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 10th-generation 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 ray-tracing in selected games, but it’s not really worth the hit to frame rates and will make this Raider noisy as hell.