MSI GT76 Titan is one of the fastest — and loudest — laptops we've tested

MSI introduced its high-power 17.3-inch GT76 Titan DTR last year equipped with the then-top-of-the-line Core i9-9900K CPU and GeForce RTX 2080 GPU. It was one of the fastest gaming laptops money can buy due to its pairing of a full-fledged desktop CPU and a full-power mobile GeForce GPU. The 2020 refresh ups the ante by swapping out the CPU and GPU for the even faster and newer Core i9-10900K and mobile GeForce RTX 2080 Super, respectively, to retain the crown of "fastest gaming laptop".

Synthetic benchmarks like CineBench and 3DMark show the 2020 GT76 Titan to be just a few percentage points behind our "proper" desktop PC reference running on the GeForce RTX 2080 Super and identical Core i9-10900K CPU. When considering the much smaller laptop form factor of the GT76, the numbers and temperatures are impressive.

A major drawback to the GT76 — aside from its two massive AC adapters — is fan noise. The machine is actually quieter than expected when running undemanding loads like web browsing or video streaming, but the opposite is true when running games or other demanding applications. Witcher 3, for example, induces a steady fan noise of 60.7 dB(A) compared to "only" ~50 dB(A) on most other gaming laptops. MSI also has a turbo fan mode called "Cooler Boost" which, when activated, will bump fan noise even louder to over 66 dB(A). Laptops very rarely ever reach 60 dB(A) in any of our testing conditions let alone 66 dB(A).

The good news is that Cooler Boost mode isn't necessary when running games. CPU and GPU temperatures will be a little warmer at 59 C and 83 C from 53 C and 77 C, respectively, but frame rates and clock rates remain identical in spite of the quieter fan noise (60.7 dB(A) vs. 66.6 dB(A)). Instead, Cooler Boost mode is recommended if running extreme applications that require 100 percent utilization of the processors involved.

Fan noise has always been a problem with many gaming laptops and not just the GT76. If you want that extreme performance, then audible fans are going to be inevitable. We just hope that the next generation of laptops are going to be better and not worse in this regard.