Today is a good day, as we can finally talk about Intel’s 12th-gen laptop processors and Nvidia’s new RTX 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti Laptop graphics cards. We’ve been testing the MSI GE76 Raider, a high-spec machine that includes each company’s flagship parts for this generation, and the performance on tap is nothing short of incredible. The 12900K and RTX 3080 Ti remain some of the best gaming hardware available in desktop PCs – despite frustrating pricing and availability issues – so it’s been fun to see how the mobile versions perform. In this first look, we put the GE76 through its paces against its 2021 counterpart, with both gaming tests and content creation benchmarks.
First, let’s briefly introduce you to the star of today’s show – the GE76 Raider. It’s a tremendously powerful machine, especially in the top spec configuration we’re testing today. As well as the Core i9 12900HK and RTX 3080 Ti 175W Laptop GPU, there’s 32GB of dual-channel DDR5-4800 RAM, a 17.3-inch 360Hz display and two 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSDs. All of this hardware is housed inside a generously-sized chassis, allowing the components within to stay relatively cool without resorting to jet-grade fan noise. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this chonky machine retails for $4199 when paired with an even fancier 4K 120Hz screen – we presume that the 360Hz option we’re testing isn’t much cheaper.
Here are the full specs of our review unit:
Intel Core i9 12900HK 14-core CPU (6P+8E)Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Laptop (175W) graphics card2x16GB DDR5-4800 RAM2x 1TB Samsung MZVL22 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD17.3-inch 1080p 360Hz IPS display99.99Wh battery
First, let’s take a look at how the processor and RAM perform together in two content creation benchmarks – video transcoding in Handbrake and 3D rendering in Cinebench R20.
The GE76 Raider ’22 performs extremely well right off the bat, even in its balanced mode, with a single-core Cinebench R20 score of 703 and a multi-core score of 6370. Those are the fastest we’ve ever recorded for a laptop processor, and is in the same ballpark as the Core i5 12600K. With the MSI ‘Extreme Mode’ turned on, this is lifted slightly to 715 and 6432.
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In our video transcode test, we take a piece of Patreon footage and transcode it into H.264 and H.265 (HEVC) formats using Handbrake with a Production Standard CRF 18 setting. Unlike our desktop machines, the GE76 laptops also offer the ability to use Intel’s Quick Sync Video (QSV) tech, which utilises the integrated graphics to accelerate the workload. Our stock H.264 and HEVC results are impressive, with the GE76 ’22 managing 38.41fps H.264 and 16.38fps H.265 in its Extreme Mode (complete with moderate fan noise). Those are chart-topping results, although the margin is only three percent over the Zephyrus M16 with its Core i9 11900H. With QSV enabled, those frame-rates go up significantly – all the way to 97.53fps for H.264 and 31.56fps for H.265. That’s with Extreme mode enabled; with Balanced mode we get a more reasonable (but still impressive) 77.24fps and 51.69fps, respectively.