MSI Titan 18 HX review: This high-spec gaming laptop delivers killer frame rates

This is just out of this world. There’s no way around it, the MSI Titan 18 HX is the PC gaming equivalent of taking a fully-fledged $5K desktop and trying to cram it down into a small, technically portable form factor. That does come with some major caveats, for sure, but it mostly delivers on that promise. It takes the best of the gaming PC world and gives it to you on the move, tied to a mechanical keyboard and an 18-inch screen.

Let me be clear though, it isn’t cheap. There are various specs of this MSI machine available, all of them with slightly varying DDR5 and SSD setups, but they’re all expensive. In fact, the model I tested is actually the cheapest of the lot, with a paltry (not really) 32GB of DDR5 RAM and a 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD. The highest spec you can buy comes in at a whopping $9,250, and includes 24TB of PCIe storage and 192GB of DDR5 memory (admittedly from HIDevolution). That’s just mind-boggling. Best gaming laptop to date? From a technical standpoint, possibly.

If you’re considering this laptop, you’ll have seriously deep pockets and a unique set of requirements. This isn’t for your average Joe, and it’s also not going to be more powerful than the highest-spec, fully-fledged desktop PC. No, this laptop is for an on-the-go video editor, 3D modeler, or gamer who demands the best of the best. Without exception. It’s not about battery life, efficiency, or portability; it’s about absolutely pure brute force when you need it.

MSI is no stranger to building prosperous laptops. In fact, I tested the MSI Stealth 16 earlier this year, which has a very similar ethos, albeit in a more professional-esque spec. That gave me a particularly useful insight into MSI’s thinking when it came to building this juggernaut. In fact, it’s given me a helpful perspective when testing it too.

I’ve spent the last few weeks putting the Titan 18 HX through its paces, testing it in all manner of scenarios. I even took it on vacation to assess its portability, and of course, ran it through the tried and trusted benchmark suite to really see how it held up in contrast to some of our laptops on test this year. The real question is, though, can this machine replace your desktop? Let’s find out.

Specs

MSI Titan 18 HX specs:

Unlike what we saw in MSI’s Stealth 16 A1V, the Titan 18 HX has opted to ditch Intel’s Ultra Core series chips in favor of a CPU with a lot more grunt, namely Intel’s Core i9 14900HX. It’s a bit of a monster when it comes to laptop processors, as it’s effectively not far off what you’d find on the full-sized desktop version.

You still get the 24-core setup, with 8 P-Cores and 16 E-Cores cores, complete with Hyper-Threading as well, bringing the total number of threads up to 32 (eight additional threads for the performance variants). Otherwise, clock speeds are impressively tight, with the HX topping out at 5.8GHz versus the 14900K’s 6GHz.

Unlike the desktop Core i9 14900K, this mobile CPU has a maximum TDP of 157W, rather than 253W, so it won’t be hitting that top clock speed as often, but this is still a seriously powerful laptop CPU.

MSI pairs this CPU with 32GB, 64GB, or even 128GB of DDR5 RAM, though it’s sadly clocked at 4,000MT/s as standard. Additionally, the spec also includes a 2TB Samsung PM9A1 PCIe 4.0 SSD as well here, which should be plenty fast enough for the majority of your gaming and workload needs.

Remarkably, however, this laptop also has capacity for a PCIe 5.0 drive, as well as one additional M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD, giving you plenty of storage at a later date. The US variant has that extra 4.0 slot filled as standard, but this is the first time I’ve seen a laptop with a 5.0 M.2 slot in it – those drives can get hot.

As for the graphics portion of this beast, that’s all sorted with the inclusion of a mobile RTX 4090 16GB GPU. It’s by far the fastest laptop GPU you can get right now. However, do bear in mind that this isn’t quite as potent as its desktop counterpart, and is more akin to a desktop RTX 4080.

Still, if you’re looking to game at 4K on the move, this is the best GPU you can buy right now. Like the CPU, though, it does need significant cooling, with the CPU and GPU together outputting up to 270W when they’re both running at peak load.

Features

And why do you need that super powerful graphics card? For the screen, of course. We’re talking 18 inches of 3,840 x 2,400 mini-LED IPS beauty, refreshing at 120Hz. That’s quite the resolution, and it’s backed by a serious refresh rate. That gives you slightly more pixels than a standard 4K screen, and it looks incredibly sharp on this 18-inch display.

Text looks immaculate, and that refresh rate makes it buttery smooth to use, regardless of whether you’re playing a game or not. For context, there are 11% more pixels here than what you’d otherwise have in a traditional 16:9 aspect ratio. The result is a display that isn’t quite as sharp as the one in MSI’s Stealth 16 (identical screen tech but in a 16-inch form factor). Tixel density for the Titan lands at just 252ppi vs the Stealth’s 283ppi, but honestly, you’re unlikely to notice that difference, and the extra screen size is very much welcome on this desktop replacement.

Colors are outstanding too, with some serious intensity to them, particularly in terms of the brighter tones. Darker shades were equally on point too, and I couldn’t identify any hot spots or bleeds. The image isn’t quite as contrast-rich as you get on an OLED panel, nor as rapid as some of the best on the market right now, but that mini-LED backlight really makes HDR content pop.

Ok, so that’s the good stuff out of the way, now it’s time for the slightly more controversial elements, namely the keyboard. It’s a tricky one, as it’s a fully mechanical setup produced by Steelseries and powered by Cherry switches. From a purely tactile sensation, it’s lovely; it’s a clicky switch, you can feel the actuation underneath quite clearly, and the keys are easy enough to press.

That said, it also features a full-sized numpad, and Steelseries has adjusted the layout quite aggressively to accommodate it all into the  laptop shell, and it takes a while to get used to it. This is a handy addition if you regularly enter data into spreadsheets on your laptop, though – you just need to get used to the layout.

The real issue, however, lies in the switches themselves. Namely, they rattle and clang just far too much for a $5,000 laptop. There’s a rattle, and you can hear the springs underneath, implying that there’s not much in the way of dampening going on.

Meanwhile, the trackpad is baked into the entire bottom half of the laptop, but you still only get access to a single square of it. It’s backlit with a mildly unsightly red LED and genuinely looks somewhat sad. The fact there’s no edge to feel on it is also massively disconcerting. and generally leads to a lot of confusion, even when casually perusing webpages as your mouse pointer suddenly stops responding.

On the plus side, you get a formidable arsenal of connections, with twin USB-A ports, a USB-C port, an HDMI out, a micro-SD Card slot, a headphone jack, 2.5G ethernet, Bluetooth 5.4, the works.

Design

As with the Stealth 16, one of the biggest drawbacks of the Titan is the design. Amazingly, for a $5,000 laptop, there’s a whole heap of plastic elements littered throughout the design. It’s not entirely plastic; some of the chassis is metal, yet elements such as the screen bezel, that odd trackpad, the underside of the chassis, and the rear vent location, are plastic.

I get it, there’s the weight to consider (and it already weighs a ton). but aesthetically it’s leaning far too much into that old-school classic late 2000s gamer ethos, and it just feels a little tacky as a result, which is a shame as the spec doesn’t represent that styling.

It’s not all sadness and plastic accents, though; there’s some decent capacity to upgrade, with multiple M.2 slots and swappable SODIMM memory as well. MSI will sell you a spec that racks up to 128GB of DDR5 and 8TB of storage, but you can go beyond that with certain third-party manufacturers as well, though doing so will bump up the price further.

But before we wrap up our design section, I want to discuss cooling. First up, the temperatures are very good, despite the hot-running components. Performance on the whole during my testing was also fantastically consistent. CPU performance was up there with some of the best desktop PCs I’ve seen, both in CPU grunt and gaming performance as well. Over multiple runs, it all ran very smoothly all-in-all.

The bad news, however, is fan noise, and oh boy, is it loud, to the point where I was getting complaints from downstairs because of it. If you’re gaming with this laptop, or putting any serious load onto it, those fans are going to ramp up, and the noise becomes almost intolerable.

If anyone’s working in close vicinity to you, they’ll be grabbing their headphones and ramping up the volume, that’s for sure. That’s a problem, a big one, and mostly unsurprising too, particularly given the hot-running CPU. Combine that with an RTX 4090 and the option to stick some of the best PCIe 5.0 SSDs in here as well (which are known for running toasty), and well, you’re just not going to have a good time. Will the Titan keep all that kit cool? Yes. Will it assault your ears as it does it? Also yes.

Benchmarks

Now we come to benchmarking – how did the chunky 18-inch Titan do with all of its amped-up hardware and screaming fans? The short answer is that it’s seriously impressive. Cinebench 2024 saw a multi-core score of 1,777 and a single score of 127. These are the highest results we’ve ever seen from a gaming laptop, and it even beats the Razer Blade 16, which uses the same Core i9 14900HX CPU.

Similarly, the CPU Profile in 3D Mark delivered some awesome results, landing 13.7K in this test, which beats nearly every other laptop I’ve tested by a factor of two. If CPU workloads are your bread and butter, and you need a laptop that can handle, for example, video encoding, as well as gaming, then the Titan is absolutely dominant in that arena.

Jump into gaming, and the results are similarly strong. I ran two sets of benchmarks, one at 1080p and the other at the Titan’s native resolution. The idea is that the 1080p stats give us some comparable figures based on hardware alone, whereas the native res figures tell us if you can really play games at the full resolution of this laptop’s 18-inch screen.

I’m very glad to say that the Titan bucks the recent trend of laptops that can’t cope with gaming at their native resolution. Cyberpunk 2077 with DLSS and AI frame generation managed an impressive average of 59fps at 3,8×0 x 2,400 using the Ultra ray tracing preset, for example, which is a fantastic result for a laptop.

Similarly, Total War: Warhammer 3 clocked in a sleek 56fps average at the same resolution, which is perfectly playable. F1 23 (without DLSS) only averaged 35fps, but that’s still much better than any other laptop we’ve tested at this resolution – you’ll get a smoother frame rate if you drop some of the settings.

Compare that to the Stealth 16, which averaged just 35fps in Cyberpunk, 29fps in F1 23, and 35fps in Total War. The 14900HX CPU is doing a considerable amount of lifting, that’s for sure, and the Titan’s ability to keep it cool despite the decibels is certainly helping lift up those frame rates. Likewise, the 1080p scores were well above the 100fps mark, with Cyberpunk landing an awesome 166fps with DLSS and AI frame generation on.

Battery

Battery life was always going to be tricky with this amount of power, and although the Titan 18 HX might be a chunky unit, its battery is still limited to a 99.9WHr capacity. That’s despite the likes of the Stealth 16 AI similarly featuring a 99.9WHr unit, but in a smaller form factor and similar hardware.

Every laptop we review goes through two battery benchmarks to really get a feel for how it will operate under lab conditions (I also do some anecdotal day-to-day testing on the side as well). The first is PC Mark 10’s gaming battery benchmark, and then the other is the modern office benchmark, both with the screen brightness set to 50%.

For the gaming test, MSI’s Titan 18 HX lasted just 81 minutes, going from 100 to 3% in that time frame. That’s not terrifyingly bad; the Lenovo Legion Slim 5, with a far lesser spec, failed at just 53 minutes, and the Alienware M16 R2 equally tapped out at 51 minutes.

Modern Office, however, landed at just 187 minutes, lasting for just three hours before it needed charging up again. That’s by far the worst office battery result I’ve seen all year, with the second closest being the Razer Blade 16 (2024) at 218 minutes. The Stealth definitely has the edge by comparison.

Price

The MSI Titan 18 HX price is $5,399 for a model with a Core i9 14900HX CPU and mobile RTX 4090 GPU, and that spec also includes a huge 128GB of RAM and a 4TB SSD. On the surface, the spec almost justifies the cost. The sheer power of the kit MSI’s managed to pack into this machine is outstanding. You get a top-tier GPU, an outlandish CPU, wild storage capacities, and a phenomenal screen.

The problem, however, comes in the implementation. The chassis is just a bit underwhelming, the fans are obscenely loud, the battery life is massively disappointing, and it feels more like a laptop from ten years ago than a 2024 model.

Combine that with the fact you could take this price and chuck it into a dedicated desktop that could perform just as well, if not better, complete with a monitor and set of peripherals, and the Titan 18 HX starts to look like an incredibly niche product.

Verdict

The MSI Titan 18 HX is an intriguing prospect. If you’re an avid gamer who also moonlights as a video editor as you bounce from gig to gig traveling all over your country, then there are good reasons to consider this laptop. It packs in a phenomenal amount of power, it’s highly customizable, and delivers in almost every area when it comes to pure performance.

That said, while it drives those super-fast frame rates and rapid render times, it lags behind massively in terms of build quality and overall refinement, which really harms the overall appeal, particularly when it comes to noise output.

If you don’t really need a portable machine, I’d look to buy one of the best gaming PCs for your desktop instead, and if you don’t really need all that power, you can still get a similarly capable gaming laptop for much less money. MSI’s own Raider line offers a model with this GPU and CPU combo, for example, but with a far more comfortable price tag. Is this the ultimate gaming laptop? Sort of; just make sure you have earplugs.