 MSI is bringing back old-school designs for its premier gaming device, as the MSI Raider GE78 gets supercharged for 2023 with 13th GenCore Y7 and Core i9 HX series processors, as well as 175 watts graphics going as high as the RTX 4090. This means a heavy and sturdy machine that's paired with a massive 330 watts power brick. A large part of the structure is aluminum, while the back and heat vents have a plastic cover with gold and red accents. It weighs 3.1 kilograms, which is plenty, but at least you'll get a good workout carrying it from place to place. On the other hand, it has a thin profile, at only 23 millimeters. The front of the laptop has a huge RGB strip that can be synced with the RGB backlight of the keyboard. The board is excellent for typing and gaming, with long, key travel and clicky feedback. The numpad is a bit smaller, but this is a gaming device, so getting one is an achievement in and of itself. The touchpad is a significant improvement. It sits dead in the center and has a large surface area paired with incredible responsiveness and a super satisfying clicking mechanism. As with most gaming laptops these days, we've got ports on the back and sides. It helps with having less clutter, so we're fans. The MSI Raider has two USB Type-A 3.2 ports, with one Generation 1 and one Generation 2 port, and one USB Type-C 3.2 Generation 2 port with power delivery and display port support all on the right. On the back, there's the power plug, one more USB Type-C port, an HDMI 2.1 connector and a 2.5 gigabit LAN port. Lastly on the left, there's a Thunderbolt 4 port, an SD card reader and a gold-plated audio jack. The display selection of the Raider is bangin', offering both a QHD plus and full HD plus option. Of course, we're treated to 16-10 displays with a high refresh rate. We tested the QHD plus panel, which has a 240Hz refresh rate, while reaching a max brightness of 507 nits, while covering 100% of the sRGB and 99.4% of the DCI-P3 color gamut. This means that the Raider provides exceptional colors that are vibrant and punchy, while the high resolution makes for a sharp and detailed image. Paired with our design and gaming profile, we settled the color accuracy at a pretty good level, with a Delta E value of 0.8, which is fantastic! We'll have our display profiles linked down below. The audio experience deserves mention as well. We've got a six-speaker setup, with two units flanking the keyboard while the rest is on the bottom. All six together deliver quality sound with no significant deviations across the entire frequency range. Only two per 100 people watching this video are subscribers. If you decide to just start following us, we'll be able to reinvest more in our laboratory, thus making even more helpful videos for you. Thank you, you're awesome! With a 24-core Intel Core i9-13 950HX and a 175-watt RTX 4080, there's nothing to oppose the Raider in terms of games. The CPU is even faster than the Core Y9-13 980HX inside the Asus ROG Strix SCAR18, delivering higher Cinebench and Photoshop scores. As for the GPU, it's not on the level of the 4090, but it's not like you really need the extra performance of the 4090. The laptop can crush any game you throw at it. Here's the Witcher 3 with the next-generation update running at 175 FPS on high settings. If you're a fan of John Wayne and the Wild West, look no further than Red Dead Redemption 2, which gets 100 FPS on the high preset and 55 FPS on the ultra preset, which is quite the drop, if we have to be honest, while the visual improvement the higher you go are harder and harder to notice. Then again, you can dial things to the extreme with Elden Ring, which has a superb combat system and looks great running at 108 FPS on maximum settings. For even more gaming tests, go ahead and subscribe to our laptop media benchmarks channel, where we're uploading gaming videos of the latest and most popular graphics cards. With such powerful components, you need as many heat pipes as possible. Here we have five of them, some of which are pretty long and curve around to cover more area. Two fans and heat sinks take the heat away. The CPU reaches 181 watts in short bursts, which is crazy. Even after 15 minutes of stress testing, the chip kept a TDP of 128 watts. The RTX 4080 is able to maintain a high TGP despite the length of the stress test. It runs at 173 watts, which is pretty close to the 175 watts limit while reaching speeds of more than 2.4 megahertz. With all that power comes a lot of noise, but on the other hand, the base remains comfortable, with a hotspot of only 39.6 degrees Celsius. With all of its power-hungry hardware, the laptop needs a big battery as well, using a 99.99 watt-hours unit, which lasts for 7 hours and 55 minutes of web browsing or 5 hours and 28 minutes of video playback. On the inside, we've got plenty of ports for future upgradeability. There are two so-dim slots for up to 64GB of DDR5 memory, as well as two M2 PCIe slots, which fit the faster generation for SSDs. If you want to see a teardown of the MSI Raider, check out our teardown video, it's linked down below. The MSI Radier GE78HX is a killer notebook with the power to back it up and compete with the best that the competition can offer. The slightly smaller 17-inch screen is still incredible and has enough size for both gaming and content creation. While many of its competitors are larger, the Raider still embarrasses them when it comes to performance. For more information about the MSI Raider GE78HX13VX, check out the written review on our website.