Gadgetory

welcome back to hardware on box today we're looking at one of the most powerful laptops you can get in a reasonable form factor for a reasonable price the msi ge70 5 raider 9sf i say a reasonable form factor because you can get more powerful components such as 8 core cpus in big beastly systems like msi so and GT 76 but a lot of gaming laptop buyers don't want that sort of chunky system which is why these sort of mid tier designs end up being quite popular the GE 75 Raider is a 17 inch notebook with a 1080p 144 Hertz display as standard this latest model packs inside Intel's new core i7 97 58 CPU the full laptop variant of nvidia geforce r-tx 20 70 GPU so no max-q gimping here plus 16 gigabytes of dual-channel ddr2 decent hunk of SSD storage it retails for right on 2000 US dollars which is standard for these specs in mid 2019 and of course there'll be a full value breakdown and discussion after all the testing the design look it's nothing special but that's typically what you get with these mid tier products that are straddling the sweet spot of portability price and performance at 2.6 kilograms heavy and twenty seven point five millimeters thick it's not the biggest laptop going around but it's also not a slim and light gaming machine like the GS 75 which shaves off 400 grams in your sleek overall but the GS 75 is a much more expensive system and for a lot of users that GE 75 will still offer the portability you were looking for I love the use of slim bezels around the display I know this isn't the crazy unique feature it once was but it still helps to bring down the overall footprint of the system and offer the largest display possible within the space available to it unlike MSI's other slim bezel designs the camera is located above the screen which means 0 nostril vision issues MSI has constructed most of this laptop out of either black metal for the lid and keyboard area or black plastic for the underside and display housing again MSI isn't going for any design awards here it's just a simple sturdy construction that focuses on functionality over premium looks there's a few red highlights around the place and a few seams you wouldn't get from MSI flagship line but overall I think the design succeeds in not feeling overly cheap while keeping as usable as possible decent port selection three USB type 8 ports which are illuminated red a USB 3 point two gen2 type-c port HDMI 2.0 Ethernet two audio jacks mini display port and an SD card reader all ports are located on the sides but none block the vents unlike some other msi designs where the power cable can easily restrict airflow add a side vent and there's quite a few vents around the edges of the laptop to maximize cooling potential the best way to describe the keyboard and trackpad are fine nothing amazing nothing terrible just your classic gaming laptop experience the tactile feel to MSI's SteelSeries gaming laptop keyboard says never amazed me too much but the layout is acceptable the numpad is basically a requirement on a 17 inch device and you get perky RGB backlighting through the SteelSeries engine I should also make mention of two buttons just below the power button one is for changing keyboard lighting profiles and the other activates MSI's cooler boost functionality which cranks the fans up to maximum when you need that extra performance or cooling power of course performance is the main feature of this laptop so let's get in-depth on how the system performs starting with the CPU the Intel Core i7 97 50 H I've already done a full performance investigation into how this CPU performs in this specific laptop which you should check out if you haven't already gives a good breakdown of performance in popular apps compared to other recent CPUs the main takeaway is that the core i7 9750 H Intel's new 9th gen 6 core CPU is not materially faster than the last gen core i7 8750 H so if you're tossing up between a new 9th gen model and an older 8th gen model and the 8th gen system is a lot cheaper you're really not losing out on anything by going last gen while the 9750 H is clocked higher on paper in real-world workloads that higher clock speed doesn't translate into significantly better performance that's not to say the msi ge70 5 is slow it's not at all in fact it's one of the fastest laptops you can get in this size class and the 9750 edges to a very capable CPU it's just only 3 to 4 percent faster than the best 8750 h laptops out there which for many buyers isn't going to be enough to justify say a 2 to $300 price increase where the GE 75 impressed me more is with the performance of the NVIDIA GeForce r-tx 2070 laptop earning to start with though I will mention that the RDX between 74 notebooks is not the same as the r-tx 2070 for desktops in fact I did an entire comparison between the desktop and laptop models where the desktop PC wins by around 20% that's down to the laptop variant being clocked 180 mega Hertz lower than the desktop card the naming sucks and it is confusing but I've covered that plenty of times now note the part that impressed me was simply that this is the fastest lap top GOP I've tested up until this points granted I haven't checked out the RT X 2080 but given its 600 to 800 dollars more it's probably not in consideration for a lot of buyers and won't be great value instead for around that $2,000 mark the RT X 2070 is faster than the gtx 1070 faster than the RT x 2070 max-q and even faster than the RT x 2080 max-q so it certainly packs all of punch so let's work through some performance breakdowns and I'll start with that impressive result versus the RT X 28 Emacs Q this really shows how under clocks the RT X 20 80 max Q comes even the faster 90 watt version loses to the RT X 2070 in the msi ge70 v with the 27 t pulling ahead by 5 percent on average this will you chose the advantage of getting a mid-sized unit like the GE 75 over a slimming light such as the GS 75 from a performance perspective there's simply more room for cooling which means the laptop can house a higher TDP GPU and that leads to better performance slimming lights are basically maxed out with the 20 80 max Q at least with current GPU architectures while systems like the GE 75 have more headroom available not to mention a 20 80 max Q system will set you back $650 more than the GE 75 with a 20 70 so once again if you go slim and light you really need to justify that extra portability a more relevant comparison is the RT X 2070 versus the gtx 1070 previous laptops with sh asses like the GS 75 often came loaded with the gtx 1070 inside and delivered impressive performance however the RT x 2070 in the GE 75 is 15% faster on average than our aggregate results for the gtx 1070 laptops we've tested previously even compared to the ASA predator Heroes 500 which is one of the fastest gtx 1070 laptops i've tested the GE 75 is still 12% faster with an RT x 2070 inside interested in an RT x 2070 max q laptop well the fully fledged variant is 20% faster on average again if you're interested in slimming light systems you really need to want that extra portability because you'll be losing out on performance it's also worth highlighting the gap between the RT x 2070 and RT x 2060 because many laptops of this size including the GE 75 are available with an RT x 2060 inside in my testing the ITX 2070 comes away 26% faster on average which is larger than the margin you'll see between these GPUs in desktop systems but this makes perfect sense the desktop RT X 2070 is clocked lower than the RT X 2060 but has more CUDA cores so it's usually up to about 15% faster if that however the RT X 2074 laptops has both a core count and significant clock speed advantage hence we end up with this sort of large margin these breakdowns don't give a lot of insight into how the GPU performs in real world games so here's a few quick charts in Metro Exodus you can clearly see the system performing well delivering over an 80 FPS average using ultra settings at 1080p in resident evil 2 you're looking at over 130 FPS in this title which makes the laptops suitable for high refresh gaming in battlefield 5 our 100 FPS average at 1080p again shows the power of this system given the GE 75 uses a 144 Hertz display the art X 370 is making good use of that extra refresh rate Headroom when available I should note here that I tested the GE 75 using the default settings which delivers strong performance this means using the sport performance shift mode and auto fan speeds while you can enable cooler boost which blasts the fans at 100% I found that in most circumstances the auto fan setting would ramp the fans up near this level anyway but unlike cooler boost would also ramp them down at idle the one thing to mention is the optional turbo mode which provides a slight 100 megahertz GPU overclock and 200 megahertz of VRAM memory overclock you'll add a few extra frames to your in-game performance for not much downside so it's something I'd recommend and the reason why the turbo mode works well is the cool performance figures the GPU sits at a mere 75 degrees during a watchdogs to gaming session with CPU temperatures of 85 degrees that's very reasonable for a laptop and right up there with some of the better designs I've tested having this sort of cooling Headroom is good for a number of reasons firstly the GE 75 runs pretty loud under load while using the auto mode up around 48 DBA but with the GPU only running at 75 degrees depending on your ambient conditions you could lower the fan speeds and get a more pleasant experience with that any performance loss or you could do some light overclocking it also should mean the r-tx 2080 variant can run at its intended frequencies without significant throttling although I haven't tested that model to make sure MSI loaded my unit with a one terabyte samsung PM 9 81 SSD although I believe 512 gigabytes is standard performance from this SSD is excellent and exceeds what is necessary for gaming by a long way internally you also get a good selection of storage slots quick mention of the display as well it's a 17 inch 1080p 144 Hertz IPS unit which is reasonably common among high-end gaming machines these days it's a good panel but it won't blow you away it achieves around 270 units of peak brightness a 10 60 to 1 contrast ratio and color performance out of the box is around a delta a average of 3.0 with a slightly incorrect white point this is an average result among gaming laptops but the real highlight here is the 144 Hertz refresh rate which is great for gaming there's no G sync support which is a trade-off to get GPU switching for better battery life speaking of battery life the GE 75 includes a 51 watt hour battery inside which is somewhat below average for this sort of gaming machine and as expected it lasts around 4 hours in our video playback battery test not a terrible result but not at the level of other more portable gaming notebooks overall the msi ge70 5 is a pretty great gaming laptop it's not a super top-tier premium offering so the design is a little on the basic side but makes up for that with excellent performance a great 1080p high refresh display decent storage and best of all a highly capable cooling solution if you want to play games and you want your gaming system to be highly portable the GE 75 will deliver that for you now that the dust is settled on Nvidia's mobile our TX lineup I think what the msi ge70 5 is offering is in a bit of a price to performance sweet spot right now this laptop sits at $2,000 while we have our TX 2060 laptops at around the $1700 mark and our TX 2080 laptops at $2,700 given the our TX 2070 is 26 percent faster than the ITX 2060 when comparing laptop variants yet cost just 18% more that's a good spot for the 2070 to be in and it's in contrast to the desktop line where the 2060 is the better buy from a value standpoint as for the r-tx 2080 well I haven't tested it just yet but it it has to be at least 25 to 30% faster to justify the price increase which is probably going to be pushing it a little and the max-q brands aren't even worth talking about because they are typically slower and much worse value simply by virtue of their inclusion in premium slim and light laptops which prioritize size over outright performance with all that said the thorn in the side of current gen laptop manufacturers continues to be older Pascal laptops given that the core i7 97 58 doesn't offer much in the way of performance gains over the 87 50 H there is still some decent last gen buyers to be had while the msi ge70 5 and r-tx 2070 laptops are good by among the current generation if you can get a gtx 1070 laptop with an 80 750 h for under $1600 I think you'll be pretty happy of course you won't get the same performance as the 2070 but if you don't quite have the cash for this level of performance a 1070 for that price is much better value than an RT X 2060 but of course Pascal laptops aren't going to be around forever and they've become harder to find since I last touched on the subject also worth mentioning is the fact that you can get some older 8750 H laptops with the RT X 27 T in it for pretty good prices so again it's worth checking out what is available in your region so yeah a bit of a mixed conclusion here with a variety of thoughts but I think it's safe to say the msi ge70 5 and the RT x 27 used here is the first time I'd swing more towards recommending and NVIDIA artex laptop than not I like the performance offered here and the fact don't need a super big boy muscle book style laptop to get it still find it amusing that Intel invented the term muscle book for those laptops anyway if you're interested in some of the laptops I've talked about here you can check out their current prices via links in the description below consider subscribing for more Hardware reviews and in-depth testing support us on patreon as well we always appreciate it and I'll catch you in the next one