The pace of change is never short of rapid in PC gaming componentry, and MSI has its foot pressed right to the floor with its latest laptop creation, the GE66 Raider. With looks inspired by luxury sports cars creating a sleek lightweight chassis, it’s also got the specs under the bonnet to run the most demanding games flat-out.
Announced at CES 2020, it’s now available in the UK at Currys PC World, and packs some serious hardware into what’s an impressively slim form.
Fully specced-up, the GE66 Raider can house an Intel Core i9 CPU with up to 5.3GHz single-core speeds and a total of eight cores ready to shred any task you put to it, and an Nvidia RTX 2080 Super Max Q-Chip. That means it’s not only small and thin enough to fit in a super-lithe chassis like the GE66 Raider’s, it’s also capable of bleeding-edge real-time ray tracing in supported games such as Battlefield V, and the Super outstrips a GTX 1080 for performance by almost 50% to bring subtlety and extreme fidelity to every single frame that shows up on your screen. Flames flickering in water reflections in real-time. Marble floored interiors mirroring the savage gunfights taking place all over them. Passing planes reflecting on car bonnets down at street level - no detail’s missed.
It speaks volumes for MSI’s cooling solutions under the hood that the GE66 Raider’s able to keep all this top-end componentry chilled. A bespoke Cooler Boost 5 design featuring wider heatpipes and larger fans cool air in from the front and dispatches warm air through four different exhausts.
And it does so while preserving the sleek lines that belie its sports car inspiration. The innovative RGB bar at the front and full RGB keyboard from Steelseries accent an otherwise sleek and understated brushed aluminium finish around the exterior. Thanks to Mystic Light RGB tech you’ve got granular control over the lighting behaviour, both colour and and sequences, all over the laptop.
The panel doesn’t want to be outdone by the specs underneath the keyboard, though - its 240Hz refresh rate is a killer feature, going well beyond the smoothness and responsiveness of even 120Hz monitors, themselves a rare premium feature. While a refresh rate this high will be noticeable in any game, and smooths out the blur of any moving characters or objects onscreen, it’s especially important in competitive games where your aim dramatically improves for seeing your target’s position update with such rapidity and precision. And with just a 5mm bezel around it, you’re looking at all-screen, no dead space.
Get your MSI GE66 Raider now at SCAN, Overclockers UK, Laptops Direct and Currys PC World.
