MSI GT75 TITAN 8RG Review : The new flagship

The MSI GT75 8RG is great for gaming with its GTX 1080 and it packs a wonderful 120 Hz display as well. There isn’t a significant overhaul in comparison to the previous generation but what’s noteworthy is that MSI added new features and lowered the price a little to bring it down to 2,99,990 which competes with the GTX 1080 MAX-Q laptops that are currently selling in the market. The Zephyrus and the Acer Triton 700 sport 7th Gen CPUs and GTX 1080 graphics cards. Given that they are MAX-Q laptops, they run slightly underpowered hardware and that’s where the GT75 gains an edge. However, all things considered, the MAX-Q laptops are way better in terms of portability which is what laptops were made for in the first place. So given the choice, we’d go for a MAX-Q laptop since they’re both priced the same.

MSI GT75 8RG Specifications

The MSI GT75 8RG is powered by the Intel Core i7-8750H and an NVIDIA GTX 1080 bringing it in the league of the flagship gaming laptops now that SLI laptops are going to be a rarity. Given the beefy stature of the laptop, there’s plenty of cooling power to handle the GTX 1080. 

As we’ve mentioned previously, the boot drive being a RAID 0 volume is certainly a welcome change. Even the display that’s shipping with the GT75 is a 4K 120 Hz panel which is something we’ve started to see more of on gaming laptops these days. MSI is also keeping other variants available for back-order which includes the Full HD variant of the display as well as the one with the higher-end Intel CPU, the Core i9-8950HK .

Build Quality

Being a bigger laptop, the MSI GT75 8RG uses plenty of metal to for rigidity. Most laptops tend to use plastic for the display panel backing. That’s not the case here. However, the inside seems to have more plastic than we like. The unit is well cooled, even at peak loads, however, there are exhausts placed towards the sides which makes using a mouse on either side a bit uncomfortable. Thankfully, there are no hotspots on the palm area. Being more of a flagship SKU, the GT75 has enough space inside the body to play around with the positioning of the components. As a result, the touch temperature doesn’t spike during CPU intensive workloads. Coming back to the cooling, MSI has kept most of the assembly as the same in the SKU that we received. Perhaps, the Core i9 variant will have a beefier cooler to account for the higher TDP of the flagship mobile CPU. The SSDs which form the RAID volume have their very own heatsink which is a nice touch since some of these NVMe SSDs are known to heat up during sustained workloads. The GT75 is heavy, it clocks in at 4.56 kg and comes with a brick for the power adapter. The Core i9 variant ships with two adapters, so portability is a concern with the GT75 and it’s bigger cousin the GT83. 

Performance

Storage

The MSI GT75 8RG like its predecessor, makes use of two Samsung SSDs, in the casse the PM961, in RAID 0 to get a 480 GB volume. There’s an additional 1 TB HGST hard drive for everything else. Peak read speeds on the RAID 0 volume top out at around 3.4 GB/s and write speeds clock in at about 2.4 GB/s. These are pretty insane transfer speeds and helps with the fluidity of your experience with the machine. The HGST hard drive, on the other hand, performs like your average commoditised HDD. There’s nothing special about it.

SD Card Reader

For the SD card reader, we use a 32 GB Lexar 1000x UHS-II SD card which easily gives 135 MB/s read speeds and 55 MB/s write speeds on USB 3.0 SD card readers and on the MSI GT75 8RG we managed to get about 43 MB/s. Like most gaming laptops we’ve tested, this isn’t something manufacturers focus much on and most of the times, it is a simple Realtek solution.

Wi-Fi

For Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, the MSI GT75 8RG makes use of yet another Killer network controller – the 1550. Killer’s solutions provide built in QoS which makes a difference when you are gaming while running tasks in the background. However, when you are looking at performance in everyday tasks then there isn’t a difference worth pointing out. In our throughput tests, we managed to get 678 MB/s on the downlink and just about the same on the uplink as well. 

Gaming

The MSI GT75 8RF packs quite the punch given the combination of an Intel Core i7-8750H with the NVIDIA GTX 1080. And now that we have a 4K panel we can enjoy AAA titles in all their glory but before we move to the gaming benchmarks, let’s take a look at the synthetics. We started with PCMark 10 that scored 7319 points and then moved on to 3D Mark where we saw Fire Strike clocking in at 18119, Cloud Gate getting 38621, Sky Diver managed 41859 and the newest of the bunch, Time Spy got 7114. 

Overall, we’re seeing a marked improvement in the synthetic benchmarks owing to the improved CPU. Now we need to see if the real world gaming benchmarks reflect the same results or not. 

The latest from Ubisoft in the FarCry series i.e. Far Cry 5 scored about 118 FPS on high settings while Ghost Recon Wildlands clocked in much lower at 106 FPS. In a slightly older game, The Witcher 3, we got about 138 FPS which is pretty decent overall. With a few careful tweaks, the FPS scores can go up a little and that makes it optimal for a 120 Hz panel. It goes without saying that the GTX 1080 on the MSI GT75 8RG makes high-end gaming quite easy.

Verdict

The MSI GT75 8RG is great for gaming with its GTX 1080 and it packs a wonderful 120 Hz display as well. There isn’t a significant overhaul in comparison to the previous generation but what’s noteworthy is that MSI added new features and lowered the price a little to bring it down to 2,99,990 which competes with the GTX 1080 MAX-Q laptops that are currently selling in the market. The Zephyrus and the Acer Triton 700 sport 7th Gen CPUs and GTX 1080 graphics cards. Given that they are MAX-Q laptops, they run slightly underpowered hardware and that’s where the GT75 gains an edge. However, all things considered, the MAX-Q laptops are way better in terms of portability which is what laptops were made for in the first place. So given the choice, we’d go for a MAX-Q laptop since they’re both priced the same.

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Mithun Mohandas

Mithun Mohandas is an Indian technology journalist with 10 years of experience covering consumer technology. He is currently employed at Digit in the capacity of a Managing Editor. Mithun has a background in Computer Engineering and was an active member of the IEEE during his college days. He has a penchant for digging deep into unravelling what makes a device tick. If there's a transistor in it, Mithun's probably going to rip it apart till he finds it. At Digit, he covers processors, graphics cards, storage media, displays and networking devices aside from anything developer related. As an avid PC gamer, he prefers RTS and FPS titles, and can be quite competitive in a race to the finish line. He only gets consoles for the exclusives. He can be seen playing Valorant, World of Tanks, HITMAN and the occasional Age of Empires or being the voice behind hundreds of Digit videos. View Full Profile