MSI GE65/GE75 Raider costs over $1500 USD, has one of the slowest SD card readers we've seen

The GE65/GE75 Raider is an upper mid-range gaming laptop from MSI that sits just below the flagship GT series. The least expensive configuration at the moment with 10th gen Intel and GeForce RTX 2060 graphics costs about $1800 USD. For that much money, one would expect the system to feature fast components from top to bottom. Unfortunately, one aspect of the system performs far below average.

The SD card reader on the MSI GE series is one of the slowest we've seen on any gaming laptop even when compared to models that retail for almost half the price. The SD card reader on the HP Omen 15, for example, has a transfer rate of 87 MB/s compared to just 33 MB/s on the MSI. Moving 1 GB of pictures from our UHS-II SD card to desktop takes almost 40 seconds on the MSI to be three times slower than on the HP.

Of course, a slow SD card reader won't impact the gaming experience and many competing gaming laptops don't even have card readers at all like the Asus Zephyrus GX701, Alienware m15/m17 series, or the newer Lenovo Legion models. If you're a content creator or hobbyist who rely on the SD card reader, however, then the super-slow transfer rates on the GE75 are going to be an annoyance.