Hey guys, Jarrod here and today we’re goingto check out the GE73VR Raider gaming laptop from MSI and see how it performs through anumber of game benchmarks to help you decide if you should buy it.
Inside the box we’ve got the laptop itself,manual and warranty information, power brick and power cable.
First up let’s look at the specs of themodel I’ve got here.
There’s an Intel 7700HQ quad core Kabylake CPU which runs at2.
8GHz and can turbo up to 3.
8Ghz.
I’ve got 16GB of DDR4 memory running at 2,400MHzhere, but the two slots can support up to 32GB.
For storage there’s a Toshiba SATA3M.
2 256GB SSD and a 1TB 7,200 RPM HGST 2.
5” hard drive installed, however there are 2NVMe PCIe 3 M.
2 slots.
For the graphics we’re dealing with Nvidia’s 1070, which is a greatmatch for the 17.
3 inch 120Hz 1080p IPS panel, as we’ll see later on in the gaming benchmarks.
For the network connectivity there’s a gigabitethernet port, and Killer AC WiFi which supports 802.
11ac, as well as Bluetooth 4.
1.
The laptop has a black brushed metallic lookto it, and the overall build quality both looks and feels pretty nice.
The physicaldimensions of the laptop are 41.
9cm in width, 28.
5cm in depth, and 2.
85cm in height.
The total weight of the laptop is advertisedat 2.
8kg, and when testing this mine weighed 2.
88kg, and when including the power brickand power cable for charging the total increases to around 4kg, so it’s got a bit of weightto it, although not too bad for a 17” laptop.
As mentioned the screen is a 17.
3 inch 120Hz1080p IPS panel which has a 5ms response time, and I think it looks great.
The first thingI noticed when turning it on was just how nice it looked, it gets fairly bright andthe viewing angles are very good, I can see all colours clearly on all angles withoutany noticeable shift.
The screen also has a matte finish to it, which I personally preferas you’re not looking at reflections.
I’ve performed my usual backlight bleedtest on the display, which involves having the laptop show a completely black screenin a dark room to help emphasize any bleeding around the edges.
I then take a long exposurephoto with my camera to help display any bleed, so basically this is a worst case scenariotest.
In this particular case the results are very impressive, the screen is lit evenlyover the whole panel, there’s no noticeable bleed even under these extreme conditions.
This can of course vary from laptop to laptop, so your results may vary.
While moving the display I only found a littlebit of flex, no big deal, it still felt fairly solid.
Unfortunately you can’t open thelaptop with one finger, all the weight seems to be down the back, so the first time I triedto do it the whole thing just slid backwards.
Above the display is a HD camera, so it’sonly capable of 720p video.
There’s an RGB steelseries keyboard whichI enjoyed typing on, although there appears to be some small sacrifices.
For instance,there’s only one windows key which may sound trivial, but I’m used to using the one onthere’s only one on the right.
The numpad and arrow keys are also pretty close to therest of the keyboard, which seemed a little odd considering that 17 inch laptops usuallyhave plenty of keyboard space, the keys do look to be a little further apart than usualthough.
I only found minimal flex while pushing down quite hard on the keyboard, it’s fairlysturdy.
The lighting can be adjusted through the includedsoftware and there are a number of effects available, it’s very customizable.
Thisis the first laptop I’ve had that allows full individual key customization which wasnice, I personally probably won’t be customizing individual keys but it’s a nice option tohave that I know many people will use.
Towards the right under the power button isa button that allows you to easily cycle through the lighting effects, and the button underthat can be used to change the fan speed of the laptop.
I also found the touchpad to work pretty well,there are physical left and right buttons which are quite loud and very clicky.
Moving onto the available I/O on the leftwe have a kensington lock, air exhaust vent, gigabit ethernet port, HDMI port, mini DisplayPort,a USB 3.
0 type-a port, a USB 3.
1 type-c port, and 3.
5mm headphone and mic jacks.
Over on the right there’s a built in SDcard reader, two more USB 3.
0 type-a ports, another air exhaust vent, and the power input.
All three USB type-A ports light up red whilethe laptop is powered on, however you can disable this in the software.
There’s nothing on the front other thansome status LEDs, and nothing on the back other than a couple of air exhaust vents towardsthe corners.
Up on the lid there’s the MSI logo whichlights up white while the laptop is powered on, and subtle Raider branding down the bottom.
The metallic lid was a fingerprint magnet, but nothing a quick wipe with a microfibercloth couldn’t fix.
Underneath there’s some air intakes to keepeverything cool, as well as some rubber feet with both help prevent the laptop from movingaround on flat surfaces when in use, and also rise it up slightly to help let cool air in.
There’s also 2 2W speakers and 2 3W subwooferson the bottom of the laptop towards the front, and they actually sound really good for laptopspeakers, at least compared to what I’ve previously reviewed, I was really impressed.
There’s a little bass and even at maximum volume the sound is still quite clear.
Powering the laptop is a 51 Watt hour 6 cellbattery, and with a full charge and doing basic tasks such as browsing the Internetand watching YouTube with the screen on around half brightness, keyboard lighting off andbackground apps disabled, I was able to use it for 2 hours and 50 minutes.
While playingthe Witcher 3 with medium settings and Nvidia’s battery boost set to 30 FPS the battery lastedfor 46 minutes and 50 seconds.
Overall it lasted little less than some of the smaller15 inch laptops that I’ve tested with similar specs owing to the smaller battery.
It wouldhave been nice to have a larger battery, but it’s always going to be a trade off withoverall size, power, and cooling capacity.
Speaking of cooling, during normal use withan ambient room temperature of 20 degrees celsius, the CPU idled at 39c and the GPUidled at 37 degrees celsius.
While benchmarking for an hour with the same room temperature,the CPU reached a maximum of 81 degrees celsius, while the GPU peaked at 76c, which I thinkwas a fairly decent result considering the large available cooling space, not too badat all.
I also found the laptop fairly quiet whennot gaming, at idle it sat around the 37 decibel mark and I could barely hear it, this is whatit sounded like.
While running my benchmarks and gaming it went up to 52 decibels whichI’ve found pretty typical with gaming laptops, and here’s what that sounded like.
Withthe fans fully maxed out it went up to 60 decibels and it was very loud, here’s whatthat sounds like in comparison.
I’ll also mention that I did notice a little coil whinewhile playing games, however once the fans kicked in it was difficult to notice, andthis will probably vary between laptops.
Finally let’s take a look at some benchmarks,we’ll first cover some real world gaming benchmarks followed by tests with variousbenchmarking tools.
All tests were run at the 1080p resolution with all Windows andNvidia updates to date installed.
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds played prettywell regardless of the settings used, although it’s important to note that the resultscan change quite a bit depending on how many people are in the immediate area and what’sgoing on, so use these results as a rough guide only.
In Battlefield 1 we’re almost able to fullyutilise that 120Hz panel even on Ultra settings, you shouldn’t have any problems at all playingthis one.
The Witcher3 also ran pretty well, if youwant to take full advantage of that high refresh rate panel though you’ll need to look atusing low to medium settings, otherwise it still felt nice and smooth at max settings.
Watchdogs 2 played great considering thatit’s usually fairly demanding compared to some of the other games we’re testing, we’realmost getting 60 FPS even at the maximum settings.
Rise of the Tomb Raider also performed great,with medium settings or lower needed to hit the 120 FPS point, although it still ran reallywell on maximum settings, with Directx 12 giving a slight edge in most cases comparedto Directx 11.
Likewise Ashes of the singularity performeda bit better with Directx 12 in most cases, with a nice experience at extreme settingsor lower.
As usual with these specs Shadow of mordorwas consistently hitting above 120 FPS even with ultra settings, so you shouldn’t haveany issues at all playing this one on this hardware.
Ghost recon struggled a little on ultra settings,but otherwise it played well, with the minimum settings taking us to around 120 FPS.
DOOM performed fairly similar regardless ofthe settings used, we’re looking at over 100 FPS here even on ultra settings, it alwaysfelt nice and smooth for me while playing.
We’re seeing pretty great performance fromthe 7700HQ and 1070 in these benchmarks.
I’ve found the 1070 to be a great match for the1080p 120Hz screen, as the 1070 is actually capable of pushing high frame rates in manygames.
I’ve seen other laptops with either a 60Hz screen and 1070, or 120Hz screen witha 1060 which don’t really make sense to me, but in this case I think they’ve hitthe nail on the head.
Now onto the benchmarking tools, while a usefulindicator note that these results are less practical compared to the real world gamingresults previously shown.
This is how the laptop performed in Heavenbenchmark with the tessellation set to extreme, and anti-aliasing set to x8, and this is howValley benchmark performed with anti-aliasing on x8 at various graphics settings.
I ran both the Fire Strike and Time Spy benchmarksfrom 3DMark and got scores of 13,259 and 5,163 respectively, not bad at all.
In Crystal Disk Mark the 256GB SATA3 SSD performedaround 548 MB/s in sequential reads and 482 MB/s in sequential writes, which is prettytypical for a SATA3 based SSD, although a little lower on the write speeds there.
The1TB 7,200 RPM hard drive gets around 120 MB/s in sequential reads and writes, which is aboutall you can really expect from a mechanical disk of this speed.
Overall I think the laptop performs quitewell, it doesn’t get too hot as it’s got plenty of internal cooling space and ventilation.
It doesn’t get too loud while gaming either compared to similarly spec’d laptops, howeverwith the fans manually maxed out it did get very loud.
The 120Hz screen looks great, andis an awesome pairing with the Nvidia 1070, all games that I threw it’s way looked excellenteven at higher settings.
The battery life isn’t too bad, even for gaming, althoughI would have liked to see a slightly larger battery in a laptop this size, but I supposeyou can't have everything.
With these exact specs the laptop comes inat around $1800 USD on Amazon at the time of recording.
As mentioned you can get differentdisk and memory sizes, so the pricing can vary based on your choice.
So what did you guys think of MSI’s GE73VRgaming laptop? I’ve found it to be a fairly powerful gaming laptop that offers a smoothgaming experience in many popular titles.
Let me know what you guys thought down inthe comments, or simply leave a like or dislike on the video to let me know what you thought.
Thanks for watching, and don’t forget to subscribe for future tech videos like thisone.
Source: Youtube
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