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.

CPU	Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX 5.5GHz / 8P+16E, 24 threads
RAM	64GB (2x32GB) DDR5-6400 (SO-DIMM) *Max 96GB
GPU	Integrated: Intel Graphics Discrete: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU (150+25W TGP, 24GB) MUX switch present
NPU	Intel AI Boost
Storage	6TB RAID 0 Array SSD #1: Samsung PM9E1 2TB (MZVLC2T0HBLD-00BT7, PCIe 5.0 / M.2 2280) SSD #2: Samsung PM9A1a 2TB (MZVL22T0HDLB-00BT7, PCIe 4.0 / M.2 2280) SSD #3: Samsung PM9A1a 2TB (MZVL22T0HDLB-00BT7, PCIe 4.0 / M.2 2280) SSD #4: Vacant
Display	AU Optronics B180ZAN01.0 (AUOC5AC) 18″ Mini-LED IPS-level, anti-glare non-touch 3840×2400 (4K+ 16:10) 120Hz refresh rate 100% DCI-P3, 10-bit (1.07B colors) 1000 nits max brightness (HDR) VESA DisplayHDR 1000 Certification SGS Certified MSI True Color factory color calibration
Keyboard	Cherry MX Ultra Low Profile mechanical switches w/ SteelSeries per-key RGB
Touchpad	Haptic touchpad with built-in RGB
Audio	4x 2W speakers 2x 2W woofers Sound by Dynaudio
Webcam	Full HD HDR camera w/ infrared & 3DNR+ Mechanical shutter
Biometrics	Facial recognition (Windows Hello)
I/O	Left: 2x USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps) Type-A 1x SD card reader Right: 2x Thunderbolt 5 (DisplayPort, USB PD 3.1 140W) 1x USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps) Type-A 1x 3.5mm combo jack Rear: 1x HDMI 2.1 FRL (8K 60Hz / 4K 120Hz) 1x 2.5GbE LAN 1x DC-in
Wireless Connectivity	Killer Wi-Fi 7 BE1750x 320MHz Wi-Fi 7 tri-band Bluetooth 5.4
Battery	99.9Wh 4-cell Li-ion
Power Supply	400W DC power supply (DC connector) 140W Thunderbolt 5 charging (optional)
Operating System	Windows 11 Pro 24H2
Dimensions	404 x 307.5 x 24~32.05 mm
Weight	3.6kg

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

While the MSI Titan 18 HX AI comes with a 99.9Wh battery – the maximum legal limit for taking it to airplanes – its battery life is not something that you should expect much of. In both battery life tests, the laptop only managed to last slightly more than 2 hours, so make sure to have the charging cable readily available if you intend to carry it elsewhere.

Gaming

Onto gaming performance, and we’re happy to report that, with the most powerful hardware available from Intel and NVIDIA, you’ll be getting plenty of framerates, or plenty of visual quality, whichever option you choose to go. Less demanding titles like Forza Horizon 5 has no problem getting past 90 FPS even at 4K resolution, though in other cases such as Cyberpunk 2077 and Black Myth: Wukong, you’ll need to make some tradeoffs to get high framerates (which includes enabling several of the DLSS features).

The Good

Let’s start by saying the MSI Titan 18 HX AI is one very powerful gaming laptop if performance is of utmost importance for you. The Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX is among the fastest laptop CPUs you can get today, and compared to AMD’s finest today, it does come with the extra NPU bit (although its usefulness is mostly limited for now). Pair it with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU and one of the most powerful cooling system available and you get a combination that churns out plenty of framerates. Besides that, the you also get 64GB of RAM and a massive 6-terabyte SSD array, which is plenty even for heavy creative workloads.

Another highlight of the laptop is the 4K Mini-LED display. This panel maxes out at 1,000 nits of brightness, along with factory-calibrated colors makes it one of the best display panels available among laptops today; the keyboard – at least the mechanical keys – are immensely satisfying to type on (while not being obnoxiously loud, which is definitely a plus). I/O is also solid, featuring SD card slots, 2.5GbE LAN, and a pair of Thunderbolt 5 ports that can be expanded to do many functions, including additional I/O, DisplayPort, and charging.

The Bad

However, there are several flaws with the design of this laptop. The first one relates to its touchpad – the haptic-powered unit sometimes struggle to detect the release of a click, and as a result you can’t click unless you take your finger off first. The lack of a hard border also makes it rather annoying to use (in fact, for the majority of review period I’ve resorted to the included gaming mouse to perform functions).

Moreover, the keyboard lighting is also quite dim; the image you see above is taken in dim lighting, with the camera’s tendency to be more sensitive to LEDs. I tried to dig around SteelSeries GG app and didn’t find any brightness-related controls either. Another pain point is the speakers: I was quite surprised for the severe lack of bass with the purported 6-speaker setup it comes with, and no amount of EQ tuning could fix it. As a matter of fact, I have yet to find laptops pre-installed with Nahimic audio to impress me so far (while those with Dolby Atmos is generally solid) – is it a coincidence?

Moving on to the display, which we just mentioned is an impressive panel if you want colors and lighting to really pop. However, daily driving it could genuinely be a problem. In SDR mode, the minimum brightness is a lot higher than most laptops (roughly 200 nits), and while HDR can lower the perceived brightness when you put it down to 0%, it also has a side effect of its own: the brightness will automatically max out upon restart, and you’ll have to manually adjust brightness every single time.

Finally, there’s the issues relating to power management. Silent mode is flat out unusable with how severely throttled the Core Ultra chip is, and in order to have a reasonable usage experience, you effectively have to stick with Balanced power mode. Which, in this case, the 99.9Wh battery won’t get you anywhere far from the socket with just slightly over 2 hours of battery life.

Verdict

While this exact unit Intel sent us is a US-specific model (A2XWJG-614US) with the $5799.99 price tag, Malaysia markets similarly has a model (A2XWJG-471MY) that shares identical specs and costs RM29,999 apiece. This is the kind of price bracket where “money-no-object” is somewhat justified, but even then the MSI Titan 18 HX AI comes with lots of flaws – despite its performance prowess – that prevents it from being a proper halo product.

Special thanks to Intel Malaysia for providing the MSI Titan 18 HX AI (A2XWJG) gaming laptop for this review.