality preset. Unusually, with shadow ray tracing enabled and DLSS set to Balanced mode, the body fee stayed just about the similar. Metro: Exodus additionally helps each options. At its Extremely preset, the sport’s benchmark device reported a 90.72fps reasonable. With ray tracing set to Prime, that dropped to 76.72fps, however with DLSS enabled, the common bouced again to 83.98fps.

A long way Cry Five averaged 125fps and there was once no wish to check at the rest beneath its Extremely preset. Assasin’s Creed: Odyssey post a ranking of 80fps at its Extremely Prime settings. Center Earth: Shadow of Conflict had no hassle hitting 150fps at Extremely high quality, and Gears Ways averaged 143.2fps at its personal Extremely atmosphere.

I noticed extraordinarily fluid efficiency when manually operating thru some video games. Doom Everlasting, which has little hassle even with mid-range {hardware}, with ease hit 250fps even at its Extremely Nightmare high quality atmosphere, however that dropped rather slightly in heavy battle scenes. With ray tracing grew to become on and DLSS set to balanced, I noticed the body fee range between 170fps and 220fps the usage of the in-game overlay. I then fired up Regulate with its high quality set to Prime. With none results, I noticed efficiency as much as 120fps the usage of Nvidia’s efficiency overlay. That dropped to round 75fps with ray tracing on, and about 100fps with DLSS set to Balanced mode to compensate.

The facility brick you get with the MSI Raider GE76 is huge and heavy

 

Those are all very excessive body charges, however I’d have most well-liked to had been ready to check these kind of video games at upper resolutions. It’s not most probably that any one would spend such a lot on an enormous pc with a 17.3-inch 360Hz panel after which use an exterior observe as an alternative, in order that was once now not a check situation for this evaluation. After all a solution of 1920×1080 will permit video games to run rather well.

That mentioned, the 360Hz refresh fee plus the efficiency of the CPU and GPU on this pc made video games glance unbelievable. Microstuttering was once just about a non-issue. I noticed no tearing in any respect, even in benchmark scenes that normally run poorly. It is exhausting to quantify whether or not 360Hz is that significantly better than, say 240Hz and even 144Hz for most of the people. Certain, there are some varieties of video games that can get pleasure from this mixture of solution and refresh fee, however others will in finding 1080p slightly too restrictive. I’d have most well-liked both of MSI’s different choices; QHD at 240Hz and 4K at 120Hz.

When operating video games and assessments, the lovers of the MSI Raider GE76 spin up inside of a couple of seconds and will get rather loud – now not distracting, however indubitably noticeable. Sizzling air is driven out the again and aspects, and I needed to pull my mouse ahead to steer clear of discomfort. The keyboard will get heat however that is tolerable across the WASD house. Alternatively, the steel house above and close to the higher aspects of the keyboard tray can turn into too sizzling to the touch for greater than a 2nd or two.

Relating to a 17.3-inch gaming pc with flagship specs, battery existence most likely is not excessive on patrons’ lists of priorities. Intel does declare energy potency enhancements for the Alder Lake structure, in part because of the E-cores and in part to its ‘Intel 7′ production procedure. Even so, MSI has long past with the very best capability that shall be allowed thru airport safety – 99.9Wh.

Do not be expecting to play high-end video games whilst operating on battery energy. I ran a couple of assessments to peer whether or not we are at some degree the place that is imaginable, however it is not. 3DMark’s Port Royal and Time Secret agent Excessive rankings crashed to at least one,650 and 1,355 respectively, and Center Earth: Shadow of Conflict controlled handiest 38fps on the similar settings as prior to.

I realized that the Raider GE76’s lovers would steadily turn into audible even if appearing mundane duties, indicating spikes in energy intake. With reasonable on a regular basis use, involving some video streaming and numerous browser-based paintings, I did not get greater than six hours on a unmarried price (the LED results and refresh fee have been at their default settings). The extensive Battery Eater Professional check ran for 1 hour, 43 mins with LEDs disabled and our common check stipulations enforced. It charged to about 78 % in two hours, which is alright.

The MSI Raider GE76 may well be referred to as a “desktop substitute” however it is not too heavy to hold round on a daily basis

 

Verdict

Intel’s top-end 12^th Gen ‘Alder Lake’ cell CPU, the Core i9-12900HK, is a beast. It reached new heights in numerous benchmarks and units a excessive bar for AMD to compare with its upcoming Ryzen 6000 collection. The combo of this CPU, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti GPU, the 360Hz display screen, and the entire different top-end {hardware} within the Raider GE76 made for a ravishing gaming enjoy. When you get used to taking part in at neatly over 100fps in a couple of high-end titles at their very best imaginable settings, it is exhausting to return. I am nonetheless now not satisfied that the 360Hz refresh fee is value losing to 1080p for, however that is why a couple of choices are to be had.

After all this type of pc is not for everybody. No longer handiest is the MSI Raider GE76 cumbersome by means of nowadays’s requirements, nevertheless it additionally runs sizzling and is ludicrously dear. This sort of cash may purchase you a slightly succesful small automotive, logo new, and it is rather positive that one thing a lot better will come alongside in a 12 months or much less. A pc of this calibre is a sumptuous indulgence, and whilst it will have to paintings nice for a few years, it may not be probably the greatest for lengthy.

Let’s additionally communicate in regards to the writer pc marketplace. Many of us who want severe efficiency for content material introduction paintings corresponding to 3-d modelling, high-res video manufacturing, animation, and even data-heavy workloads steadily purchase gaming laptops for his or her {hardware}. Efficiency in our benchmarks presentations that if time is cash, an funding of this magnitude may make sense for numerous execs. There are positive to be a number of laptops out there quickly extra adapted to this marketplace, however it is great to have choices that serve for paintings in addition to play.