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Gaming is a great way to destress, decompress and just get out of your own head for a while. But that escapism falls to bits if your game is chugging along at 15fps.
The best gaming laptops are built to deliver the best experience – everything from the elevation of the rubber feet on the underside to the display panel inside the lid is part of that mission.
Five crucial areas of tech make this happen in MSI’s gaming laptops, and you won’t find this combination anywhere else. Here are five important advancements, and some of the great MSI laptops that offer them.
NVIDIA RTX GPUs – Reflecting on the future of graphics
Two little words define how graphics in games will develop over the next half-decade: ray tracing. This is a relatively new technique that creates lighting effects by modelling the paths of light rays, simulating real-world physics in a way that just wasn’t possible before.
Ray tracing models the shadows in densely packed neon-filled cities, and paints the reflections in puddles and mirrored skyscraper windows. And, without ray tracing hardware, games tend to fall back on simpler lighting techniques that won’t fool your eyes and brain into thinking you’re in a real environment in the same way.
All of MSI’s gaming laptops use NVIDIA RTX graphics cards, which have hardware dedicated solely to ray tracing.
The MSI GE76 Raider Dragon Edition Tiamat
The MSI GE76 Raider Dragon Edition Tiamat is the perfect showcase for ray tracing and NVIDIA’s top-end RTX 3080 laptop graphics card.
It can be configured with up to an Intel Core i9 10th Gen processor, 32GB of RAM and a 17.3-inch 4K display, for true no-compromise performance to suit a generous budget.
This special edition has a striking engraved design. Artwork inspired by the tale of ancient Mesopotamian goddess Tiamat is etched across its casing, inside and out. For a cleaner look consider the 17.3-inch MSI GE76 Raider and 15.6-inch GE66 Raider, which both feature a panoramic, customisable front LED array.
Why refresh rates are key
The insides of top gaming laptops are made for bleeding edge performance, enabling hours of play without drops in frame rate. But did you know most laptop screens are not actually capable of displaying frame rates beyond 60fps?
A standard 60Hz screen only refreshes its image 60 times a second, so additional frames rendered beyond that pace largely go to waste.
MSI’s GP76 Leopard has a 144Hz refresh rate panel, so the maths on this one is pretty easy – it can fully display frame rates of up to 144fps, meaning smoother play and liquid-like panning in first-person shooters.
Ultra-high frame rates can mean the difference between victory and a losing in titles such as Fortnite, where fast reactions are often the key to victory.
MSI GP76 Leopard
The MSI GP76 Leopard is a great choice for those who need a mid-range gaming laptop that also excels as a workstation for your day job. It spreads its extensive array of ports across the back and sides, keeping your work space clearer. And its design blends the fun with the serious: this laptop won’t look out of place in a meeting, but also features a full-colour keyboard backlight.
It can be configured with up to an Intel Core i7 CPU, an NVIDIA RTX 3070 graphics card, and has that all-important 17.3-inch 144Hz refresh rate display. There’s also a 15.6-inch alternative, the MSI GP66.
MSI Cooler Boost 5: Solving the heat problem
Push a laptop’s GPU and CPU, and they’ll generate heat. If this isn’t removed efficiently, your system will start to lose precious performance.
Game stutters and frame-rate drops can happen at the most inconvenient times, and are more likely to crop up during processor-intensive boss fights than at the start of a level. Performance throttling due to excess heat contributes to the problem, and this is why it is so important to keep things cool.
So, MSI developed its revolutionary Cooler Boost 5 cooling technology to make sure you can keep fighting that last baddie until the credits roll.
Six large surface-area, high-conduction pipes direct the heat from the CPU and GPU towards two fans. These fans blow air across the pipes, sending heat out through the large vents on the back and sides, and away from you and the internals.
These are large fans, which matters not just because it allows for greater air-flow, but so they can often run at a lower rpm, reducing noise intrusion. Cooler Boost 5 is used across MSI gaming laptops, from the slim and light MSI GF65 Thin to the all-performance MSI GE76 Raider.
A laptop that lasts and lasts away from the charger
Battery life is often overlooked in gaming laptops – as if there’s an assumption you’d only use your portable computer plugged into the wall. Once again, MSI takes a different approach.
The MSI GE66 Raider has a huge 99.9Wh battery – that’s more than twice the capacity of the average slim and light laptop. This beefy battery offsets the additional power draw of the MSI GE66 Raider’s super-powered CPU and graphics card, and it’s all the more impressive when you factor in the overall sub-2.5kg weight.
It lets you work on the laptop all day before plugging in to unwind with a game in the evening, and MSI supplies a power adapter to match, with up to 280W output depending on the model you buy.
MSI GE66 Raider
Want monstrous performance without monstrous size? The top-end MSI GE66 Raider is a great choice. It has a 15.6-inch screen, and is smaller and lighter than its 17.3-inch counterparts, but doesn’t compromise on performance.
The MSI GE66 Raider can be configured with up to an NVIDIA RTX 3080, a blistering 300Hz screen, and Intel’s top-end Core i9 processor. That MSI fits all this and a 99.9Wh battery into a 2.38kg laptop is a feat of engineering – and having such a large battery lets you work for most of the day away from the charger.
Getting techy with Resizable Bar
The last MSI gaming feature we will cover is one of the most impressive – and also the most technical. All of MSI’s new gaming laptops have a feature called Resizable Bar.
This gives the CPU direct access to the up-to 16GB of ultra-fast GDDR6 RAM built into their NVIDIA RTX graphics cards, rather than just the 256MB buffer usually reserved for communication between CPU and GPU.
The benefits are huge, particularly in games that offer vast worlds packed with high-resolution textures – and the last time we checked, that covers most high-profile titles released today.
Resizable Bar offers a useful 5-10 per cent improvement in frame rates – significantly more in some cases – and is effectively a “free” upgrade. No other laptop manufacturer has pushed Resizable Bar like MSI.
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For more information, visit msi.com/laptops
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
