MSI Titan 18 HX AI Australian Review (2025)

Introduction

We were blown away by the recent 18-inch, AMD-powered, MSI Raider gaming laptop which decimated every benchmark we threw at it. But now, we have its even-bigger brother in our lab: the company’s flagship, MSI Titan 18 HX AI. It’s the most expensive laptop that we’ve ever tested and, after hearing all the stories, we were extremely keen to see how it fared…

MSI Titan 18 HX AI Specs

Features, Ergonomics and Design

The MSI Titan 18 HX AI’s appearance certainly lives up to its name – it’s a big, imposing beast. The monolithic ‘Core Black’ chassis and its sharp lines might lack some of the flourishes we’ve seen on rivals but it’s still stylish with its silver side-trim, blue accents across the rear, spaceship-like vents and RGB lid logo.

Opening up the MSI Titan 18 reveals more RGB courtesy of both the per-key-lit mechanical keyboard and high-concept trackpad which sits completely flush with the palm rest.

If you want eyebrow-raising industrial design augmentations, you’ll need to flip it over and see where the industrial designers were let loose to create all manner of complex vent patterns and wavy stand designs. The upshot is that the 2025 Titan can be a gaming laptop that turns heads at a LAN, or it can sit discreetly in an office (when its lights are turned off) and potentially power all manner of corporate-oriented, edge-computing and Ai applications.

The MSI Titan 18 HX AI has the same Mini LED display that blew us away on the Raider. The 18-inch screen has a high, UHD+, 3,840 x 2,400 resolution that provides plenty of desktop real estate for multi-window work, near-native video editing and awesome multimedia consumption. It’s got a matte finish, so there are no annoying, glossy reflections and while colour vibrancy can’t quite match that of an OLED screen , it’s not far off.

Having Mini LED backlighting means that the 1,000-nit brightness far exceeds what OLED screens are capable of and yet it can still display non-washed-out, ‘true blacks.’ This carries through to its HDR performance where it can display details in both very-bright areas and shadows at the same time. Just note, as the screen gets so bright, you may have to reduce brightness and/or tinker with Windows’ HDR calibration tool to get the best out of it, with some content.

The the very high resolution and HDR capability impacts upon the screen’s speed (there’s a LOT of image information to process). The 120Hz refresh rate certainly isn’t the fastest on the market but it does marry with a fast pixel-response time to banish lag and blurriness to a degree where only very-competitive FPS players might grumble. But, this is all nit-picking: it’s one of the very best laptop screens on the market.

Complementing the MSI Titan 18’s great visuals is great audio that comes courtesy of two, 2-Watt tweeters and four, 2-Watt woofers. The result is music that gets very loud and punchy, with great fidelity from the top to the bottom end, and which features some impressive bass.

Above the screen is a Full HD webcam which does a decent job at fending-off grain in low light, but it can produce an image that’s a bit soft. I’ve become pernickety about webcam performance (having used so many outstanding webcams on business laptops recently) so I was perhaps expecting slightly better from a laptop that aims to be the best at everything. But, few would grumble. The MSI Titan 18 also has an orange privacy slider, so that you can easily see when it’s activated. Its neighbouring IR camera facilitates Windows Hello facial-recognition log-in.

The microphone array does a very good job of capturing clear audio in noisy environments.

Below the screen is one of the very best laptop keyboards on the market – a per-key-lit, RGB, Scrabble-tile, mechanical unit by Steelseries that has a full-sized number pad and arrow keys. They are particularly comfortable and accurate to type and game upon for extended periods and they look awesome with their configurable RGB backlighting.

Just be aware that the mechanical nature of the keyboard means each keystroke makes a satisfying click that’s followed by a subsequent, minor resonance. That means it’s not silent, so it could annoy nearby people in a quiet environment.

Beneath it, the MSI Titan 18’s RGB-lit, trackpad sits flush with the palm rest. When it’s not illuminated, you can’t actually see where it’s located, which can be a bit of an issue on occasions. It also operates using haptic feedback rather that actual buttons. However, the only time I noticed a difference was when a driver was updating and it stopped working (which was only on one occasion) and I couldn’t press anything. It essentially acts like a smooth and accurate trackpad, once your fingers have got used to its whereabouts.

Connectivity and Ports

Inside there’s Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4. This means that the MSI Titan 18 is the first laptop we’ve seen to have ALL of the latest cutting-edge connectivity.

Ultimately, MSI’s Titan 18 HX AI sets out to be uncompromising in terms of all-things laptop and, barring a few relatively minor dings, it’s succeeded.

Features, Ergonomics and Design Score: 4.9 / 5

Performance

Inside the MSI Titan 18 HX AI is one of Intel’s ‘best’ mobile processors, the Arrow Lake-based Core Ultra 9 285HX. It has eight Performance cores and 16 Efficient cores (with no Hyperthreading) that operate between 2.1 and 5.5GHz. It’s partnered by 64GB of DDR5-6400 RAM and three (count’em) 2TB hard drives: two PCIe 4 (there’s room for another) and one PCIe 5 (that even has its own heat pipe). Graphics comes courtesy of Nvidia’s top-tier GeForce RTX 5090 GPU which has 24GB of GDDR7 RAM.

I was keen to see how it faired against its Raider A18 HX A9W sibling which is generally similar, but based around one of AMD’s best mobile processors, the 2.5-5.4GHz Ryzen 9 9955HX3D, and which also features Nvidia RTX 5090 graphics. It has one 2TB PCIe 4 NVMe drive but there is room for an extra PCIe 5 unit (which also has a dedicated heat pipe). I’ll post all the scores side by side.

MSI’s OverBoost Ultra technology means that the 400-Watt power supply can simultaneously deliver 270-Watts to the CPU (95-Watts) and GPU (175-Watts) – the Raider’s equivalent delivers 260-Watts. That means that the full, stated, potential of the processors can be accessed and there’s headroom for additional overclocking, for those who like to tinker.

You can read how we test laptops, here. Note too 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 initial performance testing focuses on the processor and the system in general.

Ultimately, there’s not much between the two processors: for overall performance, both are top tier; AMD is slightly ahead when it comes to CPU-based rendering workloads; and Intel has a marginally faster NPU for Ai.

At the end of the day, the processor’s raw performance isn’t a reason to choose one laptop over another.

I also ran the Geekbench 6 tests. These benchmarks will likely fold into our formal review process in 2026. For now (for reference) the MSI Titan 18 scored 3,093 for single-core CPU performance and 21,845 in multi-core. The latter is the fastest score that we’ve seen so far. The Raider scored 20,287.

Another potentially interesting test (particularly for the Titan) is CrystalDiskMark owing to it’s three NVMe hard drives, one of which supports the latest PCIe 5 speeds.

A read speed of 16,184MB/s is massive for a laptop and so is the write speed of 9,715MB/s. If you’re using niche applications that require ultimate hard-drive bandwidth, then MSI’s Titan 18 can provide it. Note that all hardware appears as one 6TB drive in Windows – that means there’s potential to eke out even more performance by reconfiguring the drive array.

Graphics & Gaming Performance

To establish the MSI Titan 18 HX AI’s gaming potency, I started by running the 3DMark gaming tests. The results were as follows…

To say the above scores are close would be an understatement. Almost every test was a photo finish and if we kept re-running each one over and over again, we’d likely get alternating winners by similarly small margins. The upshot is that both of these laptops are equally the fastest gaming laptops that we’ve ever tested and they’ll play all games at top resolutions with maximum eye-candy settings turned on.

Cooling

The Raider uses MSI’s mature CoolerBoost 5 technology which utilises (shared) heat pipes (and fans) to keep everything cool. The MSI Titan 18, however, uses a large vapor chamber as part of its CoolerBoost Pro technology. Notionally, it’s more efficient, but how does it fare in the real world?

To be frank, it’s a little hard to tell with our SKU of the Titan. It rarely ran completely silently as the fans often wound-up to a low murmur, even when performing low-power tasks. I strongly suspect that the three hard drives are responsible for this: NVMe drives notoriously get hot and PCIe 5 variants get even hotter (which is why MSI adds a dedicated heat pipe for it). That means that the Titan can get warm beneath the screen, even when the fans are maximised for Extreme performance.

Still, even when under sustained load, there was no significant thermal throttling present, so the cooling technology is very efficient.

Portability & Battery Life

One area where we had almost no positive expectations with the MSI Titan 18 HX AI was portability. For one thing, this class of laptop does not actually fit comfortably on anyone’s lap. However, in keeping with the superlatives scattered throughout this review, perhaps it can be the most unportable laptop we’ve ever tested?

First-up there’s the weight of 3.64KG. That makes it the heaviest laptop we’ve seen in years but that’s no surprise considering the stacked technology (which even includes a hard drive heat pipe) inside it.

However, the immense 400-Watt power brick is actually relatively small in the world of top performing gaming laptops – at just 1.18KG(!) – so the combined weight of the travelling package is more inline with ‘regular’ 18-inch desktop replacements.

The Titan 18’s max-size, 99.9Wh battery won’t be light, either. In our PCMark 10 Modern Office benchmark it lasted for 4 hours 36 minutes which is extremely poor for any laptop in this day and age, but actually better than other 18-inch rivals and almost impressive considering its huge Mini LED screen and power-hungry SSDs.

As such the MSI Titan 18 HX AI doesn’t quite win an award for being the least-portable laptop.

Portability & Battery Life Score: 1.1 / 5

Price, Value & Availability

We started out by saying that the uncompromising MSI Titan 18 HX AI A2XWJG was the most expensive laptop we’d ever tested and that’s partly by design, but there’s more to it than that. It’s available in multiple SKUs with our model, the A2XWJG-461AU being the top-tier variant featuring the most RAM and highest capacity of hard drives that you can buy off the shelf (you can actually push the RAM to 96GB and add yet another hard drive). The sticker price is an eye-watering $10,899 but it can be had in the current sales for $8,099.

Other variants have all the primary features and ergonomics but also reduced amounts of RAM and storage and come with Nvidia’s lesser RTX 5080 GPU instead. One is listed at $8,499 but is currently on sale for just $5,899 – that’s great value for such a monster.

But, there’s more. MSI went above and beyond with its special edition laptops this year. They include the Mercedes-AMG partnership variants of the Stealth and the Prestige, plus, the drop-dead gorgeous Ukiyo-e Prestige ultraportable. However, there’s also a special edition Titan that follows in the footsteps of the epic Dragon Tiamat model from 2021 and which uses this Titan as a base model.

It’s the (very) limited edition MSI Titan 18 HX Dragon Edition Norse Myth edition which features a, “Head-turning dragon design has been crafted using mirror-engraving, special polishing and sophisticated anodising techniques to achieve a captivating metal sheen that’s unique in the market. There’s also a ‘World Tree’ embossed dragon ring and medallion embedded in the palm rest.” I’ve seen it up close and it’s stunning. Pricing is unavailable at the time of going to press but it’s listed in MSI’s Black Friday listings. If money is no object, and you want an MSI Titan 18 HX AI that could hold its value better, it may well be worth holding out for.

Ultimately, cutting-edge technology always comes at a premium and this comes at a premium. There are better-value laptops on the market but none that have the performance, or the potential for more, than the Titan 18 HX AI.

Value Score: 2 / 5

Conclusion: Should You Buy The MSI Titan 18 HX AI?

If money is no object and/or you require the most powerful laptop on the market, then yes. However, its similarly featured sibling Raider can be currently found for $6,999 and it offers similar base-line performance (and features) but without as much headroom for more. Ultimately, these are both ultimate gaming laptops and the imminent Black Friday and Holiday sales are likely to determine who buys what. For now, though, I’m more than happy to recommend the MSI Titan 18 HX AI to anyone who demands ultimate performance from a laptop.

Overall Score: 4 / 5

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Last Updated on 18 November 2025 by Nick Ross