MSI Titan 18 HX AI A2XW Review: Stunning Display Meets Unmatched Power

There are those who appreciate portable devices… and then there are those who desire an all-in-one powerhouse. MSI’s Titan series caters to the latter, especially those consumers who demand the absolute best. Unbridled power at its core.

With the arrival of new chips from Intel and NVIDIA, we turn our attention to the next-generation MSI Titan 18 HX AI, which promises to maximize the capabilities of these latest components.

Technical Specifications

Design

As always with the Titan series, we are presented with an extremely bulky and heavy machine. This is more about setting up a powerful battle station than casually typing on your lap. Just imagine, we’re dealing with a device that’s 3.2 centimeters thick and weighs 3.6 kilograms.

The MSI Titan 18 HX AI is undoubtedly a behemoth, yet it doesn’t compromise on aesthetics. Despite its size, it features a metallic chassis made from a magnesium and aluminum alloy, boasting a two-tone color scheme: black on the top and light gray on the bottom.

The build quality is solid, yet one must first get used to its imposing nature before appreciating the subtleties, which lean towards the stereotypical gamer design whose general disappearance creates a rather interesting form of nostalgia.

Keyboard and Touchpad

The MSI Titan 18 HX AI is among the few to feature a very low profile mechanical keyboard developed with SteelSeries. The responsiveness is outstanding, the activation distance is excellent, and the overall experience is delightful.

The same can be said for the touchpad, at least theoretically. The Titan 18 HX AI includes a haptic feedback system, where the diagonal blends seamlessly into the design. The vibration feedback could be a tad more subtle, but the use is nonetheless pleasant.

Ports

On the rear of the device, you’ll find the power connector, an HDMI 2.1 port supporting 4K at 120 Hz, and a 2.5G Ethernet port. On the right, there are two USB A 3.2 Gen 2 ports and an SD card reader. On the left, two Thunderbolt 5 ports, another USB A 3.2 Gen 2, and a combo jack are positioned.

It’s safe to say nothing is missing. Especially since all connectors are performing at their maximum capability, with Thunderbolt 5, full-performance HDMI 2.1, and 2.5 Gbps Ethernet. For a huge gaming station like this, it’s exactly what you need.

Webcam and Audio

The MSI Titan 18 HX AI features a small 1080p HDR-compatible sensor. It’s neither particularly bad nor impressive. Light dynamics are roughly good, but sharpness suffers from a lack of pixels, and the processing is quite noisy. However, this isn’t critical for configurations that don’t focus on these finer details.

The audio setup is very good. The sound is clear, the bass is relatively respected, and the only thing missing is a slightly more defined and broader stage, but let’s not diminish our enjoyment.

Screen

In our test configuration, the MSI Titan 18 HX AI features a large 18-inch Mini LED display. It supports a resolution of 3840 x 2400 pixels, which is 4K in a 16:10 ratio. It has a maximum refresh rate of 120 Hz that can drop to as low as 25 Hz. The screen is non-touch but is treated with an anti-glare coating.

Under our probe and using the Calman Color Calibration software by Portrait Displays, we found a color volume coverage of 165% for sRGB and 111% for DCI-P3. The maximum brightness was measured at 1200 cd/m², which is exceptionally good and one of the major strengths of Mini LED panels.

The average delta E00 was measured at 3.04, on the brink of perfection, with a maximum deviation of 5.92 in the royal blue tones. The average color temperature was measured at 6226K, very close to the NTSC standard of 6500K. In conclusion, the panel is bright, very pleasing to the eye, and excellently calibrated. The only possible improvement might be a higher refresh rate, but it’s hard to complain when the display is this enjoyable.

Software

As usual, some bloatware comes pre-installed, including Norton Antivirus, which is just as annoying as its counterpart McAfee. It’s wise to uninstall these before using the machine.

On the other hand, we are always pleased to find MSI Center, especially the AI mode for power management, which remains very competent. The software is easy to handle, explains its features well, and allows anyone to take control of their experience… or to completely ignore it in favor of AI.

Performance

The MSI Titan 18 HX AI model of 2025 is powered by the Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX, the latest ultra-powerful generation from the blue team. It’s a 24-core SoC — 8 performance cores, 16 efficiency cores — that can turbo up to 5.5 GHz. It is supported by 64 GB of DDR5 RAM at 6400 MHz, with a huge storage space of 6 TB in RAID 0 thanks to 3 M.2 PCIe Gen 4 ports and 1 M.2 PCIe Gen 5 port available on this machine. And, importantly, it features the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 at its full TGP of 175W.

Benchmarks

In Cinebench 2024, we observed scores of 2198 points in multi-core and 133 points in single-core.

This is simply the most powerful mobile processor we have tested to date. We’ll wait for AMD’s X3D mobile models to compare, but Intel has really impressed us here.

In the 3D department, we observed 6306 points on Speed Way and 6037 on Steel Nomad. Again, these are expected performances, showing improvement over the mobile RTX 5080 but not a particularly significant leap compared to the mobile 4090 before it.

The storage performance greatly benefits from RAID 0, offering speeds worthy of PCIe Gen 5 despite the multiple bandwidths available.

In-Game

The gaming performance is quite impressive. While you must rely on DLSS to enjoy fully enabled path tracing in 4K, and not necessarily at interesting framerates, it’s important to note that these are maximum settings. And without ray-tracing, we consistently see performance at 60 FPS on these extremely demanding games without depending on frame generation.

For Creatives

In the Adobe suite, for photo editing, we observe performance quite typical of the latest generation NVIDIA GPUs. This field doesn’t change much from card to card. For video editing under Procyon, the mobile RTX 5090 integrated here sits precisely between the desktop 4090 and the desktop 5090. It’s simply excellent.

In Blender, the results are less encouraging. Here, Monster seems to be choked to a third of what we expected from it, while junkshop could easily be double. Only Classroom is performing as expected.

Cooling and Noise

We’re dealing with MSI, meaning there’s no hesitation in pushing the limits, even if it means the machine gets hot. Indeed, the MSI Titan 18 HX comfortably reaches 58°C under synthetic full load, and the fans are quite audible at full speed. You’ve been warned: you’re investing in a product that prioritizes power above all.

Battery Life

The MSI Titan 18 HX AI includes a large 99.9 Wh battery, the maximum allowed on airplanes and hence in laptops these days. The hefty 400W power adapter with a proprietary port is a sign of a very power-hungry PC.

Unsurprisingly, we found battery life to range between 2 and 3 hours for typical office use. The batteries here are more akin to built-in UPS systems than anything else, as is always the case with this type of configuration designed to be stationary primarily.

Price and Availability

In our test configuration, the MSI Titan 18 HX AI is sold for no less than 7099 euros. The starting price for this product is 6552.48 euros.