Here at Creative Bloq we love all types of laptop but with a special focus on machines for creatives and gamers. The laptop going under the spotlight today is the MSI Titan 18 HX. It has game-changing specs that enable it to compete with the best laptops for AI, graphic design, photo-editing and CAD.
Beyond the obvious performance abilities of this laptop, the next thing that punches you in the face is the unbelievable price tag. At the time of writing, the Razer Blade 17 held the position of most expensive in our best laptops for gaming guide. That title could be about the fall with the release of the Titan 18 HX. With models beginning at around £3,000 you’ll need to take out a small loan to afford one.
It’s important to remember that MSI have packed all of the best hardware into a solid and robust case. This laptop really does deliver it all with absolutely nothing missing. The price, when you think of it like that, is therefore justified. If you’re happy parting way with a lot of money, this is the gaming laptop to beat them all.
I’ve been using the laptop for a little while now and have enjoyed carrying out a range of tasks and activities on it. These include but are not limited to gaming, photo-editing, web browsing, and word processing. To benchmark the performance against other machines, we ran tests using Cinebench, Geekbench, Handbrake, and Blender Benchmark.
First impressions of the Titan 18 HX are ‘wow’. Read into that what you will but maybe I should expand on my single-word summary. The initial feeling I had was that this is one big laptop. I already knew it was going to be big; it has an 18-inch display after all, but nothing prepared me for just how sizable the thing is.
The laptop is designed to sit on your desk and never leave. Maybe you might be tempted to take it to your friend’s house for a gaming session but that’s going to be the limit of it. You certainly wouldn’t want to sit in a coffee shop while you bang out your latest video edit.
The chassis itself is made of magnesium alloy which not only looks great but also feels fantastic. There is ventilation everywhere you look around this laptop with the classic dragon lit up on the back of the display. There are sharp edges and clear-cut lines which are customary for a lot of gaming laptops but at the same time, everything feels strangely smooth and refined.
Opening up the laptop you’re presented with a low-profile Cherry MX mechanical keyboard. This is seriously cool and a pretty rare thing on laptops. It’s a joy to type on with a high level of feedback provided by the way the keys are engineered. Due to this, a small amount of extra energy is required which could be problematic if using the laptop for large amounts of word processing.
(Image credit: Future)
Underneath the full-size keyboard with full numpad is a perfectly sized trackpad that lights up red like there’s a dragon inside waiting to escape. How cool is that? Other than the lit area, this trackpad is indistinguishable from the casing that houses it. The whole trackpad is also clickable, which I really like. I’m not a fan of a lot of laptops where the top strip of the trackpad is unusable.
Then we’ve got the display. This is 18 inches of sensational ultra high-definition beauty. It’s a MiniLED with a 120Hz refresh rate. It produces a vibrant image and can refresh fast enough for even the most demanding of games. When forced, there is a little bit of movement in the display but considering this isn’t designed to be portable, I don’t envisage anyone having problems damaging the thing.
In terms of connectivity, the Titan 18 HX has pretty much all the bases covered. The laptop can be extended to a monitor using the HDMI port and USB-A and USB-C ports are in abundance. I would like to have see two HDMI ports for connecting multiple monitors but it’s not too much of an issue.
In terms of charging, there’s a DC-in port at the rear, although it’s also possible to charge via the USB-C Thunderbolt 4 port that supports PD 3.1 Charging capabilities.
All in all, this is an incredibly well-built laptop that oozes luxury and flagship status. It looks great with LED lighting to really sell the gaming look and feel.
Features & Performance
(Image credit: Future)
The MSI Titan 18 HX is a powerhouse of performance in almost every way. This is, after all, something you’d expect after paying an absolute premium for the product. That being said, once it’s sat on your desk and you’re engrossed in the latest AAA game, you won’t be disappointed with what this laptop delivers.
All the benchmark scores back up what a beast this laptop is. Beginning with CineBench (2024) the Titan 18 HX performs very similarly to the MacBook Pro 16-inch, which packs the unbelievably impressive M3 Max chip. Another similar performer is the Acer Predator Helios 18, which we called “a laptop with skull-shredding speed” in our review. If anything, the Titan 18 HX performs better in the multi-core tests, showing the heights of its performance.
The model I used for testing included the impressive Intel® Core™ i9 processor 14900HX and top-of-the-range NVIDIA 16 GB RTX 4090 GPU. The Geekbench scores set it apart from pretty much all other laptops we’ve tested at Creative Bloq. The single-core score was 2,899, the multi-core score 16,392, and the GPU OpenCL score was a whopping 184,184. The Titan 18 HX absolutely flew through the rendering required for the test.
Now onto video encoding with our Handbrake test. We get our laptops to transcode a 10-minute, 34-second 4K video to 1080p and the only laptop that’s managed to do it in less than 3 minutes is the Predator Helios 18. That did it in 2 minutes 59 seconds. The Titan 18 HX smashed that record, doing it in only 2 minutes and 47 seconds.
(Image credit: Future)
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MSI Titan 18 HX: Benchmark scoring
Geekbench 6:
CPU single-core: 2,899
CPU multi-core: 16,392
Row 1 – Cell 0
GPU OpenCL: 184,184
Row 1 – Cell 2
Cinebench 2024:
CPU single-core: 124
CPU multi-core: 1,674
Row 3 – Cell 0
GPU: 22,167
Row 3 – Cell 2
Handbrake:
2m47s @72fps
Row 4 – Cell 2
Blender:
Monster 187 (Samples per min)
Row 5 – Cell 2
Row 6 – Cell 0
Junkshop 128 (Samples per min)
Row 6 – Cell 2
Row 7 – Cell 0
Classroom 87 (Samples per min)
Row 7 – Cell 2
As is standard at Creative Bloq, we also ran a number of Blender benchmark tests that included rendering scenes such as monster, junkshop, and classroom. These scores came in at 187, 128, and 87, respectively. These scores further cement the laptop’s abilities in the 3D rendering arena.
The 18-inch UHD+ (3840×2400) display produced an outstanding visual quality that I appreciated when it came to photo and video editing. The wide colour gamut and performance make it perfect for working with graphics and video. Gamers will love the 120Hz refresh rate, which keeps things updated as regularly as you need them to be.
All of this incredible performance does come at a cost and that is to the battery life. The 4-Cell 99.9 Whrs is by no means a bad battery but if you’re going to push the hardware to its limits, then you’ve got to expect the battery to take a hit. The size of this laptop restricts its portability but in reality, you’ll need this laptop to be close to a charging point at all times, otherwise you might just find yourself out of battery juice at a key moment.
Price
(Image credit: Future)
The MSI Titan 18 HX range begins at £2,999.99 with the A14VHG-004UK. This will give you a basic specification of 12GB RTX 4080 GPU and 64GB DDR5. If you’d like to upgrade the graphics card to an RTX 4090, then that attracts a price of £3,799.99.
The model I tested for this review was the A14VIG-050UK, which includes the 16 GB RTX 4090 GPU and 128GB DDR5. This is a formidable set of specs and is what is required to achieve the benchmark scores in our performance section. For the privilege, you’ll need to pay an eye-watering £4,999.99.
Who is it for?
The Titan 18 HX is unashamedly a gamer’s laptop. Everything from the design to the advertising screams “come and play games on me.” So, if you’re a gamer with seriously high-performance demands, the Titan is the way to go.
The thing about outstanding gaming laptops is that they are always packed with incredible CPUs, GPUs, and a tonne of RAM. That usually makes them perfect for a range of creative disciplines and that is most definitely the case for this laptop.
It absolutely nailed all of the benchmark tests we did, performing well across everyday creative tasks, 3D rendering, and video encoding.
