MSI Raider GE66

Raiders of the lost laptop

- CHRISTIAN GUYTON

LET’S NOT BEAT about the bush here: for us, MSI’s laptops are sometimes hit and miss. Performance is always solid, with all the latest tech crammed inside the chassis, but the chassis is often the problem; chunky, ugly plastic casings and poor display choices mar what would otherwise have been excellent laptops.

The Raider GE66 is the successor to the GE65, a laptop that essentially reviewed everywhere as “really good, but looks a bit terrible.” The GE66 doesn’t do much to differentiate itself from its predecessors in that arena, but it does make several key improvements elsewhere.

The big pull here is a shiny new 10thgeneration Intel processor, specifically the i9-10980HK in our review model (other configurations are available). That’s bringing eight high-speed cores to the party, which combined with the RTX 2080 Super Max-Q GPU and 32GB of memory makes for one seriously competitive gaming laptop. It’s not the most powerful on the market, but for $2,700 it’s a reasonable proposition that can handle 1440p and even 4K gaming. The GPU also gives us access to raytracing in selected games, but it’s not really worth the hit to frame rates and will make this Raider noisy as hell.