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Costco Members: MSI GE76 Raider Laptop: i7-11800H, 17.3" 144Hz, RTX 3060, 1TB SSD
$1,200
$2,299
47% off
+ $10 Shippingat Costco Wholesale
Top Comments
for those who are going to , or already using the computer. i do have some inputs, hopefully they are helpful.
it's a very good computer to begin with, excellent build quality, metal construction, full power (130W) RTX graphic card, very good semi-mechanical keyboard (no where close to a real mechanical one of course) . it has the largest battery capacity you can find in a gaming laptop (if you care about battery life in a laptop).
The software from MSI (the Dragon center ) for controlling the performance, cooling system works flawlessly, you wont hear your fans spins up for no reason, like some systems from Dell or HP.
The biggest complain I have for the computer and also i believe it's biggest reason (set aside the RTX 3060) the computer is sold for this price is that the display panel MSI uses is worst than many other gaming laptops. it has a panel with model no. of B173HAN04.9, 45% NTSC, 25ms respond time, color of the screen looks washed, and you are going to see ghosting when doing fps games, like cs go. even it's a 144hz panel. here 's link for full specs of the panel:
https://www.panelook.co
this particular part bothers me so much , i ended up trying to replace the screen , it's using a .5mm 40pin design for the connection so it's not interchangeable with any other panels with higher refresh rate (including 240hz or 360hz) ,those use .4 mm 40 pin design . and they costs a lot to buy too. I ended up using a panel with model no. B173HAN04.4 , way better color performance and most importantly it brings down the respond time to 9ms , still not the best but i dont need to use a .4mm to .5mmconveter.
for those who might want to do the same thing , i would warn you that the way MSI build the screen is not meant to be taken apart , at least not in a easy way. Screen is mounted with multiple double sided tape (not the reusable kind) , I had to use a heat gun to heat up the back cover (so glad it's metal) and soften the tapes to remove the screen. lucky enough , it didn't crack during the process, so I can resell it to get the money back for the replacement screen.
Second thing is the CPU thermal throttling . I was trying to use the Intel XTU software to undrvolt the cpu and get the best out of it. But I found out the CPU can easily hit 95'c and being thermal throttling even when I run a simple benchmark within the XTU software. That Caps the power consumption at around 50w and it's not doing its best. It shows in the cinebench r23 , the multicore performance is way lower than its normal level.
I need to re-paste the CPU and GPU to address that, didn't use the liquid metal (not trying to void the warranty yet) but high performance thermal paste , the popular Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut did the trick and CPU is no longer being thermal throttling when I run the benchmark. and R23 multicore score back to over 13000 . power consumption up to 80W. It's very odd this happens to a brand new laptop , I am not sure it's only my unit or in general.
Nice thing about MSI laptop is that the company allows users to have way more controls over the BIOS options, including overclocking and XMP memory support . So I upgraded the memory from stock to the
Crucial Ballistix DDR4 3200 with CL 16, that requires 1.35v. most people may not feel the difference, but they are the best ram you can get for laptops so far.
The main SSD in the computer is not the fastest drive you may expect , not like other same GE76 Raider with High end specs, it's not a PCI E 4.0 Drive, speed tops at 2500Mb/s. upgraded the main drive to a SN850 from WD and placed the original one to secondary.
Hope all these help.
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https://www.bestbuy.com/site/msi-...Id=6468118
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/msi-...Id=6468118
My son builds games in Godot and plays Minecraft and is super happy with how those have been running.
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https://storage-asset.msi.com/spe...UE-046.pdf
Says max 130w, which is think is the highest the 3060 goes. I was wondering about the screen and it only says screen is 45% NTSC, but can't find the nits.
I picked up a Legion 5 Pro deal a couple of weeks ago and it's a fantastic machine. But with this being a non-Pro model, I really don't have a good idea of which is best between this GE76 and Legion 5.
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https://slickdeals.net/f/15441784-nitro-5-gaming-laptop-15-144hz-ryzen-7-5800h-16gb-512gb-ssd-rtx-3060-1099-99?v=1&src=Site
Not sure if the extra 100 is worth it except for the screen size and extra warranty
Edit: Also this one seems EXTREMELY big and heavy, where the Acer Nitro 5 seems only really big and heavy. I've heard issues with the build quality on this one feeling cheap as well.
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