MSI GE63 Raider

Design

MSI’s GE series has always focused on performance and price, so the GE63 and 73 units are a little bulkier than the latest sleek gaming ultrabooks. At 1.08 inches (2.8cm) thick this range wedges itself into a gaming-specific size bracket that offers ample space for internal components, which in turn cuts out a lot of thermal and space management engineering costs.

The GE63 shifts all the ventilation to the sides and the underside of the unit, keeping it off the screen and away from the rear (both common output points on gaming laptops). We tested an engineering sample ahead of the launch and we noticed some CPU temperature spikes at 100°C , which we’re hoping can be cooled down in consumer models as we expect thermals and stability to be the areas that differ the most from the final model.

Ports

On the right side of the laptop are a pair of USB 3.0 ports and an SD Card reader. The left side is where you’ll find the Ethernet jack, an HDMI output, a mini DisplayPort, another USB 3.0 port, a USB Type-C port, and speaker, headphone and microphone jacks. And just in case you were wondering, yes, some of the ports (specifically, the USB Type-A ports) also have lights, though those are solely red.

Display

The Raider RGB’s 15.6-inch, 1920 x 1080p display looks nice, but I wish it were just a tad brighter.The display covers a magnificent 184 percent of the sRGB color gamut, easily proving more vivid than the premium gaming average (134 percent), the Stealth Thin (150 percent), the Alienware 15 (114 percent) and the PowerSpec (113 percent).

But it’s not as bright as any of those displays. It measured 253 nits on our light meter, less than the premium gaming average (282 nits), the Stealth Thin (293 nits), the PowerSpec (306 nits) and the Alienware (374 nits).

Performance

The key component in the new GE series performance comes from Intel’s 8th Gen chips. The six core Intel i7-8750Q adds an additional two cores to the traditional four core array that has been the maximum on laptops over the last few years. This means that there is the potential for 50% performance boosts over last year’s iterations, plus any individual core optimizations. If we throw the new GE63 8RF model against last year’s GE73 7RF on Cinebench’s single-core CPU test we noted a 9% boost in performance, while the multi-threaded performance showed a 49.7% increase. This is a substantial jump considering the multi-threaded Cinebench scores of MSI’s 6th Gen GE72 6QD were 669, meaning last year’s devices saw a boost of just 9%.

Battery

The GE63 does not have particularly good battery life despite its power-saving graphics-switching. A four-hour runtime on our Wi-Fi battery test with brightness at medium is passable. By contrast, the ASUS ROG Zephyrus M GM501 does not even manage three hours. The main downfall here is the GE63’s 51 Wh battery, which is considerably smaller than the 92 Wh battery powering the Aorus X5 v8 and the 99 Wh battery found in the Alienware 15 R4. Both of these devices lack Nvidia Optimus though, so their battery runtimes are not vastly longer than our test device.