MSI Titan 18 HX A14V – the Boat Anchor of a Retro-Galaxy Laptop I: Performance Profile, Sound, and Trackpad
The Titan is called Extra as its name suggests it should be. I’d love to know who actually buys these kinds of halo laptops, which are simply not made for mere mortals and seem to be a bit of a dying breed — the days of laptops like the absurd Acer Predator 21 X are long gone now.
The Titan 18 HX sports an 18-inch Mini LED display with 3840 x 2400 resolution and 120Hz refresh, Intel’s new 14th Gen Core i9 14900HX processor, an RTX 4080 or 4090 GPU with DLSS 3.5 support, up to 128GB of DDR5 RAM in its four slots, three M.2 SSD slots (one of which is PCIe Gen 5), a six-speaker audio setup, a SteelSeries-made mechanical keyboard, and a new vapor chamber cooler with a slick-looking exhaust design on the laptop’s elevated underside.
It has a lot of ports, with two Thunderbolt 4 /usb-c ports, three HDMI 2.1s, and a full-size SD card reader. While all of this costs an eye-watering $5,000, it also weighs a shoulder-tiring 7.94 pounds / 3.6kg. Compared to other newMSI laptops, this one has an intelligent performance profile that will adjust settings based on whether you are playing a game or doing other tasks. Almost nobody buying this monster is going to do anything other than play games with it and don’t move it around. This desktop replacement machine is meant to mostly live in one spot and play games as it lets its colorful peacock feathers of RGB lighting shine.
MSI is debuting a bunch of new laptops at CES 2024, but none are quite as over the top as the Titan 18 HX A14V, a boat anchor of a gaming laptop that costs as much as a beater car and has one of the coolest (or most garish, depending on your preference) trackpad designs I’ve ever seen.
Intel hasn’t offered up any comparisons to its 13th Gen chips. We didn’t find the 14th Gen laptop chips to be as good as the best gaming chip on the market – it was a refresh in name and nature. We have to wait on the reviews to find out how Intel handles mobile this year.
Core count on theCore i7 variant will be bumped up much like the desktop versions. The core i7 1470HX has 20 cores, eight performance and 12 efficiency. The efficiency cores of that model are four more efficient than the 13th Gen Core i7 model.
Intel has chosen to compare its latest Core i9-14900HX with AMD’s Ryzen 9 7945HX — the first mobile processor to feature AMD’s 3D V-Cache. At 1080p, Intel’s i9-14900HX beats the 7945HX in most of Intel’s tests, with the exception of Horizon Zero Dawn, Cyberpunk 2077, and Red Dead Redemption 2.
