SACbomber

Traveling with the Titan. Keyboard is outstanding but not all keys have these Cherry mechanical switches. Numpad is not mechanical, which is a bit jarring when I need to quickly punch in numbers alongside text. MSi Center is a horrible piece of software. Slow to start and slow to respond. Set it to Extreme Performance mode + Discrete GPU. Not launching it otherwise. Steelseries GG (controls keyboard and touchpad lighting) is also a horrible piece of software. At least it made the default keyboard lighting a lot dimmer, somehow. MSi True Color is the most horrible piece of software among these. Somehow ruined my display's color output. Imagine a flaky component video input and you might have an idea of what I saw. Uninstalled True Color, uninstalled MSi Center, used MSi's own "Clean Center Master" program to wipe the rest - twice, uninstalled the nVidia driver using DDU in safe mode, reinstalled it all... Now the color looks right. Sort of. sRGB mode looks too warm. Need to calibrate the screen but my calibrator isn't compatible with miniLED so have to get another one soon. Fans pulse on and off. Strange noise profile. Minimum screen brightness is still too bright. Might try a third party tool to drop it further. Has some visible miniLED bloom if I present some edge cases (white traces on black background). Doesn't seem so bad. Setting up some benchmarks. Saw this funny thing in HWinfo: I'm sorry? XTU says no such thing: Where's HWinfo's "Power Limit Exceeded" coming from? Ideas? ThrottleStop does not support Arrow Lake. Tried it, doesn't even show E-cores, P-core undervolts don't stick. Latest XTU works well. Applied a very easy -15 mV to all cores and cache. Could go a bit further but read that desktop Arrow Lakes can't go much further than -50 or -60 mV so maybe I'll try -30 mV next. That i7-6700HQ in my old ASUS ROG took -130 mV like a champ. Won the silicon lottery with that one?

Benchmarks are coming. Traveling again this weekend. See why I needed a new laptop now?

Why this and not a... ASUS ROG, since my last one lasted a decade (and more - it's still in use elsewhere)? Don't like how ASUS uses liquid metal in its laptops. Least not their poor application of LM. Horror stories and shocking photos abound. Also saw how Gamer Nexus revealed their downright fraudulent warranty/RMA behavior. Acer Predator? Back when the nVidia GTX 1000 series laptops came out, buddy of mine in the air force bought a top-end Acer Predator laptop for something like 4 grand at the PX. That thing would play "battlefield" sound effects (gunshots and such) each time he turned it on and there was no way to turn it off. Their gaudy design also seriously turned me away. Alienware New Area 51? Wasn't available immediately. Also didn't like the glass panel on the bottom. What was Dell thinking? Also all the ports are at the back on the chassis. Interesting machine otherwise. Razer Blade 18? Horror stories of poor Razer quality abound. When I built that Sandy Bridge PC I bought a Razer keyboard and a Razer mouse. Scroll wheel failed fairly quickly. Keyboard had a removable USB cable design and the contact went to hell also fairly quickly. Razer warranty gave me the runaround. Probably worse than their product quality. Also that Blade 18 promises 280 W of combined power, the highest of all current-gen gaming laptops, but I have a feeling that it requires their proprietary cooling pad to attain that level. Also didn't like the glass panel on the bottom. What was Razer thinking? AORUS MASTER 18? Wasn't available immediately. Read some review that said the 16 (not 18) was all plastic, which is a serious turnoff since the previous generation (AORUS 17X) was all metal. Interesting machine otherwise. Quad fan with two big ones spitting hot air out and two little ones sucking cool air in. Flashy design though. An eagle flexing its arm? Clevo X580? Read about this thing only after placing the order for this Titan. Really interesting machine though I don't like the split heatpipe solution. Looks like the CPU and the GPU each get their own pipes and their own single fan, instead of one massive vapor chamber shared among them. That old ASUS ROG of mine had a vapor chamber and didn't have cooling problems, surprising since the fan intakes are very restricted. Took a holesaw to that ASUS to open up holes right where the fans are and dropped loaded temperature by twenty freaking degrees. @win32asmguy We need to have a head-to-head benchmark competition, your X580 with 275HX/5090 and my Titan with 285HX/5080. Honestly might return this Titan to get an X580. MSi Raider, basically a cheaper Titan? Wasn't available immediately. Still isn't. Heatpipes instead of a vapor chamber, might not matter much really. Ryzen 9955HX3D looks like a really interesting CPU though.

Note to anyone looking for this info: on MSi laptops with the Copilot key such as this Titan, there is no "Right Ctrl" because it's the Copilot key, natch. To access the "hidden advanced BIOS options", the key combination is Fn + Copilot + Right Shift + Left Alt + F2 Have to do it each time you go into the BIOS. Cracked it open and pulled the PCIe 4 drive before even booting the stock system. Did that because I wanted to clean install and I know the Windows installer sometimes likes to put the bootloader on another drive. Didn't know that it came with a 2TB PCIe 5 + 2TB PCIe 4 in RAID 0 format. Got a message even before getting into the BIOS, stating that the VMD controller is reporting an error. Deleted the existing virtual disk in BIOS but Windows 11 installer didn't see the remaining PCIe 5 drive because VMD controller is [Enabled] in the BIOS. This is normal. It must be disabled. Can't disable VMD controller without activating "advanced BIOS". Even after activating it, the actual setting is elsewhere. Go to Advanced - System Agent (SA) configuration - VMD and disable it there. Windows 11 installer correctly saw the lone 2TB PCIe 5 drive after that. Also enabled overclocking, disabled CFG lock, disabled undervolt protection, disabled all the virtualization stuff while in there. Speaking of stock drives, here's the 2TB PCIe 5 one: And PCIe 4: CPU-Z: So MSi put in some nice Micron CSODIMM sticks. Think they're OEM versions of these ones. Thought they only included old SODIMM sticks and that I had to buy my own modern CSODIMM sticks to upgrade. Ran AIDA64 to confirm that they really did run at 6400 out of the box: Note the 3191.9 MHz memory bus. Times two for DDR and it's basically 6400. This is really nice since you don't need to manually fiddle with XMPs and memory overclocking options in the BIOS to get the stock RAM sticks to run at their fastest. Such is the case for many other recent laptops, even some of the previous MSi models. Good job MSi, one less thing to tweak. GPU-Z: Fun fact with this 5080: with the newest driver downloaded from nVidia, nVidia Control Panel's System Information page showed that it does not have Dynamic Boost, even though Maximum Graphics Power was 175 W, as promised by MSi (150 W + 25 W through Dynamic Boost). Uninstalled that one and installed the lastest one posted on MSi's support site instead. Getting Dynamic Boost to correctly appear now.

It's here. First impression: it's thin! Might find it funny describing a Titan with the word "thin" but at 1-1/4 inches it's actually thinner than that Sandy Bridge HP Elitebook I've been using to tide me over. Overall design is decently understated without flashy colors or lighting. Visibly it's not a serious business laptop but it doesn't shout "I AM A GAMING LAPTOP!" either. Think it looks much better than the flashy designs used by some other manufacturers (like ASUS...lol). NotebookCheck has photos of the previous generation. Not much changed on the outside for this generation. Biggest change is that there is no longer a "factory seal" sticker on the bottom over one of the screw holes. Cracked it open the usual way. Here you see the innards. Another big change is the fans. MSi made no mention of the fans in this Titan but they now have denser blades. Blades themselves are also thinner and made of metal. I'm certain you can cut yourself on them. Compare with the photo on NotebookCheck. Here's a closeup of the new cooling solution for the PCIe 5 drive. Just a thin heatpipe and some hardware. An enterprising individual can easily fabricate his own. I'm sure the forum gurus modding their old Clevos and Alienwares can fab this thing. MSi put thick heat pads under the installed drives (can sort of peep that light blue thing under the PCIe 5 drive in the above photo). Every drive slot has them installed. Might work for single-side drives like the ones MSi includes but they don't play well with my double-side drives. Drives become bent if I try to force them down. Running my two other drives without those pads. Bottom cover is pretty floppy but the chassis is stiff and rigid. It's all alloy! Hinges feel smooth and tight. Did read that some of the MSi laptops have problems with their hinges. Don't think that's the case with the Titan. Pulled this photo of the previous generation's top cover off eBay (not my photo): Top cover hinges look like two big stampings that go almost halfway up the cover, which is an alloy stamping. MSi likely used a special adhesive to bond the hinge stampings to the cover. Proper structural adhesives can be stronger than spot-welds though I'm not saying that's what MSi used here. Silly huge 400W power brick. Put my phone on top so you get the idea. The integrated cable strap is annoying. Must cut it off if you want to remove it. Also there's not a lot of cord between the brick and the plug. MSi Click Bios: Cobbled together a gaming PC back when Sandy Bridge just came out. Used an MSi mobo in there, which had Click Bios. Absolutely nothing has changed apart from the arrangement of the interface. Using the same old ugly font even. What a nostalgia trip. What else... MSi includes in the box an M99 Pro mouse, a "dual drive" which is a USB stick with two ends, one USB-A and other USB-C, and a little black dragon keychain/charm. All to make you feel better about putting down the equivalent of a used Civic on a laptop. The "dual drive" isn't anything special, with promised read and write speeds of barely 120MB/s and 40MB/s, respectively. With the availability of TB5 ports on this laptop, I'm holding out for a nice portable TB5 SSD in the future. Certain they can get speeds to 7000+.

Movie coming this year, could be fun!

Had a brief flirt with a Precision so might be able to help. Did you follow this guide? Think the varstores are different for each laptop/BIOS version. Blindly following any one guide means you possibly modified some varstore you didn't mean to. Needed to dump bios and analyze the dump with some custom tools. You remember what varstores you modified?

Thanks! Once I open a new thread over at the MSI board, I'll post some benchmark results (3DMark/Cinebench/AIDA64 and such) and we can go from there. Also, Kobayashi! Nice.

Hi everyone, Rick here, or just SACbomber. A bit about me: I've been using an old ASUS ROG laptop (i7-6700HQ/GTX 980M) for the last decade or so. Old Elitebook with a Sandy Bridge and AMD Caicos before that. Games? Meh, just drop the graphics until things are smooth. Used "3D Analyze" all the way back then to force SW TnL to run STALKER SoC so low graphics are just a throwback for me. Basically checked out of the entire PC hardware scene until that thing could no longer keep up with video upscaling (realtime DVD resolution to 4K using neural-net algorithms). Started researching PC hardware a few months ago and I went "i-NINE? Gen 14? Core Ultra? P-cores and E-cores? Pardon me?" Was waiting for Alienware to blow out their M18 R2 (14900HX/RTX 4090) but Dell just quietly discontinued them instead. So, bought an MSI Titan 18 HX AI (Core Ultra 9-285HX/RTX 5080). Haven't received it yet. You'll see me over at the MSI board once I get it. I'll post photos, system info, benchmark results and such. Why not a desktop at that price? I move too often. Maybe we can have a benchmark competition among machines of this class, such as the Razer Blade 18, AORUS MASTER 18, Alienware New Area 51 and such. Cheers and see y'all around!