MSI Raider A18 HX A9W Review (2025)

One of our favourite laptops is back and it’s bigger and better than ever… literally. The latest MSI Raider has grown to 18-inches in size and is subsequently something that might not actually fit on your lap. However, there are many benefits to using a large, desktop replacement, gaming laptop, especially with the end of Windows 10 now on the horizon and many computer users needing an upgrade for their trusty, old PCs. So, just how good is the MSI Raider A18 HX A9W? Is it too much laptop for you to handle or the monster machine you’ve been dreaming of?

Table of Contents

• MSI Raider A18 HX A9W Specs
• Features, Ergonomics and Design
  • Connectivity and Ports
• Performance
  • General Computing & CPU Tests
  • Graphics & Gaming Performance
    • Cooling
• Portability & Battery Life
• Price, Value & Availability
• Conclusion: Should You Buy The MSI Raider A18 HX A9W?
• Awards

MSI Raider A18 HX A9W Specs

Features, Ergonomics and Design

I won’t lie. I miss the old gun-metal grey MSI Raiders that looked like Aston Martins wearing night club lighting rigs on their fronts. The newer styling (which appeared last year) is more reminiscent of a tier-two Titan (MSI’s flagship gaming laptop)… but that’s not a bad thing.

The 2025 18-inch, all-black Raider A18 HX A9W has sharp lines with some classy geometric flourishes and red accents. It can actually aesthetically fit inside an office without raising too many eyebrows (translucent WASD keys aside). That’s assuming all the lighting is turned off as illuminating the glowing dragon logo on the lid, the Mystic Light strip on the front and the per-key-lit RGB keyboard in an office would be like turning up to work with your first face tattoo.

Opening it up reveals the massive 18-inch, mini-LED IPS screen. This has a massive 3,840 x 2,400 resolution (an enhanced, 16:10 aspect ratio version of UHD), is very bright, supports HDR and has a matte coating to fend-off distracting reflections. Colours are vibrant (the entire DCI-P3 colour gamut is supported, which creators will like) and contrast superb, with details remaining visible in both shadows and highlights. HDR works well (even if you have to occasionally fiddle with its calibration to avoid blowing-out highlights) and also ensures that both colourful and monochromatic gradients are rendered smoothly.

There’s plenty of space for multi-document work while multimedia looks phenomenal. It’s bright enough and non-reflective enough, to be able to be used outside.

The very-high resolution means it’s not quite the fastest screen, so super-competitive FPS players might grumble at the minor blurriness that blights very-fast-moving objects, but it’s a minor issue for most.

Partnering audio comes courtesy of four 2-Watt speakers and two 2-Watt Woofers. Not surprisingly it’s loud, punchy and bassy. Only musical purists might lament the fact that fidelity can sound a little lacking in the mid-range on some tracks. It’s only to a very minor, nit-picking degree though.

Above the screen is a Full HD webcam with partnering IR camera for Windows Hello facial recognition login. It does a decent job of capturing sharp video with only a minor amount of grain appearing in low light. There’s also a hardware cover for assured privacy. The microphone array does a good job of capturing clear audio but noise cancellation isn’t quite as polished as we’ve seen on recent business laptops. Few would complain, though.

The large, Scrabble-tile, low-profile, touch-type keyboard (from steelseries) is very well featured and generally very comfortable to type and game upon for extended periods. Just beware that the inherently large palm-rest means that your forearms may rest uncomfortably on it depending on your physical size and seating/standing position. It’s another minor point that won’t affect many people but I need to nit-pick with such an extreme machine. Most people will love interacting with the full-sized keys, number pad, arrow keys and plethora of shortcuts that are scattered among them.

Beneath it, the trackpad is smooth and accurate. The button actuation is quiet and well-weighted too.

All in all, the MSI Raider A18 HX A9W is a joy to interact with.

Connectivity and Ports

Inside the Raider A18 HX there’s Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4. That’s pretty much the latest and greatest of everything for an AMD laptop. Only Thunderbolt 5 is missing.

At the end of the day, this Raider has got every feature you could want from a laptop.

Features, Ergonomics and Design Score: 5 / 5

Performance

Inside MSI’s Raider A18 HX A9W is AMD’s latest-and-greatest mobile processor, the Ryzen 9 9955HX3D. It has 16 cores which operate across 32 threads between 2.5 and 5.4GHz. It’s a gaming-focused processor with a special 3D V-Cache architecture that we first wrote about in 2023’s Asus ROG Strix SCAR 17 X3D review. There’s no dedicated NPU, but there should be plenty of Ai oomph provided by all of the onboard AMD and Nvidia silicon.

It’s partnered by a generous 64GB of DDR5-5600 RAM, a sizeable 2TB NVMe hard drive plus, a top-tier Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 GPU with 24GB of GDDR7 RAM.

MSI’s OverBoost technology means that a boosted 260-Watts of power can be delivered simultaneously to the CPU and GPU. I expected great things.

You can read how we test laptops, here. Also note that, alongside the raw benchmark scores, we publish a mathematically derived Star Rating where 1 is the least-good score that we’ve seen and 5 is the best.

General Computing & CPU Tests

Our first group of benchmarks focus on the processor and whole system in general. Here are the raw scores. It didn’t take long to establish where the Raider A18 HX A9W sits stands in the world of high-performance laptops.

Other tests include the UL Procyon Microsoft Office benchmarks. An MS Office update earlier this year led to us dropping these from contributing from the overall Performance rating due to software-derived score-dropping. However, the Raider’s 319,000 is (again) the fastest score we’ve ever seen, so we’ll be adding it back moving forward. Score: 5 / 5

In the CPU version of the Procyon Ai Computer Vision benchmark, I was expecting the Raider to struggle due to the lack of NPU. However, it scored 209 which, once again, is the fastest score we’ve ever seen in this test. Score: 5 / 5

I also ran the Geekbench 6 benchmarks. These will likely fold into our formal review process next year. For now, for reference, the Raider A18 HX scored 3,206 for single-core CPU performance and 20,287 in multi-core.

Thus far, in every test, it’s easily the fastest laptop we’ve ever seen. I wondered if this would continue into the next batch of tests…

General Computing & CPU Score: 5 / 5

Graphics & Gaming Performance

To establish the Raider’s gaming potency, we start by running the 3DMark gaming tests. The results were as follows…

So, once again, the Raider blitzes everything else on the market. Interestingly, in Time Spy, the only test where it didn’t get the top score, it actually managed a faster average framerate than the laptop that beat it. Also, the Raider is the first laptop we’ve seen to average over 1,000fps in Night Raid. Inconsistencies like this (at high framerates) are why UL created more-modern, stable benchmarks (Steel Nomad and Solar Bay) to supplant them.

I also ran the new Solar Bay Extreme test which adds even-more demanding ray-tracing (and other challenging graphical) features. The Raider scored 22,934 which is an average of 160fps. I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume this would also represent the fastest score in the market if we had more data points.

I like to run the built-in benchmark of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. At default (full eye candy, UHD) settings, the Raider A18 HX averaged 89fps with the lowest one per cent of frames (1% Low Score) hitting 65fps: very playable. With DLSS (Ai frame-generation) turned on, these scores rose to 124fps and 101fps (1% Low). At Full HD and Minimum settings, it exceeded 280fps. So, pro FPS players can plug it into a super-fast gaming monitor for competitive playing.

Ultimately, the MSI Raider A18 HX A9W can play any game at UHD resolutions with full, ray-tracing eye candy settings dialled-up to maximum.

Next, I ran the GPU version of the UL Procyon Ai computer Vision test and the Raider scored 1,114 (Score: 5 / 5). I still don’t know what this number actually means, but it’s the fastest score I’ve seen on a laptop in this test.

The UL Procyon Video Editing test, which uses Adobe Premiere, is another benchmark that recently saw scores slightly reduced by software and driver changes, borking our comparisons. However, once again, the Raider cared not one iota and blitzed through it with a new high score of 66,713. That means the most difficult rendering test (UHD, H.265, 60fps) for a 900MB video file took just 37.9 seconds. HP’s 5070-sporting Omen 16 took 67 seconds.

At the end of the day, the MSI Raider A18 HX A9W is easily the fastest laptop we’ve ever had in our labs. Whether you want it for gaming or high-end, portable Ai workloads it will stroll through them better than (almost) anything else.

Graphics & Gaming Performance Score: 5 / 5

Cooling

Under general usage, the MSI Raider A18 HX A9W runs cool and silently. Only when forced into Extreme Performance Mode (and placed under heavy load) do the fans ramp-up to a modest and consistent whoosh. The base can get a little warm with all that power flowing into it, but it’s nowhere near the furnace-like gaming behemoths of yore. That’s largely down to MSI’s mature Cooler Boost 5 technology which uses two fans and shared heat pipes to expel air through multiple vents around the chassis.

When we ran the 30-minute version of Cinebench R23, the score dropped by less-than two per cent demonstrating there’s minimal thermal throttling present, too.

Portability & Battery Life

So far, the MSI Raider A18 HX A9W has destroyed everything in its path but, as we’ve said for some time, there’s no such thing as the perfect laptop and there must always be compromises. Not surprisingly, this is one of the categories where it didn’t quite do so well.

This stacked, 18-inch desktop replacement weighs more than some small desktop computers at 3.63KG. The power brick (which is at least relatively small compared to those of its forbears) adds another 1.38KG.

And you’ll need that too because the max-size, 99.9Wh battery ran our PCMark 10 Modern Office battery life test for a paltry 3 hours 49 minutes. Part of that will be down to the large, Mini LED screen not getting very dark at its dimmest settings.

The size is such that you’ll need a super-sized laptop bag to lug it around but build quality (including the hinge) feels robust enough for it occasional transport to LANs and such like. The lid is relatively rigid but an 18-inch screen is always going to flex a little when a twisting force is applied. So, look after it.

Still, it’s worth remembering that one of the benefits of a desktop replacement laptop is you can lock it away in a drawer when required – something you can’t do with a desktop PC.

Portability & Battery Life Score: 1 / 5

Price, Value & Availability

Another inherent drawback of hyper-premium laptops like this is that you’re going to have to pay for the ceiling-shattering performance on offer. MSI sells a cheaper, Nvidia RTX 5080-sporting variant (SKU: A9WIG-054AU), but the our Raider A18 HX A9W review unit (SKU: A9WJG-049AU) costs a colossal $9,399. The good news is that’s it’s frequently on sale…

Value Score: 2.1 / 5

Conclusion: Should You Buy The MSI Raider A18 HX A9W?

If you need the ultimate desktop replacement laptop then this is currently it. MSI’s flag-bearing Titans will likely challenge its position, but they will arrive with an even-higher premium.

Ultimately, the MSI Raider A18 HX A9W’s story is told by the tale of the tape: it’s the biggest, fastest, most-stacked laptop we’ve ever tested but it’s also one of the most expensive and least portable: purchase accordingly. An alternative is its arch-rival, the Asus ROG Strix SCAR 18, which costs a similar amount and has a flashier lid. But, it can’t match the Rader A18 HX where it matters the most.

Overall Score: 4.4 / 5

Awards

Last Updated on 29 October 2025 by Nick Ross