MSI launched their new GE76 gaming laptop earlier this year, but it’s already been
refreshed with Intel’s new 11th gen Tiger Lake processors as well as other nice improvements
just a few months later, so let’s find out what the differences are in this comparison.
I’ve got the highest specced GE76 with Intel’s best 11th gen Tiger Lake processor, Nvidia
RTX 3080 graphics, 64 gigs of memory and for my first time ever, a 1080p 360Hz screen.
The original GE76 at best case either had 1080p 300Hz or 4K 120Hz screens, but now the
new 11th gen model also has 1440p 240Hz or 165Hz panel options, which I honestly think
is a much better sweet spot for a 17” laptop with these specs.
You can check out different configurations of the GE76 as well as updated prices with
those links down in the description.
I’m going to focus this video on seeing what the differences are between this new
11th gen version of the GE76 compared against the older 10th gen model.
If you want absolutely every single detail about the GE76 then I suggest referring to
my dedicated review video over here.
Otherwise yeah, the focus here is seeing how the new GE76 compares.
As the CPU change is one of the main differences, we’ll just briefly take a look at what’s
different there.
Both are 8 core 16 thread parts, but the newer 11th gen chip is based on 10nm, has more cache,
offers PCIe Gen 4, and has lower single core boost speeds, though Intel says this is offset
by other IPC improvements.
Build quality and overall design with the new GE76 is the same as the 10th gen one,
but most importantly we’re still getting the RGB bar on the front.
The 1080p 360Hz screen has decent color gamut for a gaming panel, good contrast, and it
gets above 300 nits at full brightness, but of course expect different results with the
4K or 1440p panel options.
It’s possible to disable optimus and only use the Nvidia discrete graphics after a reboot,
which will boost gaming performance, but there’s still no G-Sync in the 11th gen model.
The screen response time from the newer 360Hz panel is one of the better results I’ve
tested, however it’s still beaten by other 240Hz and 300Hz laptops that I’ve got data
for, though as expected it’s quite a bit quicker compared to the 4K 120Hz panel I tested
in the previous GE76.
The 10th gen GE76 didn’t have Thunderbolt at all, while the new 11th gen version has
Thunderbolt 4 and USB 4 on the rear Type-C port.
The HDMI port has also been upgraded from 2.0 in 10th gen to 2.1 in 11th gen, and the
SD card slot on the right has also been upgraded to SD Express, otherwise the I/O is the same.
11th gen CPU also means PCIe Gen 4.0 support.
We get 20 lanes total, 16 lanes are dedicated for the RTX 3080 graphics for max performance,
leaving 4 lanes for one of the two M.2 slots, while the second M.2 slot has 4 lanes of PCIe
Gen 3.
Basically this means much faster read and write speeds with the PCIe 4 SSD that comes
installed compared to last gen, but an ssd in the 2nd slot will be slower.
The newer GE76 still has the largest possible 99.9Wh battery, and I’ve tested battery
life to see if 11th gen offers improvements.
The new model was lasting a little longer in the YouTube playback test, but it wasn’t
able to match the older one when it came to running an actual game.
Regardless, outside of gaming both are below average results compared to others, lasting
less than 5 hours.
11th gen definitely offers increased performance for CPU heavy tasks.
In Cinebench we’re reaching one of the highest single core scores I’ve ever recorded, which
is 23% higher compared to the 10th gen GE76, which is only a few months old.
Multicore performance is also boosted by 25%, which is certainly welcome, but it’s getting
beaten by plenty of other AMD Ryzen options.
Even the Intel i9-11900H in the ASUS Zephyrus S17 is doing better, granted this is all at
stock, and with a HK processor in theory you can tune it through overclocking and undervolting,
which is supported through MSI’s BIOS.
Performance on battery is much better compared to 10th gen.
Single core performance only lowers a little, while the newer 11th gen GE76 moves up a few
spots on the graph when compared against the same selection of laptops.
I’ve tested both laptops with the same CPU plus GPU stress test in the same ambient room
temperature with the highest performance mode and max fan speed, though the tests were done
months apart.
The newer 11th gen model is a few degrees cooler on the GPU, shown by the green bars,
but the CPU was warmer, as per the blue bars.
The GPU was reaching slightly higher clock speeds on the newer 11th gen model, but the
difference in CPUs was much larger, presumably because 95 degrees celsius which we’re seeing
on the 11th gen model is the thermal throttle limit.
Despite 11th gen having that liquid metal pad it would seem it’s not enough, I was
expecting the 10nm chip to be cooler with this change but that wasn’t my experience.
The thermal throttling on the 11th gen processor in this test prevented it reaching higher
power limits, and the GPU was also running behind too, despite reaching slightly higher
clock speeds on average.
Now let’s take a look at the differences in games.
I’m only going to look at 1080p here as that’s the resolution of my 11th gen model,
but at the same time lower resolutions like this are where we would expect to see a difference
between processors anyway.
The newer GE76 seems to also seems to run its RTX 3080 graphics up to 150 watts in a
combined CPU plus GPU stress test, but with the CPU idle, the GPU was able to get up to
165 watts, and we didn’t see that extra 15 watts with dynamic boost in the older 10th
gen model.
I should also note that as the laptops were tested at different times, different Nvidia
drivers were used, but both had the exact same memory kit installed.
Cyberpunk 2077 was tested through the same part of the game on both laptops.
I’ve got the newer 11th gen GE76 shown by the purple bars, and the older 10th gen model
shown by the red bars.
The average FPS from the 11th gen model is slightly ahead at all setting levels, though
in most cases it’s not by much, often just one to three FPS.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider was tested with the game’s benchmark, and again the newer
11th gen GE76 was a few frames ahead regardless of setting levels, though this is less than
a 3% performance improvement at max settings, so again nothing serious.
CS:GO on the other hand is heavily processor dependent, so even at max settings we’re
looking at 15% higher average FPS with the 11th gen laptop, though it’s not like the
10th gen model and its 460 FPS are going to be unplayable.
Control is a GPU heavy game, so it makes sense that the differences at medium and high settings
were small.
There’s a much larger boost to average FPS at low settings though, with the 11th gen
model reaching 17% higher, though its 1% lows were lower.
Performance drops down with ray tracing enabled, but the 11th gen laptop is still 2 to 3 FPS
ahead regardless of setting preset.
Enabling DLSS brings back the performance, and the differences are bigger here.
Even at max settings the 11th gen laptop is now around 7% ahead of 10th gen, so perhaps
the CPU difference matters more for DLSS.
Things start to change in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, the older 10th gen laptop in the
red bars was now ahead in terms of average FPS regardless of setting level, though the
newer 11th gen machine was mostly ahead for 1% lows still.
Battlefield V also had similar behavior, where the 10th gen machine was able to beat 11th
gen, though this was only happening at high and ultra settings, and at the small differences
seen it’s kind of margin of error stuff either way.
Rainbow Six Siege was generally ahead on the 10th gen laptop at higher setting levels in
terms of average FPS, but it’s only a small difference.
There are bigger differences noted in the 1% lows, and the 11th gen GE76 was always
ahead there.
The 10th gen laptop is doing even better in Microsoft Flight Simulator now, which I didn’t
expect given this is generally a CPU heavy game.
This title is difficult to fairly compare, because even testing it on the same laptop
I often get inconsistent results, I want to drop it from testing but you guys still ask
for it.
Red Dead Redemption 2 was also doing better on the 10th gen laptop, well, kind of, I need
to explain.
These are the results I got when I first tested the game, however I found that for some reason
the 11th gen system could get a speed boost if I instead set the refresh rate in the game
settings to 60Hz instead of 360Hz.
I’m not sure if this is some sort of bug, but at least the results from the test make
more sense now.
Watch Dogs Legion was another that also saw better performance on the older 10th gen laptop
for some reason, so yeah some games seemed to do better with 11th gen while others favored
10th gen.
I wasn’t expecting the newer 11th gen laptop to come out behind in any of these tests,
in my mind there’s no reason it should be behind in anything, so I’m not exactly sure
why that was the case.
That said, I did also see similar behavior when I recently compared the 10th gen i9-10980HK
against the 11th gen i9-11980HK in this video here, and that was with entirely different
laptops, so not sure what the deal is.
I mean this wasn’t too unexpected after seeing those thermal tests earlier, I’m
just saying it was unexpected for me going into this testing.
You would expect the newer 11th gen to beat 10th gen.
Now if you do want to see how well the GE76 performs in different resolutions I’ve tested
way more games in this video over here, both at 1080p, 1440p and 4K so check that one out
if you want more benchmarks.
Now let’s check out some content creator workloads, it’s not all just about gaming.
Adobe Premiere was tested with the Puget Systems benchmark.
The newer 11th gen GE76 was scoring 9% higher than the older 10th gen model in this test,
though both laptops are already fairly high compared to others.
The differences in Adobe Photoshop were much larger, which makes sense to me as this test
depends more on processor performance.
This time the 11th gen GE76 was beating the 10th gen model by about 17%, and the GE76
was only just slightly behind the desktop 11900K.
The difference in DaVinci Resolve was smaller with a 6% higher score on the 11th gen model.
That makes sense given both have RTX 3080 graphics with 16 gigs of VRAM.
The 11th gen model can in theory boost the GPU higher, but I’m sure the processor change
accounts for at least some of the difference too.
Overall there are some nice bonuses with the new 11th gen model of MSI’s GE76.
Obviously if you already bought the 10th gen model then it makes no financial sense to
consider upgrading to the 11th gen version, but perhaps if you were already considering
a GE76 then some of these improvements might help sweeten the pot.
This is the second case I’ve seen now where Intel 11th gen could either improve or worsen
gaming performance, at the end of the day it doesn’t seem to change much either way,
but 11th gen doesn’t seem to be offering big gains when it comes to gaming outside
of CPU dependent games like CS:GO.
The most important thing to me is the welcome addition of 1440p high refresh screen options,
this is what the GE76 should have had from the start.
Outside of games though, the raw CPU performance sees nice improvements compared to last generation,
as noted through Cinebench tests, but at the same time there are also plenty of cheaper
Ryzen options that were doing better.
I don’t know about you, but I think it would be pretty cool if we saw a GE76 with Ryzen
in future.
The increased CPU performance with 11th gen also seems to translates fairly well into
content creator workloads, and PCIe Gen 4, Thunderbolt 4 and faster storage are welcome
improvements that are a result of the 11th gen processor.
I had higher hopes from the liquid metal pad plus 10nm processor combination, in many of
the thermal tests the older model was doing better, but I suppose this could perhaps vary
by unit to some degree.
If you want to know absolutely everything else about MSI’s GE76 gaming laptop, then
check out my full review video over here as I cover pretty much everything else over in
that one, I only went over the differences between 10th and 11th gen here.
You can also check out this one if you want to see how well it performs in games at 1080p,
1440p and 4K resolutions, and of course make sure you get subscribed for future laptop
comparisons like this one.