MSI’s new GP76 is basically the cheaper more budget friendly option of their
GE76 gaming laptop, so let’s find out what compromises have been made in this review.
I’ve got the mid range configuration option with 6 core i7 processor,
16 gigs of memory, and Nvidia RTX 3070 graphics.
The GPU runs at the full power limit of the 3070 too, up to 140 watts with dynamic boost.
There are both lower and higher specced models of this available too,
you can find examples and updated prices linked in the description.
The overall design looks extremely similar to the GE76, the most obvious difference
is there’s no light bar on the front with the GP model. build quality feels decent,
both the lid and interior have a black metal finish while the bottom panel is plastic.
The laptop alone weighs 2.8kg or 6.2lb,
then 3.6kg or 7.9lb with the 230 watt power brick and cables for charging.
The dimensions are typical for a 17” gaming laptop with this level of specs inside,
it’s not thin but not too thick either.
Mine has a 17.3” 1080p 240Hz screen and we do have the option of disabling optimus after a
reboot which will boost gaming performance. Unfortunately there’s no G-Sync or FreeSync.
Colour gamut was decent and it gets bright enough at full brightness,
over 300 nits which I think is the minimum you’d want.
MSI’s Dragon Center software, the control panel for the laptop, lets us enable or disable panel
overdrive which affects screen response time. With overdrive enabled, which is the default,
the GP76 is offering the 2nd fastest response time I’ve ever measured,
and with overdrive disabled it lowers down to 6.2ms but with less overshoot and undershoot.
Backlight bleed was extremely minimal, but this will vary between laptops and panels.
There’s a 720p camera above the screen in the middle,
no Windows Hello support though and the more expensive GE76 uses 1080p.c
This is what the camera and microphone look and sound like, this is what it sounds like
to type on the keyboard, and this is what it sounds like if we set the fan to full speed,
so you can still hear me ok over the fan noise.
The keyboard has per key RGB backlighting which illuminates all keys and secondary functions. It’s
got 4 levels of brightness, but I thought it was a little dim compared to older MSI laptops even
at max brightness. Typing was fine, I didn’t have any problems, but I tested the mechanical keyboard
in the ASUS Scar 15 at the same time and it was just so much better, granted it’s also louder too.
The precision touchpad worked alright, but it felt a bit small relative to the size of the laptop,
I’ve had larger and better ones on 15” machines. The left has a Kensington lock, air exhaust vent,
USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A port and 3.5mm audio combo jack. This is another way the GP76
differs from the GE76, the GE has an extra Type-C port on this side.
The right has two more USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A ports for 3 in total, and there’s an air exhaust vent on
this side too. Again the GP is missing something the more expensive GE model has, an SD card slot.
The rest of the I/O is on the back between the two air exhausts, from left to right there’s a USB
3.2 Gen2 Type-C port, 2.5 gigabit ethernet, HDMI 2.0 output and the rectangular power
input. The higher tier GE model is the same, but it also has a mini DisplayPort.
The Type-C port does not have Thunderbolt and it cannot be used to charge the laptop, but it does
offer displayport 1.4 out, and both it and the HDMI port connect directly to the Nvidia graphics.
There’s no groove on the front,
but the lid sticks out a little due to the angle so it’s still easy to open.
There’s a little flex to the keyboard and screen but only if you’re going out of your way,
I never noticed any issues during regular use, the screen doesn’t wobble when typing for instance.
Fingerprints show on the interior, but they’re easy enough to clean with a microfiber cloth.
Underneath has plenty of air vents, we can easily see the fans and heatpipes through the holes.
There are 13 phillips head screws which are all the same length. It was easy enough to pry open
with the tools linked in the description, getting it back on was more challenging.
Inside we’ve got the battery down the front, two memory slots in the middle just above,
two M.2 slots over on the left and WiFi 6 card on the right. The more
expensive GE76 instead uses the newer WiFi 6e.
The speakers are on the left and right sides near the front,
there aren’t any on either sides of the keyboard which is the case with the GE76.
The speakers in the GP76 don’t sound great, but I compared them right after the ASUS Scar 15
and that one is one of the best I’ve ever heard. The GP76 still has some bass, but it
sounded a bit tinny and wasn’t too clear at higher volume, and the latencymon results weren’t ideal.
Like other MSI gaming laptops, the BIOS the GP76 uses is
excellent once you press this epic cheat code to enable advanced mode,
you can change pretty much everything from power limits, undervolting and overclocking.
Just make sure you understand what you’re doing as you could brick the machine.
The GP76 has a 65Wh battery, so smaller compared to the 99.9Wh one
in the next level up, the GE76. I’ve tested it with all RGB lighting off,
background apps disabled and screen set to 50% brightness.
I’ve run my YouTube playback test both with optimus enabled and disabled. As
expected I was able to get some extra battery life by using Optimus, as the
Nvidia discrete graphics alone draws more power.
It’s not doing very well when compared to most other laptops tested,
it’s one of the lower results that I’ve recorded.
The Dragon Center software also lets you change between these options which
control the maximum charge level to help increase battery life span. I
found that while gaming for a long time the battery charge would dip,
unless it gets below 90% it doesn’t charge back up regardless of what’s set here.
Let’s check out thermals next.
The MSI Dragon Center software lets us change between different performance profiles,
which from lowest to highest are silent, balanced and extreme performance. Extreme
mode lets us enable coolerboost mode which sets the fan to max speed, and we’re also given
the option of overclocking the GPU here too, though no overclocks were applied by default.
Although software only lets us enable coolerboost in extreme mode,
we can use the F8 keyboard shortcut to enable it in any of the modes.
Additionally we can set user mode which lets us customize
the fans for both CPU and GPU if you want to get more granular.
It was fairly cool when sitting there idle. I’ve run stress tests with both the
CPU and GPU loaded up to represent a worst case, as well as playing an actual game.
The GPU was hitting thermal throttling in silent mode, which is expected as the
fans run much quieter, as you’ll hear soon, though this was still happening in balanced
mode with the stress tests going. The CPU was otherwise thermal throttling in extreme
mode until we use the cooling pad linked in the description or apply an undervolt.
These are the clockspeeds for the same tests. We’re seeing higher performance with higher modes,
with extreme giving the best, though CPU and GPU clockspeeds are able to improve
with a mixture of increasing fan speed, using a cooling pad or undervolting.
The GPU was running around the 125 watt limit of the 3070,
which is expected in workloads where the processor is active,
however it was a little lower in the game. It’s good that the processor is able to get
higher than 45 watts under combined CPU plus GPU load, many laptops limit Intel CPUs there.
Here’s how an actual game performs with these different modes in use.
Silent mode is still doing quite well relative to the higher modes, and we can see that by
using MSI’s software to apply a GPU overclock we can get a small 3% boost to average FPS.
Here’s how the different modes perform in Cinebench R23. There’s basically no
difference between balanced and extreme in this one now that the GPU is idle.
It’s doing alright compared to other 6 core options. This is the highest score I’ve got
for a 6 core Intel laptop, and it’s slightly ahead of some cheaper Ryzen alternatives,
though there are also some Ryzen 6 core laptops that are doing much better in multicore.
We’re losing a fair bit of multicore performance when running on battery though,
single core doesn’t change too much however. Combined with the low battery
life earlier, the GP76 just isn’t too impressive when it comes to battery.
The keyboard was in the low 30s when idling, so normal stuff and cool. It’s mid to high 40s
with the stress tests running, though as you’ll hear next it’s still fairly quiet.
Balanced mode is a little cooler despite performing better due to increased fan speed,
extreme performance is fairly similar with the fan on auto speed, but we can lower
it further with coolerboost enabled at the expense of your ears, let’s have a listen.
It sounded silent to me when idling, and it’s still relatively quiet with the stress tests
in silent mode, so given Shadow of the Tomb Raider was above 90 FPS max settings here,
you can clearly play games well without running too loud if you don’t mind hitting
thermal throttle limits. Balanced mode is louder, extreme mode louder still,
then with coolerboost you’ll probably want headphones.
Now let’s find out how well MSI’s GP76 compares against other laptops in games, but use these
results as a rough guide only, as they were tested at different times with different drivers.
I’ve tested Battlefield 5 in campaign mode at ultra settings, and the GP76 is highlighted
in red. It’s giving me the second highest average frame rate I’ve ever recorded from
any gaming laptop in this test, very impressive stuff considering the specs.
It’s only beaten by MSI’s GE76 with higher tier CPU and GPU,
and the GE series is basically the better version of the GP we’re looking at in this video.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider was tested with the games benchmark tool with the highest setting
preset. The GP76 drops down a little when compared to the same selection of laptops.
It’s just 3 FPS behind the Neo 15 just above it with the same wattage RTX 3070 graphics,
though that laptop has an 8 core Ryzen processor. Regardless it’s
still pretty impressive that the GP76 is beating the Alienware 51m below it,
that’s a thicker and more expensive desktop replacement machine with an i9-9900K CPU.
Far Cry 5 was also tested with the games benchmark tool at max settings.
The GE76 lowers a bit more now compared to the other laptops tested. Generally I’ve found this
test to depend more on the processor, so the 6 core i7 is likely the reason it’s a
bit lower compared to others. Every machine ahead if it has more cores, some even have
lower power limit GPUs, so that confirms that the processor difference is key here.
I’ve also tested the GP76 in 13 different games at all setting levels in this video over here,
so check that one out if you want to get a better idea of how well it runs in games.
Now for the benchmarking tools, I’ve tested Heaven, Valley, and Superposition from Unigine,
as well as Firestrike, Timespy and Port Royal from 3DMark,
just pause the video if you want a detailed look at these results.
Adobe Premiere was tested with the Puget Systems benchmark. Although the GP76 is
being beaten by others, it’s the highest score I’ve recorded from a 6 core laptop so far,
so it appears you really need 8 cores to get above this.
Adobe Photoshop generally depends more on processor performance, the selection of laptops
tested here is different to the last graph, so not directly comparable, but still a good result for
a 6 core processor, just slightly behind the same CPU in the M15 a couple of spots above.
DaVinci Resolve is more GPU heavy, and the high wattage 3070 is able to put the GP76 in line
with the other new Nvidia 30 series laptops that I’ve tested, which are all at the top.
I’ve also tested SPECviewperf which tests out various professional 3D workloads.
The drive speed for the 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD was great for both reads and writes,
and as there’s a 2nd M.2 slot you could add another drive if you want.
I booted an Ubuntu 20 live CD to test Linux support and most things worked,
including keyboard, touchpad, camera, speakers and WiFi. You can still adjust keyboard
brightness and enable coolerboost with the F8 key shortcut, but screen brightness didn’t work.
Let’s discuss price, you can check the links in the description for updated prices,
as these will change over time. At the time of recording, the configuration I’ve tested here
is listed for $2265 USD on Newegg, though this is sold by some random seller so I’m
guessing it’s priced higher than it should be but I can’t see it anywhere else at the moment.
This is pretty clear because the GE76 with better features is only a little more expensive,
double the RAM and 8 core CPU with higher refresh screen for just a little more.
Not to mention all the other benefits that the GE76 offers,
including larger battery, more ports, better camera, WiFi 6e, front facing speakers,
higher tier screen options like 4K 120Hz, and of course most importantly of all, the RGB light bar.
Honestly if the GE76 is available for about $100 more than the GP76
I would just get that for those extras. Maybe even two or three hundred extra,
depends how much you care about those things, but in general I am expecting the GP series to be
cheaper than the GE. I think it’s just a case of this one example on Newegg not being that great.
At the end of the day though, all those extra features are just bells and whistles.
At its core, the GP76 still offers great gaming performance. It’s still got full power GPUs,
the option to disable optimus, and excellent screen response time, so it just doesn’t
really seem that MSI has cut anything away from the core gaming experience of the GP series.
Like I said, it just depends on the price difference between GE and GP
and whether or not you want those extra features.
If the GP is cheaper and you want to save some money then it’s the clear choice.
You can check out my full review of the GE76 over here if you want to get a better idea
of what that model has on offer, otherwise get subscribed if you’re new to the channel
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