MSI Titan 18 HX AI R…

	MSI Titan 18 HX AI: MSRP $5699, Currently $5199 The beastly  MSI Titan 18 HX AI gaming laptop for 2025 is powered by the latest Intel and NVIDIA mobile hardware, includes Thunderbolt 5, and puts up some huge benchmark scores.
	Extraordinary Performance Fantastic Keyboard Excellent Display Tons Of IO Attractive Chassis	Hefty Price Premium Battery Life Beefy Form Factor

One of the perks of running an online publication like HotHardware is that we often get to play with some seriously high-end, drool-worthy hardware. Such is the case with the MSI Titan 18 HX AI gaming laptop we’ll be showing you here today. This beastly machine is powered by the latest mobile technologies from Intel and NVIDIA, and as you’ll see on the proceeding pages, its performance and features are next level. MSI has been on a roll the last few years and has built out an impressive portfolio of leading-edge gaming laptops, featuring platforms and chips that run the gamut. Let’s dive in and see if the Titan 18 HX XI is a worthy addition to the line-up or if MSI has missed a step with this latest generation…

 MSI Titan 18 HX AI (2025) Gaming Laptop Specifications 

As you can see in the MSI Titan 18 HX AI (specifically, model A2XWJG) features nothing but flagship internal hardware. The system is packing Intel’s top-end Core Ultra 9 285HX 24-core processor (8P, 16E), paired to 64GB of DDR5-6400 memory (expandable to 96GB), and NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 5090 mobile GPU, with a full 175W TGP, though the entire setup (CPU+GPU) can boost up to 270W. The system also features plenty of the latest connectivity, including Thunderbolt 5 (w. DisplayPort and Power Delivery 3.1), WiFi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and 2.5Gb wired ethernet, and storage comes by way of multiple M.2 SSDs. In our particular configuration, three 2TB Samsung PCIe Gen 4 SSDs are setup in a RAID 0 config, which appears as a single 6TB volume in Windows. The system has four M.2 slots in total – 3 x Gen 4, and 1 x Gen 5 – so it’s expandable and can be configured in multiple ways. There’s also an 18” display and fully mechanical keyboard on the MSI Titan 18 HX AI, but we’ll take a closer look at those in a moment. Powering the system is a massive 99Whr and MSI includes a beefy 400w brick to ensure plenty of juice when plugged into the wall.

In actuality, the MSI Titan 18 HX AI is as powerful as a notebook could get and it probably offers more performance than the vast majority of desktop systems out there.

MSI Titan 18 HX AI Build Quality & Design

Like many of MSI’s previous-gen high-end gaming notebooks, the Titan 18 HX AI’s chassis is built from a combination of magnesium-aluminum alloy and polycarbonate. The lid has a single MSI Dragon logo embedded in the center, and because this is gaming / enthusiast targeted machine, that logo also features integrated RGB lighting for some extra bling. The body has a premium, slightly soft-touch feel to it, which does pick up fingerprints fairly easily, so you’ll want to keep the included microfiber cloth with the system handy. There’s minimal flex to the lid and perimeter of the chassis, so the overall build feels high-quality and rigid.

Overall, the MSI Titan 18 HX definitely has a premium look and feel, but somewhat surprisingly it’s less aggressive and gaudy than most other high-end gaming laptops. As you’ll see later, the bottom cover is pretty wild and the rear vents definitely have some gamer flare, but the rest of the rig is fairly understated given the target audience.

It’s not an unwieldy, chonky boulder like some gaming notebooks of the past, but the MSI Titan 18 HX AI is still a large and relatively heavy machine. Its large footprint is a result of the 18″ display and the decision to mount the hinges on top of the machine rather than the back. On the plus side, this design makes room for additional cooling hardware and venting on the rear and leaves plenty of room on the sides for ports. For a desktop replacement notebook in this class, having lots of connectivity is important, so we are OK with this design decision. The hinges are sturdy and the display stays in place at any angle. There’s a fair amount of resistance, but the display swings open smoothly and can be opened with one hand without the machine sliding around on table. At about 8lbs pounds, the MSI Titan 18 HX usually stays put, but you’ll certainly feel it if you’re going to carrying it around all day.

The 4K+ (3840×2400) display on the MSI Titan 18 HX AI we tested is excellent for gamers or content creators. The IPS-class display has increased color accuracy and wide viewing angles, and features mini-LED backlighting and a fast 120Hz refresh rate. QHD and faster 240Hz IPS panel options are also available.

If we had to describe the MSI Titan 18 HX AI’s display with just a few words, they would be bright, vibrant and spacious. It supports HDR1000 and gets plenty bright, viewing angles are excellent, and uniformity and saturation are top-notch. Everything from on-line videos to games pops on this display, and the pixel density is so high everything is tack sharp. Couple all of that with the 120Hz refresh rate and the display in this machine delivers.

Just above the display panel is a good 1080p IR webcam with Windows Hello support. It’s a pretty good webcam and an upgrade over the 720p models MSI has used in the past, but if you’re going to game stream with this machine, you’ll probably want a higher-end, dedicated webcam in our opinion. For Zooms or Teams meetings, it’s well above average though.

On the audio front, MSI outfits the Titan 18 HX AI a six-speaker design tuned by Dynaudio, which features dual down-firing woofers paired to a quartet of full range drivers. The speaker setup in the MSI Titan 18 HX AI isn’t going to compete with standalone speaker setups, but the layout and tuning sound exceptionally good for a laptop and are clearly among the best in this class of system. Bass is much stronger then you’d expect, the mids are clear and the highs are crisp. The speakers in this machine are well suited for media consumption, teleconferencing or content creation, but hardcore gamers should opt for a headset or external speaker setup. But make not mistake — the speaker system in the MSI Titan 18 HX AI is among the best out there.

The keyboard in the MSI Titan 18 HX AI is designed and built by SteelSeries and it features real Cherry mechanical key switches. Like the display, the Titan 18 HX AI’s keyboard is phenomenal. Due to the machine’s size, there is a discrete number pad available and spacing is adequate for comfortable typing. About the only complaint is a tiny bit of flex in the deck when mashing away, but we doubt it’ll be an issue for most people and it’s more rigid that the Titan we tested last year. The keyboard has per-key RGB lighting and all the lighting can be managed in the bundled Steelseries software. The trackpad is a good size, but lacks discrete integrated buttons. It works well for productivity tasks and does a good job with palm rejection and gesture recognition, but gamers will still want a good mouse. There is no physical delineation though, so it’ll take some training to get used to tapping in the right locations. Enabling the very cool backlighting will help.

Spread around three sides, MSI equips the Titan 18 HX AI with two Type-C (USB / DP / Thunderbolt 5) ports, three Type-A USB3.2 Gen2 ports, an SD Express Card Reader, an HDMI port (8K @ 60Hz / 4K @ 120Hz), a 3.5mm audio jack, an RJ45 jack for the on-board 2.5G network controller, and obviously a power connector.

The left side of the machine is home to two USB-A ports and the SD card reader slot. The right side houses the 3.5mm audio jack, and additional USB-A port and the pair of USB-C Thunderbolt 5 ports. And around back you’ll find the he rectangular power jack for the included 400 Watt AC adapter, the HDMI output, and the RJ45 port. There’s also venting on three sides of the machine (and on the bottom as well).

The venting on the sides of the Titan 18 HX AI will exhaust hot air directly onto hands that might be positioned nearby when using an external mouse, regardless of being a lefty or a righty, but most of the warm air exhaust exits through the rear and towards the back of the machine, so it was never a problem in our opinion.

The design overall looks pretty clean in our opinion. The mostly black finish with silver and blue accents and angular lines work well together and from most angles, the MSI Titan 18 HX AI doesn’t scream “gamer”; it’s only when viewing it from the rear that people will know this isn’t a run-of-the-mill laptop.

Thunderbolt 5 Capabilities And Experience

We want to spend a little more time focusing on the MSI Titan 18 HX AI’s Thunderbolt 5 support. This is one of only a few laptops with Thunderbolt 5 certification at this time, and while it doesn’t technically offer many more new features over and above previous versions of Thunderbolt, TB5 does offer much higher power delivery (240W vs 100W), double the available bandwidth for storage and peripherals up to 80Gbps, and a boost of display connectivity up to 120Gbs.

Those capabilities make the MSI Titan 18 HX AI particularly well suited for use with high-speed external storage and docks, which could be a boon for creators. We actually experimented with a Sonnetttech Echo 13 Thunderbolt 5 SSD Dock, which adds a bunch of additional connectivity along with high-speed, PCIe Gen 4 NVMe storage.

Attaching the Echo 13 Thunderbolt 5 SSD Dock to the MSI Titan 18 HX AI requires only a single TB5 cable. Upon connecting the dock, the internal NVMe SSD pops right up, and offers >6GB’s sequential transfers, along with a slew of additional TB and USB ports, plus another ethernet port and dual card readers. 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB options are available.

Utilizing the additional Thunderbolt display output also allows users to daisy chain multiple displays – as you can see here. The above picture shows the MSI Titan 18 HX AI connected to the Sonnettech dock and a pair of 32” 4K displays. For creators that like working on multiple, large displays that also have to work on-location from time to time, this kind of setup would be super convenient.

MSI Titan 18 HX AI Software Experience

Our MSI Titan 18 HX AI shipped with Windows 11 Pro, with the 24H2 update preinstalled. There’s minimal bloatware to speak of, save for a naggy Norton Security suite, which we promptly uninstalled. Other utilities that were pre-installed out of the box included MSI Center, Nahimic audio control software, and a couple of SteelSeries apps for controlling the keyboard lighting and shortcuts.

MSI Center can be used to monitor hardware health data and fan speeds, and it provides system updating, recovery and support tools as well.

The MSI Center app offers a host of optional plugins for things like AI-assisted photo search and tagging, tuning audio, capturing in-game highlights, and switching color profiles for the display. The MSI True Color plug-in will throw a notification upon every re-boot when a display profile is loaded, which might bug some users, but it’s harmless enough.

All in all, MSI Center is a useful application with a straightforward interface, tons of options and minimal clutter, though it will initially nag you to set up a backup schedule for the machine and out of the box, and there will likely be a number of system updates that require installation from the get go.

It is also inside the MSI Center application that users can tweak the machine’s performance profile. For example, this system can operate with a hybrid graphics configuration that leverages both the iGPU and discrete GeForce RTX 5090, or users can opt for a full-power discrete mode, that keeps the GeForce powered-up and engaged at all times, directly connected to the display. Hybrid mode will dynamically leverage the most appropriate GPU given a particular workload to balance efficiency and performance, but the discrete mode runs flat out at all times for maximum performance, at the expense of battery life and increased thermal output.

And with all of that out of the way, let’s get to the benchmarks…