The MSI GE76 Raider Review: Tiger Lake Plus Ampere Equals Framerate

Battery Life

Although battery life is certainly not the goal for 17.3-inch desktop-replacement laptops, MSI has squeezed in the largest possible battery they could to give the GE76 Raider a fighting chance. At 99.9 Wh, it is bumping right into the 100 Wh maximum for air travel. As usual though, battery life is not just a factor of battery size, but also efficiency of the entire system, and laptops with big NVIDIA GPUs tend to not fare that well.

MSI does include “Hybrid Graphics” with the GE76 Raider through a software switch in their settings, which allows the user to choose between NVIDIA Optimus to disable the GPU when not needed, or discrete graphics only, which directly connects the display to the RTX 3080 via a multiplexing switch. What would have been nice to see though is NVIDIA’s new Advanced Optimus, which allows this change to happen without a reboot, but sadly, it is not here.

Web Battery Life

On a web workload, the high base power draw of the GE76 Raider is a serious disadvantage. A large 17.3-inch display, coupled with the RTX 3080, even while switched off, still results in less than amazing battery life. AMD has really done their homework and provided the ability for the dGPU to draw basically no power when not in use, which is why the ASUS system is ahead. NVIDIA has more work to do here to achieve those results.

Looking at the normalized results, which remove the battery size from the equation, paints an even worse picture for the GE76 Raider, with high power draw masked by a very large battery.

PCMark 10 Modern Office

One of the more recent tests we’ve added to the laptop suite is the PCMark 10 battery life test, which runs the Modern Office workload in ten-minute loops. If the laptop finishes, it is allowed to idle to fill out the full ten minutes before it starts again. The large battery helps the GE76 Raider surpass the Razer Blade 15 here, but it is no match for the AMD-powered ASUS.

Movie Playback

Video playback is one of the least-demanding tests since almost all of the work is offloaded to the video decoder, allowing the rest of the system to sleep, so it tends to be the best-case scenario for almost any system. The Intel video decoder is very efficient, which helps the GE76 Raider take advantage of the large battery and provide reasonable video playback time.

If we divide the result by the length of The Avengers, we get our Tesseract score, and the GE76 Raider is almost able to play back this movie three full times on a charge.

Battery Charge Time

With a massive 280-Watt AC Adapter, the MSI GE76 Raider has the ability to recharge the 99.9 Wh battery very quickly if they had decided to, but to prolong the battery longevity, often the charge rate is reduced.

That is certainly the case here. Power draw at the wall while charging was only around 50-55 Watts, and the GE76 Raider takes almost three hours to completely fill the 99.9 Wh battery.