MSI GE73 8RF-215 Raider RGB, Core i7-8750H, 16GB RAM, 128GB SSD, 1TB HDD, GeForce GTX 1070, DE

With the MSI GE73 Raider RGB 8RF you're getting a huge amount of hardware, all wrapped up in a chassis that can just about handle it all. Let's start with the headline items. The CPU is the Intel Core i7-8750H, a six core, twelve thread CPU that reports at around 2.2 GHz and goes all the way up to 3.9 GHz depending upon core loading and thermals. The thermals we'll get to in a moment, but what it boils down to is that you have plenty of threads if you plan on utilising something that prefers more cores to raw clock speed, yet if you're gaming which normally just uses a couple of cores then you're not being limited by low clock speeds and instead you get some pretty beefy clocks. This is backed up by Intel's UHD 630 graphics which keep the desktop battery life nice and long, but when the going gets intense then the nVidia GTX 1070 takes over and produces smooth frame rates at maximum image quality settings on the 1080P display. As we said in our intro you can get the Raider in two flavours with either a 60Hz 4K screen or a 120Hz 1080 screen, and we hugely recommend the latter. 4K screens below 27" or so are pretty pointless and certainly at 17" they do nothing other than suck the juice and kill your eyesight. Whereas 120Hz is a benefit that everyone can enjoy and the panel in the GE73 Raider 8RF is excellent, giving rich colours and consistent brightness. It's also worth noting that the GTX 1070 inside the 8RF is overclocked, but also kept cool enough that the nVidia GPU Boost technology can work its magic and boy does it ever, giving scores and frame rates close to, and sometimes better than, the scores we saw from the GTX 1080 in the ASUS Zephyrus GX501G.