Is Msi A Good Laptop Brand – By Monica Chin, Senior Reviewer Covering Laptops and Other Devices. Monica was a writer for Tom’s Guide and Business Insider before joining The Verge in 2020.
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Is Msi A Good Laptop Brand
If you like the look of MSI’s powerful GE76 Raider with RGB charging, but the price and bulky case are too much for you, the GS76 Stealth might be faster for you. This laptop is younger than the GE76 in terms of features, weight and price.
Msi Gs76 17.3
The GS76 isn’t the most powerful gaming laptop you’ll find, nor is it the quietest and most efficient. But it still packs plenty of great features – including a great QHD, 240Hz screen and a fun RGB keyboard – as well as a powerful RTX 3070 GPU to handle any game you need. While it’s not the best 17-inch laptop on the market, it’s worth considering if you’re looking for a big-screen gaming laptop that should serve a lot of people well, especially if you can get it at a discounted price.
Among 17-inch gaming laptops, this product is attractively priced. The configuration I have, with a Core i9 processor, 1 TB of storage, and 32 GB of RAM, is currently $2,199 at Best Buy. The most comparable GE76 Raider model I could find is about $1000 more – it has a higher refresh rate RTX 3080 GPU but a lower screen resolution, which I don’t think is a trade off beyond the justice of the particular use case. . The similarly specced Alienware X17 (also with a lower-resolution screen and a Core i7 instead of an i9 processor) is several hundred dollars more expensive than the GS76.
Runs at 55 frames per second with maximum preset. When scaled down to 1080p (just for comparison – there’s no reason you should), the framerate increases to 70fps. The benchmark looked good both times, with no visible hiccups.
It scored 51 fps with ray tracing at Ultra (highest setting) and 80 fps with ray tracing cropped at QHD. Lowering the resolution to 1080p increased those averages to 77 and 114 frames per second. That’s another strong result, though clearly worse than what we saw in the 1080p GE76 Raider.
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There’s no benchmark, so I just played with it a bit.) With ray tracing enabled, the GS76 was only able to average 20fps in QHD and 40fps in 1080p. After removing ray tracing, these numbers increased to 42 and 65 fps. Of course, if QHD ray tracing is a priority for you, Nvidia’s DLSS can help smooth things out. And vice versa, taxation of the processor
Could take full advantage of the 240Hz screen, averaging 336fps in QHD and an insane 431fps in 1080p.
To illustrate the difference between the GS76 and the more expensive 17-inch screen: the GE76 Raider averages at least 20 frames per second better in almost all of these titles. This means that most of these games can be played on the GS76 without major compromises. Personally, as someone who loves immersive graphics, I’ll take a QHD panel over a 1080p resolution (which our Raider review unit had) with a few extra fps any day.
The GS76 was also good, but not at the fore when it came to other types of work. Exporting a 50-minute, 33-second 4K video took two minutes and 27 seconds, beating the GE76 but beating the Alienware X17 by almost a full minute. It also scored a reasonable 817 in the Puget Systems Benchmark for Premiere Pro, which tests both playback and export performance. While this isn’t the case with the best CPUs on the market (the GE76 Raider still has the highest score I’ve ever seen in a test unit), it’s pretty close to the Alienware X17 with an RTX 3080.
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And of course my regular workloads of Chrome, Zoom, and Slack ran fine on this device. The GS76 had no problem making Zoom calls on a large number of Chrome tabs, even with battery saver turned on. There are several different fan profiles that you can switch between with the F8 key. Please note that the most active extreme performance setting is the one you would probably want to use for gaming and hard work
. Even though I was doing nothing, the GS76 sounded like a box fan with this profile on and was very audible in other rooms.
The second big disadvantage is, as you might guess, battery life. Battery life is never a top priority for these types of laptops that aren’t easy to carry around often. Still, using this device as my main source of work at 200 nits, I averaged just four hours and 15 minutes (although the times were somewhat variable and I’ve seen up to five and a half and more light loads – our battery test average is still the same (approx.) . You can get better battery life if you lower the resolution and refresh rate. But of course this has a detrimental effect on image quality. Charging was also slower, with the GS76 charging to 50 percent in an hour.
Moving on to the chassis: while it’s not small, it’s quite practical for a 17-inch laptop at 5.4 pounds and 0.8 inches thick. The case is refreshingly muted (even the RGB keyboard is pretty unobtrusive in most settings) – you can definitely use it in public places without having to turn around indoors. I will note that while the keyboard was fine in this regard, the cover was an absolute magnet for fingerprints.
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There are no devastating omissions in the port selection. There is a power outlet, an RJ45 Ethernet port, two USB-A, a headphone jack, an SD slot, two USB-C and HDMI. There’s no dedicated DisplayPort, but USB-C supports it. Gaming laptops of this size are starting to put ports on the back of the case, but the GS76 still has them all on those sides.
The keyboard is quite comfortable, although there is one… odd one. I didn’t get the fastest typing speed at all, but the keys have solid travel and the clicking isn’t too loud. RGB per key is clean and not too distracting.
The main complaint I have is that the Fn key on the GS76 is in a weird place. It is located on the right side of the bar between the and Ctrl keys. Reaching for it while typing is not at all practical – to press it I had to either move my entire right hand across the keyboard or do a little Twister-style twist. This is annoying because you have to press Fn to change basically everything – volume, brightness, keyboard profile, fan profile, airplane mode, etc. You can reverse it, but then you still have to press Fn whenever you want. to access the arrow buttons where the volume and brightness switches are located. Either way, it’s hard not to have access to Fn.
Two other notes for potential buyers: First, the touchpad, while scrolling smoothly, makes a slight click that takes some getting used to. Also, the 720p IR webcam is terrible. It’s so grainy and full of noise that I just turned it off most of the time. Also, my face looked weirdly bright red (which I confirmed with my phone camera, but it’s not actually what it looks like). It supports Windows Hello facial recognition, which is useful.
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Every smart device now requires you to agree to a series of terms before using it—contracts that no one actually reads. It is not possible to read and analyze each of these contracts. However, we’ve started counting exactly how many times you have to click “I agree” at device review to use the device, because these are contracts that most people don’t read and certainly don’t know how to negotiate.
Ultimately, the GS76 hits a sweet spot of portability, affordability, and performance that I appreciate. I can’t promise you’ll never have to screw up a setup, but I’ve run into very few problems with the game. The QHD panel combined with the 240 Hz refresh rate ensures a great gaming experience. Even when doing normal work or browsing Twitter, text and photos looked sharper and scrolling was smooth. I wish the aspect ratio was higher than 16:9, but that’s not as much of a problem for productivity on a 17-inch display as it is on a smaller computer.
However, it still won’t be the 17-inch gaming laptop that everyone will prefer. Battery life is terrible, which reduces the benefits of the thin and light form factor, as you’ll need to carry a 230W charger with you most places.
