In the wide world of gaming laptops, MSI’s Raider range is legendary. Every model has won our prestigious Best Gaming Laptop Award and now MSI has tasked SMBtech and High Performance Laptops to tell you about the brand new model, the Raider 18 HX A9W. It features Intel’s new Arrow Lake processor, Nvidia’s new RTX 50-Series GPU, plus an updated design, world-first features and heaps of Ai augmentation. Here’s what you need to know…
At a glance
The first thing you’ll notice is the size. It has a massive18-inch screen but it’s on a 17-inch body. And what a body it is. The black chassis starts-off discreetly as an unassuming – yet imperious – monolith, when idle. But fire up the RGB and the difference is night and day: you’re suddenly beholding arguably the best-looking gaming machine on the market.
The individually lit, SteelSeries RGB gaming keyboard is back with its responsive and accurate, low-travel, colourful keys (including full-size arrow keys) and number pad. The divisive translucent WASD keys are gone but this is one design element we won’t miss(!)
There are RGB flourishes around the rear and sides. The MSI Dragon logo lights up and, of course, there’s its party piece, the Mystic Light bar RGB strip at the front which makes it look like a cross between a UFO and a night club. It never gets old.
The screen is an evolution of one of our favourites. It’s the world’s first 18-incher to use Mini-LED technology. It produces an incredibly bright 1,000-nit image with stunning colours, an humungous 2,000,000:1 HDR contrast ratio and true blacks (thanks to local dimming) that rival OLED displays. Unlike OLED-sporting rivals, though, it has a matte finish, so it doesn’t turn into an annoying black mirror, with distracting reflections, when viewing dark content. It’s got a crazy-large UHD+ 3,840 x 2,400 resolution, a rapid pixel response time and a quick 120Hz refresh rate. Games can’t fail to look sumptuous on the Raider 18 HX A9W.
Even more awesome on the inside
That’s just the outside. It’s hard to know where to begin with the internals of the Raider 18 HX A9W because almost every core component has been updated.
First up, there’s the brand-new, Intel Arrow Lake HX processor. It has eight Performance cores and 16 Efficiency cores that provide a 15 per cent performance increase over the previous generation, the i9-14900HX. Plus, it now features an NPU for Ai-optimised tasks.
The new processor also provides support for the latest, speedy DDR5-6400 RAM (with advanced CSO-DIMM architecture) and, erm, lightning-quick Thunderbolt 5 connectivity that can hit up to 120Gbps!
It’s partnered by the new Nvidia RTX 50-Series GPUs which have the new GDDR7 RAM (40 per cent higher bandwidth that GDDR6) and DLSS 4 for next-gen, Ai-upscaling, ray-tracing and framerate acceleration. It looks set to redefine 4K gaming and will look incredible on the Raider’s screen.
Gamers look away for this next part: the new Ai chops make the new Raider 18 HX A9W a powerful EDGE-computing-based Small Language Model (SLM) machine. It can do things like summarise meetings, optimise presentations, create interactive learning, analyse videos and act as a writing assistant – so, sysadmins can justify buying one, too.
Of course, with great power comes great responsibility… for power and cooling and MSI, once again, has you covered. The latest MSI OverBoost Ultra technology can simultaneously send 175-Watts to the GPU and 85-Watts to the CPU (260-Watts total) to provide full power to the system without throttling performance (unlike so many rivals).
It all works in tandem with MSI’s proven Cooler Boost 5 thermal technology which uses two fans, seven copper heat pipes (potentially more if using the latest PCI 5 SSDs – yes, the Raider supports those too!) and 3D cooling stands. These combine with the larger, Magnesium-Aluminium alloy chassis (with larger vents) to facilitate even-better cooling, stability and performance.
With no bottlenecks, we fully expect it to push the silicon to levels that rivals can’t match – just like previous Raiders.
Other features include the latest Wi-Fi 7 wireless connectivity with its super-low, 2ms latency and its super-wide, 320MHz-channel bandwidth. Plus, it has a maximum-sized 99.9Wh battery which has the potential for all-day battery life.
MSI Software
We’ve often been impressed by MSI’s software offerings which are more intuitively designed and more useful than the bloatware we see on some rivals. First up is the MSI AI Engine which optimises the laptop the more you use it: intelligently adjusting your favourite settings when working with applications like Microsoft 365 and Adobe Creative Cloud, tools like MS Teams, streaming services like Disney+ and YouTube and playing your favourite games.
There’s also a new MSI AI Robot which lets you interact with your laptop by simply talking to it and telling it what you want to do(!) We’re keen to try that out. Plus, there’s the excellent MSI Center which makes everything simple to configure – and lets you automatically or manually overclock the heck out of it!
Gaming laptops have not changed much in the past two years, so we’re genuinely excited by the overhauled MSI Raider 18 HX A9W. We strongly suspect it will be another Best Gaming Laptop Winner and we’ll be reviewing it asap. Find your perfect model here and, if you’re quick, you can score a $300 discount!
Last Updated on 26 April 2025 by Nick Ross
