The MSI GE75 Raider Laptop Review: Core i9 and RTX 2080 Performance

Display Analysis

MSI’s GE75 Raider ships with a 1920x1080 IPS panel, offering an impressive 144 Hz refresh rate. Some will lament the lack of a UHD option, although in our gaming test it really showed that even the mighty RTX 2080 will struggle with UHD gaming in laptop form, and the smoothness of gaming at 144 Hz is something to behold.

The GE75 Raider offers a matte display, meaning there’s a slight blurriness to the pixels due to the anti-glare coating, and there’s no touch capabilities.

MSI is one of the few manufacturers to think about color management, which they offer through their MSI True Color application. You can choose from six pre-defined modes, as well as calibrate the display if you have a supported colorimeter. For all of our testing, we left the display in the default sRGB mode, which should offer the best accuracy for day-to-day work, but if you are gaming there’s a dedicated gaming mode which lets you adjust the gamma as needed for a particular game.

To see how the GE75 Raider’s display performs it was tested with Portrait Display’s CalMAN software suite, using an X-Rite i1Display Pro colorimeter for brightness and contrast measurements, and the X-Rite i1Pro2 spectrophotometer for color accuracy readings.

Brightness and Contrast

At 447 nits, the GE75 Raider offers an incredibly bright display for a gaming laptop. Coupled to that is great black levels at maximum brightness which provides an excellent contrast ratio closing in on 1300:1. It wasn’t that long ago that gaming laptops often shipped with TN panels that could struggle to even hit 800:1 contrast, and the latest generation of high-refresh IPS displays has really helped here. The laptop only goes down to 23 nits but since you're unlikely to be using it in bed, that's probably not a concern.

Grayscale

Portrait Display CalMAN

In the sRGB mode MSI delivers one of the most accurate grayscale results we’ve seen on any laptop, let alone a gaming laptop where most manufacturers pay no attention to the display calibration.

Gamut

Portrait Display CalMAN

Testing the primary and secondary colors at 100% levels shows that once again MSI has done an excellent job tuning the display characteristics. The display almost perfectly hits the correct points for sRGB.

Saturation

Portrait Display CalMAN

Testing the primary and secondary colors across their entire range, the results are still perfect. The gap between this laptop and all other gaming laptops we’ve tested is massive.

Gretag Macbeth

Portrait Display CalMAN

The Gretag Macbeth test checks for color accuracy at many points, rather than just on the primary and secondary color axis, and includes the important skin tones. The results are near perfect, with none of the colors even reaching an error level of 3.0, and an average error level across all colors of just 1.32. This is exceptional.

Colorchecker

Portrait Display CalMAN

This relative color graph indicates the targeted color on the bottom of the image, and the top half is the color that the GE75 Raider produced. The color differences are so minute that it’s almost indistinguishable.

Display Conclusion

MSI has delivered an incredibly accurate display in the GE75 Raider, which is something we don’t often get to see in a laptop targeted at the gaming demographic. The color accuracy is among the best we’ve tested on any laptop, and additionally MSI offers the ability to quickly change and tune the display as needed through their simple to use, yet surprisingly robust, True Color software suite.

That, coupled with the high refresh rate, make this an excellent display. The only thing not included is G-SYNC, which is unfortunate in a laptop of this class.