MSI Titan 18 HX AI (A2XWJG) Review – Superb Hardware, Subpar Execution

Unboxing

Today we’re taking a look at MSI’s flagship gaming laptop that is the Titan 18 HX AI – as the halo model, expect lots of overkill hardware and big numbers. Starting off with the unboxing, lifting the box open immediately reveals the laptop along with Titan series’ tagline: Total Dominance.

Note that our particular unit is a US-specific model provided by Intel, so the items you’ll be getting inside the box may differ. That said, here’s a list of items:

– Type B (US) AC cable
– 400W DC charger
– Laptop quick start guides
– Regulatory documentation
– Promotional leaflet
– Support leaflet
– MSI Gaming Mouse M18, USB-C cable & documentation
– Lucky keychain
– MSI Titan 18 HX AI (A2XWJG) laptop

Walkaround

The MSI Titan 18 HX AI is among the largest and heaviest laptops you’ll find on the market, though its lid design is surprisingly reserved for what is effectively a “desktop-replacement” laptop. You’ll find an illuminated dragon logo on the outside, while inside you get a 4K+ Mini-LED display rated for 1000 nits of peak brightness. On top of the display is the webcam and microphone array, along with the mechanical shutter for privacy.

Inside, you’ll find the keyboard featuring a more conventional layout compared to other MSI laptops; the keys themselves use Cherry MX-based mechanical switches, though this applies to a portion of the keyboard only. Arrow keys, numpad keys, and Fn row keys stick to the conventional rubber dome switches instead. Down below, you’ll find a haptic touchpad hidden under a completely flush surface illuminated via RGB. The underside of the laptop reveals plenty of vents, with all the Philips screws exposed – this gives you access to two RAM slots and four SSD slots.

Slimness is very far down the Titan 18 HX AI’s priority list – the thickest point of this laptop measures a whopping 32.05mm, so don’t expect this laptop to be easily carried around (it’s also very heavy, at 3.6kg). The rear exhaust portion also reveals the laptop’s blue accents, and its overhang heatsinks design meant the display only opens up to 135 degrees, though this is common among gaming laptops.

Finally, I/O: on the left you get a pair of USB-A 10Gbps ports and a full-size SD card slot, while on the right you have access to a pair of Thunderbolt 5 ports, another USB-A 10Gbps port, and a headphone jack. The rear of the laptop also features RJ-45 LAN port and HDMI 2.1 output, accompanied by the rectangular-shaped DC connector.

Specifications

MSI Titan 18 HX AI (A2XWJG-614US)

Note: the following specification list also applies to the variant (A2XWJG-471MY) available in Malaysian markets.

Performance

Storage

If you want performance, the MSI Titan 18 HX AI has got plenty: starting with the SSD test, we see sequential read speeds exceeding 16,000MB/s, faster than even the fastest PCIe 5.0 SSDs on the market today. The secret sauce lies on the RAID 0 setup combining three separate 2TB SSDs – the primary Samsung PM9E1 PCIe 5.0 SSD, plus a pair of Samsung PM9A1a PCIe 4.0 SSDs, combining to deliver immense SSD performance.

It is worth saying that a RAID 0 array like this does trade drive reliability over absolute performance, and as far as random I/O is concerned, it’s not much faster than the traditional single-drive setup found in the ROG Strix G16 we recently reviewed, for example. Still, you do have a fourth SSD slot if you ever need more storage, if 6TB of storage out of the box is not enough somehow.

CPU

This MSI laptop packs the top-performing chip from Intel, the Core Ultra 9 285HX. We pit it against the closest competition, AMD’s Ryzen 9 9955HX3D – and we can see throughout both laptops’ power profiles that they pretty much stay within striking distance of each other. In Cinebench 2024’s case, the AMD chip is faster; though for a more bursty scenario like Cinebench R20, the Arrow Lake chip emerges on top (and it seems like you don’t even need to activate the Extreme Performance profile for it).

Part of the reason behind the Core Ultra’s advantage in short-term workloads comes down to the cooling overhead it has. While the AMD chip pulls 128 watts at its peak, the Intel chip can pull upwards of 220 watts thanks to MSI’s overbuilt cooling system, and it even manages to sustain at 170 watts or so for the remainder of these tests. Still, from a power efficiency perspective, the Zen 5 chip does outperform Arrow Lake in this case.

As a side note, we’d 100% recommend against using Silent mode in this laptop, ever. This power profile caps the CPU to just mere 15 watts, and to put it simply – a desktop-grade processor is not designed to operate at this little power (i.e. a Core Ultra 258V would easily outperform this chip as it is significantly more power-efficient). What you get with this kind of power target is a performance level akin to laptops made in 10 years ago, even the Windows interface itself struggle to respond properly.

GPU

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU onboard this laptop measurably beats all other GPUs in this list, and putting it into Silent mode does match the performance of the RTX 5070 Ti on average. However, as we mentioned earlier, Silent mode will be problematic to use in general due to severe power throttling of the CPU, so just stick to Balanced, or Extreme Performance if you need to squeeze just a bit more performance out of the GPU. The same applies to ray-traced benchmarks, with the RTX 5090 notably faster than all other entries in this list.

System

Moving on to system benchmarks, we see the MSI Titan 18 HX AI topping the charts once again – as long as you use either Balanced or Extreme Performance power profiles (although in both cases, the scores barely surpassed the ROG laptop due to its better CPU scores). Silent mode basically neutered the CPU’s performance to just one-eighth of the original, which is far from ideal.

Same story here – the GPU performance advantage pushed the laptop to the top of this chart, though Silent mode once again sits at the very bottom of this chart.

Battery