With RTX being introduced to gaming laptops, it’s no surprise that MSI GE75 Raider will also get an RTX of its own. Although most of the parts are the same as the previous model, we’ll still go through it. Now with MSI GE75 Raider 8SE at our hands, we’ll be looking at its design and how well it fare with games. Without further ado, let’s jump right into the MSI GE75 Raider 8SE review.

The Design & Display

At first glance, we can see that the MSI GE75 Raider 8SE has gotten rid of the feather brush on its lid. I think that’s a smart move because of how often it collects dust and how fingerprints on it is rather obvious.

The lid is now replaced with a cool-looking matte color which gives off a premium and mature look, more dust-proof than before as well as harder to catch fingerprints on it.

Then there’s the iconic red MSI dragon logo on top of the lid along the red diamond cut 3D Dragon Spine which I absolutely dig.

At the bottom, we have this artistic design that is inspired by cosmological warship on both the surface and the rubber pads. You can say that MSI is rocking the alien carvings on the designs!

On the sides, we have all the ports that we commonly used such as headphone & mic port, USB-C, full SD card reader, and 3 USB ports that lights up but sadly there’s no Thunderbolt 3.

However, the ports that light-up are conveniently useful because you can find the red LED port easily as it’s very visible in the dark, but it maybe a little too blinding to the eyes.

That aside, the display on this bad boy is insane. It has a 17.3-inch and super thin bezel display that offers a really wide-spread of a display screen. Besides that, it supports 144Hz refresh rate and 3ms response time which is no doubt a display made solely for gaming.

RGB Keyboard

As for the keyboards, the MSI GE75 Raider 8SE gets the Steelseries RGB-backlit chiclet keyboard which most MSI gaming laptop has. Moreover, the keyboard even supports Per-Key RGB customization meaning every key on the keyboard can have a different color.

The customization can be easily changed through the SteelSeries Engine application provided and there are even some pre-sets that are ready to be used such as Freeway, Aqua, Drain and Disco.

Specifications

The specifications on this gaming laptop is impressive as it’s powered by 8th Gen Intel i7-8750H CPU, a chip that’s perfect in performance.

Besides that, it runs on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 that supports ray-tracing in games and also one of the only graphic card in the current market capable of doing it.

Moreover, it comes with a RAM of 16 GB DDR4 2666 MHZ (8GB*2) that allows smooth gaming experience. Then there’s also 128 SSD + 1TB HDD for storage, it might not be enough but we could always get an upgrade. With specs like this, it’s perfect for heavy gamers that are always on the go.

Benchmarks

We also did some benchmark runs on the laptop and to no surprise, it has quite the satisfying result that we were looking for.

• PCMARK10

The score for PC Mark 10 is 4875 and although it has not gone far from it’s previous model, it’s still an impressive score. As you can see, Digital Content Creation is at 6429 meaning editing and rendering video is not a problem at all. So, this might be the laptop to go to if you game heavily and does lots of content creation.

• 3D Mark 

As for 3D Mark, it has a total score of 6184 which is absolutely an incredible score. Besides that, a graphic score of 6247 and CPU score of 5851 is honestly more than enough to run on any graphically demanding games.

Performance

With this laptop lying around, we couldn’t resist the urge to game on it and so we tried 2 games that demand highly on graphics. The first game that we tried is Far Cry New Dawn, a game that came out quite recently and is known for its gorgeous graphic.

As you can see, the RTX 2060 is working its magic with ray-tracing, making the world of game much more realistic than ever. There are even times when the gameplay started and I didn’t even realize and thought the game was still in a cutscene.

Aside from that, the combat in Far Cry New Dawn is so smooth and seamless that the FPS still remains on a satisfactory level after hours of heavy gaming on it. Next, we tried Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, which is also a game that requires high graphics to run on it.

As you can see, it has over 60 FPS in combat while the settings are all high and as the game progresses, it remains around 60 FPS. Like Far Cry New Dawn, this game boast of an immersive world and with RTX 2060, we were able to experience a better gameplay and view Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey differently.

Verdict

Overall, it’s really an impressive gaming laptop with it being very compact and highly portable plus there’s an RTX in it but it can be a bit pricey to me. Still, you get what you pay right? So, I could only say that the price on this laptop that has an RTX 2060 is reasonable. Although there are times when the fan gets really loud while gaming but that’s what fans do. In short, MSI GE75 Raider 8SE is definitely for gamers that are always on the move but only if you got the budget for it.