MSI GE63 Raider RGB-608 15.6" Gaming Laptop, 144Hz Display, Intel Core i7-9750H, NVIDIA GeForce RTX2070, 16GB, 256GB NVMe SSD + 1TB HDD

MSI is my go to gaming laptop brand. I got this laptop as a upgrade from my GE60 which served me a good 5 years throughout college, as it served as a gaming and schooling computer. I could take it anywhere as I travel and move around a lot and I wanted to have another laptop to serve the same purpose. With the GE63 I mainly use this laptop for gaming. The processor and graphics card can play any of the latest titles without an issue on high settings. I can play most games on high settings. The 1TB storage space is great too, and there's room to swap that out for more GB/TB if that's your thing. With 1TB I can have most of my favorite large games on there like GTA V, Fallout 4, Skyrim, Arma 3 and I still have a couple hundred GB of room for other large or small games. The sound quality is good, I can enjoy spotify on speakers and or watch movies. The RGB keyboard and front cover are a nice visual touch. The keyboard is customizable to different flashing patterns, or non flashing colors. The touch pad is nicer compared to the GE60. The GE63 actually has a left and right click buttons. The laptop is quiet when browsing the internet or related light activity. The fan personally doesn't bother me when I'm gaming. It's what you can expect out of any gaming laptop, fan noise is reasonably quiet. The fans do have a good air flow and the laptop does not get super hot. This laptop is also pretty slim compared to my old one and other gaming laptops out there. Should fit in most bags that can accommodate a 15.6 inch laptop.What I don't like about this laptop is the USB placement, compared to the GE60 where almost all the ports were on the left side. I use a mouse and gaming headset so the USB ports get in the way on the right side with the mouse sometimes. In addition, the charging port is also on the right side though it doesn't really get in the way. At the end of the day though, there's enough ports to have my wired mouse, wired headset, and a flash drive plugged in if I were to do school work or such. While on the cons subject, I'll mention battery life. With most gaming laptops, the battery life is not that great when not plugged in. Especially if you're gaming which eats up the battery. I can get up to 2 hours on battery doing light activity on the computer (such as browsing, researching, writing, etc) not gaming, and lasts an hour video call with about 30% battery remaining. There is a pretty good battery saver assistant which can help you maximize your battery time. Although I always have my charger with me, which is actually pretty big and bulky.Overall, I love this laptop. I can take my games anywhere and still have a computer to do business, school, or leisure, etc. I definitely recommend this laptop.Edit Sept 2020: I put in a 2TB SSD NVME and 32GB ram @2666mhz, which was an easy installment, and the games load/run better. I have moved a way from the 1TB HD drive that's included. I now use it as storage.Edit Dec 2020: If you're a [mobile] gamer this is for you, you can play just about every title out there. Cyberpunk 2077 can be played without issue on high graphics. Flight Sim 2020 plays fine on reasonable settings, both games are demanding and this laptop can keep up. I am very happy with this laptop and I know it will serve me well like it did with my old one.Edit Jan 2021: I would consider this laptop to be mainstream gaming. MSI just released newer gaming laptops with the RTX 30 series so if you're serious on getting a gaming laptop get the newer MSI. If you're on a budget or just mainstream gaming then this laptop is for you. This laptop is almost 2 years old since I got it and I'm slightly salty that the RTX 30 is out, but as anything with technology, it ages out over time.

MSI GE63 Raider RGB-608 reviewI use this laptop all day everyday, both at work and at home. It is a phenomenal machine, Probably the best computer I have ever owned personally. That being said, it took a lot of work and know how to get it to that state. I felt comfortable cracking my new laptop open like a clam and replacing a lot of the parts. However, I have over 12 years in the IT field. If you do not feel comfortable opening up this laptop, and doing some rocket surgery on it, This computer may not be for you. However, if you do feel comfortable with that, and If you want the most powerful, most portable desktop replacement out there, You need this computer.Some Bullet Points to display how powerful this laptop is:* Geekbench CPU score of 1142 single, 5980 Multi* Geekbench GPU score, 56978 Vulkan* Stable 144 FPS on Rainbow Six Siege, Ultra Graphics* Stable 144 FPS on Escape From Tarkov, Ultra Graphics* Stable 144 FPS on Squad, High Graphics* Stable 90 FPS on HTC Vive VR games (Gorn, Onward, fallout 4)* I can search 2.3 million lines of code in about 8 seconds!* I can run 9 virtual machines concurrently.Upgrade list:I made a lot of upgrades to this laptop, I would not recommend using this laptop as is, Out of the box, it had severe thermal issues, It had underpowered ram, the NVME was a joke, and seriously who uses 5400 rpm hard drives anymore?1. The upgrade i went with first was from the included Kingston 256 GB drive, to twin Samsung 970 EVO SSD 1TB drives, and put them in RAID 0. I get almost 7 gigabyte transfer speeds! (use samsung drive cloning tools to move OS, intel rapid storage to make a raid)2. I upgraded the memory from included sticks of 8gb each, in two sticks, to 64 gb of Corsair Vengeance Performance running at 2666 mhz (32x2)3. Removed the SATA harddrive, dropped in a Sandisk 512 GB SSD.4. Removed the terrible thermal paste, Like seriously this stuff was the consistency of toothpaste mixed with glue. It did not conduct heat at all! Switched it to arctic silver on both the GPU and CPU. went from hitting TJ max 100 C, to barely breaking 85 C under full load.The GoodThis machine is so powerful it's hard to describe, Almost everything I load is instantaneous. This computer has 6 cores, with 12 threads. After doing a repaste, I have no problem no problem hitting a full turbo of 4.5 ghz! It tends to hit full turbo for a few seconds, but never holds it under load. It tends to hold 3.99 ghz for any continuous workload (Like gaming). For a laptop CPU, I couldn’t be happier.This computer is also running a real, full powered 2070 RTX in it. I have yet to find some type of graphical load that this Laptop cannot handle. It will easily do 1440p at 60 fps, or 1080 at 144 fps. It will handle Ultra settings for every game I have tried on it so far. I can't say anything about 4k content though, Since i don’t have a 4k display. The Graphics card has a ton of ram, running 8Gs at GDDR6. I have not tested any image processing on this card either, so I can’t say anything about that.So we know the thing has guts, but it also looks good doing it. Super cool RGB keyboard, you can program every key to be a different color if you'd like. You can even program some RGB windows in the case lid, to annoy all the people sitting across from you!If you want this laptop for gaming, and for doing power user tasks such as sorting large data sets or running virtual machines, you found the right machine.The BadSo I ranted and raved about how great this thing is, are there any bad sides? Why yes there are! I'm glad you asked. Thankfully almost all these issues can be resolved by the end user (you). First off this thing does come with some bloatware. Killer Network Service made me believe my entire network was failing more than once, you MUST uninstall this driver set if you want to have consistent networking. It would cut out my discord while i was speaking, it would drop tons of packets in my games, it would end my SSH sessions. Super easy fix, just uninstall it, and then make sure to disable the service in services.mscThis laptop does have a battery, but under load it runs it for maybe 40 mins. So yea i wouldn’t plan on using it anywhere away from power. Maybe 3 to 4 hours web browsing on battery?( I don’t really use it for that, I have a touch screen laptop with 8+ hours of battery life for web surfing and the like.)Another huge let down for the price of this laptop was the disk storage. I mean, a HDD? This is supposed to be a high end gaming laptop! To be fair it did come with a NVME, however it's the slowest NVME I have ever run, running at only 930 MB/s (my new Samsung Evos run at 3,500MB/s per) so that's definitely nothing special.The included Ram was nothing special either. Just two 8 GB sticks for a total of 16 GB of ram. This just isn't enough ram for most modern games. Most people probably won’t take issue with this, but I want to be able to run 4 virtual machines without any ram restrictions on them.The UglyThe thermal pasting on this was incredibly poorly done, the worst I've probably seen in my life. (See attached pictures) This is a huge factor in any gaming laptop. At first when I got this laptop, I couldn't even hit 130 frames fluctuating in siege, Far from the 144 stable i wanted to see. While under load, the CPU would constantly hit TJ max 100C. For those of you who don't know, 100C is enough to boil water, so it's bad for your chip to get that hot and stay that hot. Once I hit that temperature, the computer would sound like a jet engine trying to cool itself off, and constantly dip to about 3 ghz. While the cooling system is plenty adequate for cooling the CPU and GPU, the thermal paste they put on there is not up for the job of transferring the heat to the cooler. You MUST repaste this laptop to get the full potential.ConclusionThis is an amazing laptop, and I am really happy with it, But I wasn’t happy with it at all out of the box. If you want to get this laptop running like a prized stallion, you have to put in a ton of effort. After you do, it will easily out pace most desktops.

This is my second MSI laptop. I’ve had other brands like Dell and HP. MSI is much better over all for features and speed options. My first MSI failed, not because of hardware but because of a separate software issue. I bought both to edit video and photos, not game. The led keyboard with key by key assignable color is brilliant to remind you of which key do what function. I like the ergonomics better than my other MSI. It’s smaller and lighter than my 17 inch, but doesn’t feel like it. I like the curve at the palm of the mousepad so much more. The lid’s led lights are a cool gimmick that I never see. It’s very fast so far! I can run Adobe CC, Vegas Pro, and DaVinci Resolve very well. One issue I have seen so far when editing video or photos is the screen calibration. There are various MSI schemes and initially I chose “designer” thinking it would work best but it made some of my old pics and videos look terrible. I found the MSI True Color Panel and switched to sRGB and it looks right again. Render speeds for 1080p video were speedy. Of course, It’s only been a week so we’ll see.

Hasta ahora el producto entregado luce excelente y en buenas condiciones, la verdad es que el aspecto de la laptop bastante atractivo, también viene con algunos programas pre-instalados muy útiles para la personalización del equipo y monitoreo del hardware, el único detalle que le veo es que la distribución del teclado es un poco rara, pero no creo que sea difícil acostumbrarse con el tiempo; voy a realizar algunas pruebas y entonces actualizaré mi reseña del producto si noto algún detalle.