MSI Titan 18 HX Review: Titanic Doesn't Even Begin to Describe This Gaming Laptop

Gizmodo

05-05-2025

Let's get one thing out of the way before we start this review. MSI's Titan 18 HX is a hulking, powerful, and all-around excessive gaming laptop, starting at $5,279 for its lowest configuration. It demands much more from your wallet if you want the best possible specs. It's also a similar price to what you would pay for a full-sized, pre-built desktop with all the fixings. The Titan 18 HX is an ultra-expensive desktop replacement, and when I say that, I mean it in the whole sense of what that term implies—it's so massive in size and cost, and yet it is the closest you'll get to having a desktop tower you can schlep from room to room.
MSI Titan 18 HX
This behemoth-sized laptop offers intense performance in a great chassis with excellent keyboard and display. It also costs well over $5,000.
Pros Performance is great for both gaming and other intensive tasks
Performance is great for both gaming and other intensive tasks Mechanical keyboard feels incredible
Mechanical keyboard feels incredible Nice screen with good brightness
Nice screen with good brightness Sound is solid and loud for this size of device
Cons Terrible battery life
Terrible battery life Per-key RGB isn't very bright
Per-key RGB isn't very bright Astronomical (and rising) price
If you can spend the necessary amount of dough on this nearly eight-pound behemoth, the Titan 18 HX can be the mobile PC for whatever you need, so long as you can do it in less than two hours when away from a plug. It feels luxurious to use with its excellent mechanical keyboard, and it looks good with a quality mini-LED, 4K display. However, you should know that—inevitably—you'll be pushing the settings on your favorite games and then find the performance ceiling. Reaching the max of what you can do at 60 fps on the Titan 18 HX is akin to the feeling of driving 80 mph on a highway without a car in sight, then screeching to a halt with bumper-to-bumper traffic. Even with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 GPU, this gigantic laptop is packing, though there's a limit to what a laptop GPU can accomplish. That's not a point against the Titan 18 HX, but it's something to keep in mind alongside that eye-watering price tag.
With the latest top-end Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX CPU and RTX 5090 GPU, and 64GB of DDR5 RAM, I found the Titan 18 HX can meet just under the benchmarks of a full tower with the latest components. To display those graphics, the laptop sports a 4K mini-LED display with clean visuals and nice, high brightness. It's still prone to reflections in direct light, so keep that in mind if you intend to take this beast outdoors. (It already weighs as much as a small dog, so why not play fetch with it?) At the top end you can spec it with 6TB of storage, enough for—at the very least—a majority chunk of your Steam library. I've never felt so spoiled when using a laptop. For the price you're paying for this device, you better feel like you're living in the lap of luxury.
With the near-top-end specs in my review unit, the MSI Titan 18 HX totals to a whopping $6,379. If you really have no care for expenses, you could go for the even more expensive Dragon Edition Norse Myth edition with a cover that includes embossed Nordic runes and a killer image of a leering dragon. Unless this machine is something you plan to take to work, which may incite more questions than you're comfortable with. It costs a dragon's hoard, but MSI's prices have gone up, even in the midst of our testing for this review. MSI's other products, like its Claw 8 AI+ have seen price increases over the last few weeks, and the Titan 18 HX is no exception. MSI did not respond to questions about whether these price hikes have anything to do with Trump tariffs. Either way, it's clear MSI isn't alone feeling the pressure of the White House's obsession with import taxes.
At this price, the Titan 18 HX has to be a perfect specimen if I were to recommend it at all to anybody, even those who can afford it. With these specs, the device needs a quality thermal system in place, and MSI has managed the heat with surprising grace. You can bet your keister this device spits out some hot air, enough that my mouse hand could get extra sweaty next to the side exhaust. The rest of the airflow blasts out the rear vents. After playing with the laptop for around 15 minutes, the area surrounding the function row keys was burning hot, enough that if you leave your fingers there, it stretches from uncomfortable into painful-to-touch territory.
But the Titan 18 HX still feels comfortable when you actually use it. The laptop's thermals, which include a vapor chamber and dedicated copper heat pipe for the SSD (it has four SSD slots, though one is PCIe Gen 5 and the rest are Gen 4), keep heat off the palmrest and away from the WASD keys where most players will rest their sensitive fingertips. Playing on this laptop itself is a joy. The Titan 18 HX sports a full mechanical keyboard with Cherry switches. Each key clacks with a subdued clap that's not too stiff but not light enough to accidentally press the wrong key at the wrong time. If I had one small complaint, it's that the per-key RGB lighting isn't all that bright or eye-catching unless you're sitting in a truly dark room. The seamless touchpad uses haptics, which use motors to simulate the click of a regular mechanical pad, feels on point without that too-smooth glassy texture found on other laptops.
MSI claims its device can draw 270W of power to both the CPU and GPU for gaming tasks. This 'Max Boost' setting can also push 200W to the CPU exclusively, which will increase performance in intensive tasks. All that means is that the Titan 18 HX manages to put a good deal of power toward the components that need it most for gaming. Perhaps what surprised me most is just how effective an Intel's Core Ultra 9 285HX is as a gaming CPU. In benchmarks, it manages to meet or, in some cases, beat the performance of the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K desktop-level CPU. Intel's latest desktop processors weren't exactly stellar on release last year—especially for gaming purposes, but the fact this laptop CPU is comparable to desktops at all indicates Intel made some good strides with the top-end Arrow Lake series of chips.
Outside of gaming, the Titan 18 HX hit the mark for more intense rendering tasks. It managed to meet sub-1 minute benchmarks for our tests rendering a scene in Blender, which is practically equivalent to what we get on high-end desktop PCs. The Titan 18 HX was similarly fast in our 4K to 1080p video encoding tests. As for gaming, that's where things get slightly more complicated.
The in-game benchmark results were stellar in titles like Cyberpunk 2077, where the Titan 18 HX managed to get 60 fps at 4K with ultra settings without any kind of upscaling. It was a similar story with games like Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered and Black Myth Wukong. However, there is a performance ceiling, and if you were hoping to max out every single ray tracing setting in very demanding games like Marvel's Spider-Man II, you will find a wall that will dunk your fps below 50 and into the low 40s in some intensive moments. This is where you could technically make use of Nvidia's oft-touted multi-frame gen capabilities with DLSS 4. This essentially inserts multiple 'generated' frames in between each frame that's actually rendered by the PC. With a host of technical trickery, this boosts your frames per second so 50 or 60 fps can work into the low 100s on 2x frame gen, or upwards of 200 fps with 4x settings.
Multi-frame gen is not a panacea for low framerates. You still want closer to 50 or 60 fps before you enable it to avoid graphics artifacts that will spoil the picture. It's especially not ideal if you're planning to mostly focus on multiplayer, as frame gen will necessarily increase latency, which will impact how the PC tracks your mouse movement between frames. That being said, I wouldn't worry about your framerates in most multiplayer shooters, whether that's Marvel Rivals or Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. The laptop version of the RTX 5090 is a top-of-the-line card, and to be frank, there is no other consumer-level card you can buy that is more powerful than it. The GPU will top out most games, but even then there's a cap to how much you can honestly expect from it.
And still, even if you have the bodybuilder physique to hold this eight-pound behemoth aloft for more than a few seconds, it can't be your everyday carry laptop. MSI can't escape the age-old problem with gaming laptops: the battery. Off a charger, on balanced performance settings through Windows 11 and MSI's Center software, I couldn't even make it two hours without needing to plug it in. It's far worse when gaming, and you'll be lucky to get more than an hour of time before the battery runs out. The Titan 18 HX is a desktop replacement, after all, and that demands you use it from your desk or at least close enough to some power source.
There's only so much you can expect from a laptop, but the Titan 18 HX represents the top end of what's technically possible with modern hardware. When the only Razer Blade 16 configuration currently for sale costs $4,900 with an RTX 5090 in a thinner chassis, paying upwards of $5,000 for the heftier frame and larger (though non-OLED) display doesn't sound as ludicrous. We can expect the upcoming Razer Blade 18 or other large laptops that have yet to see the light of day (which is another factor of Trump's trade war) to be priced at or just below MSI's humongous device. MSI's Titan 18 HX is close enough to a supercharged pre-built desktop I could even consider it an alternative for a full gaming rig, especially if you have need for just one device you can plug into your TV or drag to your bedroom for whatever gaming needs. Though as tariff woes continue to increase costs and decrease availability, I wouldn't blame you for looking at the Titan 18 HX as an idol of excess. I'm not the religious type, and idolatry is the kind of sin that may be a worthy price of admission for such a powerful piece of tech.