MSI Titan 18 HX hands-on review: no-holds-barred gaming powerhouse
The Titan HX gives you pure unadulterated performance - and Overboost Ultra makes sure it's at full power for you
Initial Stuff verdict
You won’t be disappointed by the power on offer here – it’s incredible. But how much will it cost?
Pros
- Incredible power
- Wonderful display
- Great connectivity
Cons
- Predictably heavy
- Bound to be expensive
- Battery life will be short
Walking through MSI’s showcase at CES 2024 one thing was incredibly obvious – it has updated pretty much every single laptop it does with the latest chips. But nowhere more so than at the top of its gaming laptop range, where thee 18in powerhouses have been announced.
As well as the Raider 18 HX and Stealth 18, the Titan HD gives you pure unadulterated performance with even higher end specs than the other other two – which certainly are no slouches!
At the heart of the Titan is Intel’s Core i9 14900HX (Raptor Lake) which is from the newly announced 14th generation. The 24 core CPU offers a max clockspeed of 5.8GHz in turbo across eight performance cores. Then there’s a dedicated Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, itself having 16GB of GDDR6 memory.
And talking of memory, you can even specify up to 128 GB of RAM to sit inside it – yes you heard that right! Wow.
When I saw it, I thought the UHD+ (3840×2400) display was an absolute peach. It’s MiniLED and so a cut above the norm, plus it boasts a 120Hz refresh rate. Put simply, your games will look amazing on it.
MSI Overboost Ultra is also on board to manage heavy game loads. It’ll spin the CPU and GPU up to the max, offering a total power output of 270W. There’s also a stack of cooling tech on board, too. The Vapor Chamber Cooler has two fans and two exhausts for hot air to exit.
As you can see the keyboard uses Cherry switches and is backlit and is customisable. The trackpad can also change colour if you wish – our colours were cycling around quite nicely as we played with it.
MSI Titan 18 HX early verdict
You won’t be disappointed by the power on offer here – it’s incredible. But how much will it cost? It’s sure to be rather pricey and with plenty of rivals it’ll be interesting to see if it can make the case that you should buy something cutting edge rather than looking just below the top-of-the-range.
Dan Grabham
Editor-in-Chief