MSI Titan 18 HX review (most powerful 18-inch gaming laptop)

8 Comments

  1. PHVM_BR

    May 1, 2024 at 5:01 pm

    Have a laptop like that with Intel HX, especially i9, without undervol it is a waste.

    In addition to the performance that increases considerably (+10%), the entire usage experience improves with much lower temperatures in IDLE and in light use with less noise, much fewer consumption/temperature spikes…

    • AlexS

      May 9, 2024 at 7:57 am

      Yeah, this model and many others are marred by a choice of a CPU that is too strong for the cooling solution.

  2. Davedpro2024

    May 6, 2024 at 6:26 pm

    What is the temperature on cpu and gpu if turn on cooler boost(max fan mode)? (It means far cry 6 and cyberpunk)
    What is the wattage?

    • Andrei Girbea

      May 7, 2024 at 2:26 pm

      The power settings are similar to regular Extreme, not affected by Cooler Boost. The temps are a little lower, but I haven't logged that use scenario, since I find it too noisy to consider, and regular extreme with Auto fans is already cool enough

  3. Altandmain

    May 7, 2024 at 1:12 am

    Although the laptop is arguably the best high performance laptop, it feels like it has too many compromises for its price range. At this price range, it should be nearly perfect.

    There's plenty of areas for improvement:

    1. The speakers are not fit for a laptop of this price range. At this price point, the speakers should be as good as the Asus G16 or Macbook Pro 16.

    2. Although the keyboard is using Cherry MX switches, the Numpad and certain other keys are not Cherry MX. Why did MSI save money on a few switches on a laptop at this price point?!

    3. When I tried it out, I found the Haptic Touchpad to be lacking – and not having borders made it hard to see where your fingers were leaving the Touchpad area. Personally I think the best implementation of a Haptic Touchpad is Apple and on the Windows side, the laptops with Sensel Touchpads.

    4. Adopt the CAMM memory standard. One of the reasons why the laptop is slow is because it uses 4x SO-DIMM slots. The problem is that the DDR5 standard has effectively saturated this standard. The CAMM standard was made for overcoming the limitations. Slow RAM can be a bottleneck in some games and where memory bandwidth is an issue.

    There are some things that MSI should do to address the fact the fans are always spinning – a more quiet fan curve that would not require changes to the hardware. This should also come with a "lower power" performance profile.

    MSI did improve the build quality of their previous generation chassis. Yet it doesn't seem to give any advantages in performance compared to its cheaper counterparts. They are charging a premium for the 4k higher refresh rate Mini-LED. I personally prefer a 4k 120Hz over a QHD 240Hz, but it's nice to have options.

    That reminds me – we may be unable this generation to run >120 fps @ 4k. Perhaps when the 5090 comes out, then we will see GPUs with that ability.

    Another problem I see is that Intel seems to have built a very inefficient CPUs as measured by performance per watt. One can only hope that the Arrow Lake CPUs are more efficient. Certainly, there is a huge gap between this generation and Apple's M3 Max CPUs, which is the closest comparison to this laptop that Apple has.

    • Andrei Girbea

      May 7, 2024 at 2:27 pm

      Thanks for your input, all solid points. 3 and 4 especially are quite difficult to accept imo. And the pricing.

      • Altandmain

        May 11, 2024 at 8:36 pm

        There is one other major issue – no G-Sync. On a laptop at this price point, I have to be harsh. The display is otherwise beautiful though and one of the brightest that ships in a laptop right now.

        Apparently more recent reviews indicate that the latest software updates have improved the haptic touchpad, which is a big improvement.

        To me, the good news is that MSI has made considerable improvements over their last generation, but there's still a lot of work to do.

  4. BC

    June 11, 2024 at 4:38 am

    Fingerprint Sensor Missing – Not right for this price point…

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