60 PCWorld NOVEMBER 2019REVIEWS MSI GE65 RAIDER
MSI GE65 Raider
PROS- 8 cores of computing power in a laptop!
- GeForce RTX 2070 neutralizes any need for a
GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q. - Relatively light and compact.
CONS - Compromised battery capacity.
- 280-watt AC adapter is truly the shape and the size
of a brick. - 10-key design won’t make corporate accounting
happy.
BOTTOM LINE
MSI’s GE65 Raider is proof positive of how far
gaming laptop performance has come, with its
9th-gen Core i7-9880H and full-power GeForce RTX
- All this in a laptop that weighs just over five
pounds. Only the battery life disappoints.
$2,699
means very low latency and
very little visible tearing,
because redraws are
happening at three times the
rate of a 60Hz panel.
The biggest compromise in
battery life is the 53-watt-hour
battery. That’s about the size
used in a lot of 13.3-inch
thin-and-lights. For comparison, the Dell XPS
15 packs a 98-watt-hour battery.
The GE65 Raider ran just over 4.5 hours
before going dark. Its sibling, the GS65
Stealth, ran just over 6 hours with its 80Whr
battery. In the end we’d rate it as not great,
but not terrible either.BOTTOM LINE
Overall, we’d have to say there’s a lot to like in
the GE65. The main highlight is the 8-core
Core i9-9880H, which offers a significant
performance increase over previous chips.
Against a 6-core 8th-gen, you’re looking at
about a 57-percent increase in performance.
More significantly: If you’re upgrading
from a quad-core 7th-gen Core i7 chip,
you’re in the ballpark of a 118 percent uptick
in multi-threaded workloads. So yes, worth it
if that’s your jam.
On graphics or gaming, the GE65 and its
GeForce RTX 2070 punches out of its weight
class and genuinely makes us wonder
whether the thinner GeForce RTX 2080 Max
Q are worth the trade-off—especially sincethe GE65 Raider really isn’t that much larger
or thicker than most Max-Q laptops.
The only serious compromise here is the
battery. A longer run time would have made
the GE65 perfect (and likely thicker). Still, if
you want a lot of performance in a compact
laptop and are willing to give on battery
life, the GE65 Raider should be on your
short list.