Inside of this box right here is the new MSI Raider, but not any MSI Raider. This right here has both the new AMD X3D mobile chip and a mobile 590, meaning that this right here has the fastest possible hardware combination for a laptop. Just how fast is it? Well, we’re about to find out. It’s a big box. Takes up like the whole frame of the top down. Jeez, this thing’s freaking huge. I can already tell you that much. Oh my. This thing’s freaking heavy. It’s like an absolute weapon of a power brick here. Holy freak. 400 watts is what we’re able to get out of this charger over a proprietary connector, which makes a lot of sense cuz you would need two USB type-C chargers in order to deliver that kind of power. And this just makes a lot more sense. 3 lb on the power brick. For context, uh the laptop I’m currently using, the HP ZBbook Ultra, is half a pound heavier than just the power brick that comes with the Raider. Holy freak. This thing has to be like 7 12 lb. Let’s see about that. 8 lb on the laptop. That is freaking wild. You’re going to have 11 lbs in your backpack with both of these. But I can see why. Look at the size of the heat sinks that are in this thing. So much just bare copper in there. It is freaking beautiful. The the heat pipe situation down here is crazy. Looking at the outside of the Raider, the design is quite gamer. It’s not super duper insane, but these red accents here and the general mass and size of the thing certainly lets you know that it’s a gaming laptop and a half. As for IO, on the right hand side, we have headphone microphone combo jack, USB typeA, two Thunderbolt 4s. Around the back, we have our power input, HDMI 2.1 and 2.5 GB networking. And on the left hand side, we have two more USB type A’s and a full-size SD card reader. Now, one thing that you don’t get on this model is Thunderbolt 5. But we also have a second MSI Raider here today. This one has Intel in it and the IO is all basically the same except over on this side you get Thunderbolt 5. Unfortunately, we can’t fully drag race these two because the Intel one has a 5080 in it, but it will be nice to see the 5090 versus the 5080. And we can do a little bit of CPU testing. One thing I am definitely noticing here is that this laptop is a bit of a fingerprint magnet. Like if you look here, I’m just going to give it a little bit of a touchy touch. I’m not even like incredibly sweaty or anything right now. This thing just really really Yeah. All right, let’s open this beast up. As I am sure you’ve been able to tell, this is an 18-in laptop and it is gargantuan. Like this trackpad right here, it is of a pretty decent size, but it just looks like a tiny little island because this laptop is so freaking big. Like let’s compare to the one on like a normal laptop. They are basically the same size which means this is more than good enough. It just looks tiny. There’s no point in even trying to use this on battery, right? Let’s plug her straight in. It’s the Dragon RGB. Oh, it is. Hell yeah. One thing I am immediately noticing using the Raider is that the trackpad just is not big enough. Uh, I know that I did just say that it’s about the same size as on the 14 in, but the problem that I’m having is is that it’s just not really like in a position that makes any sense cuz I keep on like indexing my hands based off of it being down here, but you actually want to be like thereish. So, I keep on clicking like down here on the bottom where there’s no actual trackpad. And one thing that also is very unfortunate is that because there’s a numpad over here, absolutely love it. Thank you, MSI. The trackpad is not centered with your keyboard. So, you’re going to be sitting here something like this. And for one, the palm rejection is an absolute nightmare because I keep on clicking it cuz my entire hand is on top of the trackpad. But also, I really like to use my thumb and it’s not anywhere close to the trackpad. So, that sucks. Uh, and also it’s not RGB, which I was hoping it would be. So, uh, I don’t know. It’s just kind of all around. The keyboard is pretty good. The problem I’m having is that this stupid trackpad is, like I already mentioned, exactly where I want to have my right hand and I keep on clicking it and then I’m not typing where I’m supposed to be typing. This is a desktop replacement, so chances are you will just turn off the trackpad and use a mouse over here. But a lot of other brands have figured out how to do trackpads properly on 18-in laptops, and this is not good enough MSI. Actually, you know what? Let’s just do that. I want a mouse. There we go. I can’t believe it. The keyboard’s not even bad either. On a lot of MSI laptops that don’t have those, like the Cherry MX switches, I sort of expect the keyboard to be mediocre, but this right here is like decent. Like I’m going to give it an A minus for a keyboard, but the experience of using it is like a B because I just keep on clicking the trackpad and you can’t use the trackpad when you do the keyboard. So, it’s a B. Well, that’s a bit of a disappointing start, but you know what’s not at the reason that we’re actually here, though, the performance. Inside of this thing is an AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX 3D 16 core processor. The CPU is able to go up to 5.4 GHz. And those 16 cores are 16 cores. Like you don’t have any of those high efficiency, low power cores. None of those nonsense going slow stuff. These are 16 real big fat meaty cores that can do whatever you want them to besides have your battery last a while. To complement that, we have 64 GB of RAM which is running at 5600 mega transfers per second, which means that we might be able to replace it. That’s the sort of speeds that you can get out of a Sodom. We also have two SSDs. One is 2 TB. Oh, the second one is also 2 TB. So you could raid zero them if you want it to be even faster and you don’t care at all about your data. And for the GPU, we have AMD Radeon graphics, which only has two cores in this configuration, meaning it’s not really there, but that doesn’t matter because we also have an RTX 5090 mobile, which is basically a desktop 5080, but even slower. Now, we do have 24 GB of RAM. So, if you’re doing professional workloads on the go, this thing will be pretty awesome, but it has almost identical core counts to the desktop 5080 and it’s also clocked an entire gigahertz slower. So, if you’re going into this expecting desktop 5090 performance, you’re not going to get it. But what I want to do right now is see just how fast all of those cores can go. We have Cinebench on here. And let’s bring out the Intel version as well. All right, we have laptop number two here. And it is speced out with an Intel Core Ultra 9285HX, which has 24 cores, but only eight of those are performance cores and 16 of them are efficiency cores. It’s also able to go up to 5.5 GHz. And the memory on this one is also slightly faster at 6,400 mega transfers per second instead of the 5600 that we found on our AMD system. All right, it is time for our drag race. We are in Cinebench R23 because I think it’s more fun to look at than R24. Go. The AMD1 started up way faster and it’s going way faster. And what’s our score? 38,988 points out of this guy and 38,187 points on the Intel. That is nearly a dead heat between these two. Under 1,000 points when you’re going that fast is pretty much within the run to run variance. So, we can effectively say that these are pretty damn close. Well, now that we know it’s slightly slower, our Intel system can once again go away. All right, let’s give this guy a little game here. booted up Doom Eternal and hopefully it is a good one. I am screen recording at the moment, so the FPS won’t be quite as high as you would expect to have. Oh wow, I am bad. It does look like we’re getting around 140 to 160 FPS, which is pretty good, especially given that this is 4K, but at the same time, I am seeing a lot of screen tearing. And I’m really really disappointed that this monitor does not have G-Sync as an option for a laptop that is this expensive. And especially given the fact that it is a 4K monitor where in all games you aren’t necessarily going to be able to get all of the 120 fps or even in this where we’re getting over it. I’m still seeing screen tearing. It’s not as premium of an experience as I would hope for. And the actual gaming portion is pretty great, but the screen is not so good. I am not super impressed. I need to break out the other laptop because this AMD system has an engineering sample panel. So, it’s not quite what we’re looking for, but we have the Intel one. So, one second. All right, we’re on the Intel machine now with the properly calibrated panel, and it actually looks really quite good in SDR. We’re able to get a bit over,00 nits peak brightness, which is fantastic. and it’s accurate enough for most of what you’re doing as long as you’re not a photo or video professional. Out of the box, our model was a little bit blue in sRGB mode. I don’t mind that too much cuz you’ll just get used to it. Your eyes will sort of white balance it for you after a little bit. And overall, I think that this looks pretty great. Where things fall apart, though, is when you enable HDR. Just look at this background right here. Then I’m going to turn on HDR. It’s bright. It certainly is really bright. All right, we are now in HDR. It looks horrible. Like, did you see that? It’s just literally the entire screen is blown out and the saturation is just off the charts. It is obscene how colorful this is. Future Alex here. After recording, we found out that if you turn on HDR and then restart the whole laptop, the display goes from really bad to really bad but not quite as bad. For comparison, this time I have a MacBook Pro, which by the way has a brighter screen. And it is so much less bright and also so much just actual colors. Once again, now we’ll take this guy, turn the HDR brightness all the way down to make it somewhere reasonableish. And now it’s kind of looking okay. And all that we had to do was restart it and completely change the settings. Okay, this I can kind of stand, but it is still completely incorrect. It’s not even close. In our bestcase scenario, with the brightness turned all the way down on the MSI and it restarted, we’re only able to get a 64.3 delta EITP. And again, 12 is what we expect for an okay viewing experience. It is still so comically oversaturated and over brightened that stuff that you’re looking at in HDR on the MSI sadly just looks cartoonish. Now, for our performance results, we tested the MSI Raider with the 5080 and the Intel chip, plus our 5090 against an Asus Stricks Scar that had a 4090 in it to see how it’s improved generation over generation. And it has a little bit at 1600p in Total War Warhammer 3, we were able to get an extra 13% performance on the 5090 compared to the 4090. The 5080, however, was 1% slower. In F12024, similar results. The 5090 has about a 9.2% uplift, while the 5080 is again 1% slower than the 4090. And in Cyberpunk 2027, we had a much bigger uplift for the 5090 over the 4090, nearly 20%, but the 5080 was only 3.25, 25, meaning that it’s near as makes no difference to last generation’s best. So, overall, it is a nice little gen over gen bump, but at the same time, it’s nowhere near the price bump. We’ll get to that later. Maybe the speakers will be a redemption, though. In here, we have six speakers, two woofers, and four tweeters, which maybe sound good. We’ll find out. All right. It sounds loud and clear, although I suspect there won’t be a whole lot of bass. Oh, that’s not too bad. It’s kind of nicely balanced. Belle, can I borrow your MacBook for a second? Here we have the MSI. Switching over to Mac. Wow, that’s way [Music] better. The MSI sounds like junk now. It’s amazing how a laptop of this size is able to just completely destroy the speakers on one that has all this space to put in way more bass. One thing that is quite nice though is the webcam. Well, maybe the webcam itself isn’t, but we do have a little switch here beside the webcam, which I really appreciate. You can super easily just know that no one’s looking at you on your free time. Open back up here. We also have Windows Hello facial recognition. Absolutely love to see that. So, this webcam right here is going to be decent enough for what you might want to do for video calling people, but do not expect it to be accurate. Actually, maybe this is just the display being a piece of Once again. Oh, that looks way better. It’s just that HDR was on and it looks like ass. Going back to the AMD one here to have a look inside of that one. 12 Phillips head screws later and we are in. And holy crap, that is some impressive heat pipage. In here, we have two big beefy fans and also six heat pipes. Although, if you spring for the Gen 5 SSD option, you even get a seventh heat pipe that goes down onto that guy. In here, we also have two SSDs that are upgradeable. Love to see that. Looking underneath the SSD here, we have a great big thermal pad, which is great. So, if you want to put in a double-sided SSD in the future, it should be no problem. You just might have to get a slightly thinner thermal pad for it. Also, what is incredibly exciting here, look at that. We have our RAM right here. You can replace it just as you want. This one’s 32 GB. So, if you want to upgrade it in the future or just your RAM dies, here you go. You can do it. Now, what’s a little bit not as good is the battery. It is literally as large as they could make it. This thing right here is 99.99 W hours. And uh that doesn’t matter when you have a computer that’s this large and this powerful. We tested the Intel one, which is verified to have the correct battery life, and it came in a bit over 4 hours. So, uh do not expect to be like going to the library and writing a paper with this thing right here on battery. You’re going to have to take that three lb great big brick wherever you go. And one final thing while we’re in here, the Wi-Fi card is replaceable. And on the AMD system, you will want to because the MediaTek Wi-Fi cards are just not as good as the Intel ones or the Qualcomm ones. You will have some problems with connections and stuff like that. At least in my experience. So, so far, this laptop’s been a bit of a mixed bag, but the price makes it not. This thing right here is $5,600, and for that, MSI’s out to lunch. Who the is going to buy this thing for $5,600? The strict SCAR that we looked at with the 4090 in it cost $4,000. Now, that does have less RAM and less storage, but $1600 to upgrade to the next gen, plus a better RAM and storage is insane. I am sure this is not entirely MSI’s fault. Nvidia probably has the prices of these 50 series chips just absolutely to the moon. But man, it’s pretty rough. The Intel system with the 5080 also is very close to $5,400. And as we saw, it performs pretty much identically to the 4090 that uh costs what, $1,400 less. Uh, wow. It’s not a great time to be buying a gaming laptop, at least if you’re trying to get one that’s this baller here. So, MSI, let’s just uh talk about this one for a second. This laptop is $5,600. The trackpad being really annoying and just not good enough for a laptop of this price, I think I could get over, but the screen I cannot. The things that matter the most when you are designing a laptop are the keyboard, the trackpad, and the screen because those are things that you are actually interacting with. And when two of those three are misses, the whole laptop’s a miss. It doesn’t matter. A MacBook Air is a better laptop than this $5,600 piece of trash. It doesn’t matter if you can game at 1,000 FPS if those,000 FPS are delivered to your eyeballs through something that looks like a piece of crap. But I hope that you, the viewer,