Costco Members: MSI GE76 Raider Laptop: i7-11800H, 17.3" 144Hz, RTX 3060, 1TB SSD Expired

I bought the computer not from Costco at regular price and have been using it for almost 2 months, too bad i can't get a price match ,but you can't beat the price at $1200 for what you are getting.

for those who are going to , or already using the computer. i do have some inputs, hopefully they are helpful.
it's a very good computer to begin with, excellent build quality, metal construction, full power (130W) RTX graphic card, very good semi-mechanical keyboard (no where close to a real mechanical one of course) . it has the largest battery capacity you can find in a gaming laptop (if you care about battery life in a laptop).
The software from MSI (the Dragon center ) for controlling the performance, cooling system works flawlessly, you wont hear your fans spins up for no reason, like some systems from Dell or HP.
The biggest complain I have for the computer and also i believe it's biggest reason (set aside the RTX 3060) the computer is sold for this price is that the display panel MSI uses is worst than many other gaming laptops. it has a panel with model no. of B173HAN04.9, 45% NTSC, 25ms respond time, color of the screen looks washed, and you are going to see ghosting when doing fps games, like cs go. even it's a 144hz panel. here 's link for full specs of the panel:
https://www.panelook.com/B173HAN0...49890.html
this particular part bothers me so much , i ended up trying to replace the screen , it's using a .5mm 40pin design for the connection so it's not interchangeable with any other panels with higher refresh rate (including 240hz or 360hz) ,those use .4 mm 40 pin design . and they costs a lot to buy too. I ended up using a panel with model no. B173HAN04.4 , way better color performance and most importantly it brings down the respond time to 9ms , still not the best but i dont need to use a .4mm to .5mmconveter.
for those who might want to do the same thing , i would warn you that the way MSI build the screen is not meant to be taken apart , at least not in a easy way. Screen is mounted with multiple double sided tape (not the reusable kind) , I had to use a heat gun to heat up the back cover (so glad it's metal) and soften the tapes to remove the screen. lucky enough , it didn't crack during the process, so I can resell it to get the money back for the replacement screen.
Second thing is the CPU thermal throttling . I was trying to use the Intel XTU software to undrvolt the cpu and get the best out of it. But I found out the CPU can easily hit 95'c and being thermal throttling even when I run a simple benchmark within the XTU software. That Caps the power consumption at around 50w and it's not doing its best. It shows in the cinebench r23 , the multicore performance is way lower than its normal level.
I need to re-paste the CPU and GPU to address that, didn't use the liquid metal (not trying to void the warranty yet) but high performance thermal paste , the popular Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut did the trick and CPU is no longer being thermal throttling when I run the benchmark. and R23 multicore score back to over 13000 . power consumption up to 80W. It's very odd this happens to a brand new laptop , I am not sure it's only my unit or in general.
Nice thing about MSI laptop is that the company allows users to have way more controls over the BIOS options, including overclocking and XMP memory support . So I upgraded the memory from stock to the
Crucial Ballistix DDR4 3200 with CL 16, that requires 1.35v. most people may not feel the difference, but they are the best ram you can get for laptops so far.
The main SSD in the computer is not the fastest drive you may expect , not like other same GE76 Raider with High end specs, it's not a PCI E 4.0 Drive, speed tops at 2500Mb/s. upgraded the main drive to a SN850 from WD and placed the original one to secondary.

Hope all these help.

I bought this about a week ago after asking if I could get a price adjustment when it goes on sale for Black Friday and I was told yes. I used a benchmarking test and the CPU and GPU received above average scoring and the ssd speed received below average scoring (this is my first SSD though so it's still blindingly fast to me). I would describe the display as average video quality. The display is ok. Things that are deep reds look a little orangey. So the color accuracy is what's off a bit and not necessarily the display's picture quality. Bottom line is I wanted a 17" with a great cpu and gpu that wasn't much more than $1k. This is the one for me. It is 67% more dollars as it's $2k for the next level up GE76 with a more color accurate screen (and 3070/16GB more RAM). So to me it is just not worth it for more color accuracy and a bit more brightness out of the display. Also $2k is WAY out of the budget! All of the other 3060 deals I have seen that were $1,200 or less were GPU wattage throttled and this one is definitely not. Besides the display not being the best, this laptop is VERY heavy. I'm used to that because my previous laptop was a desktop replacement Sony VAIO that weighs maybe 1/2 pound less but, still figured I'd mention it. I also took a look at e B a y and last year's similarly spec'ed (albeit with 10th processor and 20 series GPU) GE75 models regularly sell for $1,100ish still. This is a great deal and over the past week of ownership, I still haven't seen a deal on another similarly spec'ed out laptop that has made me want to return it and get that instead. So for all those interested in this laptop, I am going to use the word "serviceable" to describe the display but, most other aspects of it are on the high end of the spectrum. Love the keyboard feel and the fact that you can have more than one extra monitor connected without a dock/adapter being necessary as well.

You should have no issue getting a refund from them without having to buy and return it.