titan MSi Titan 18 HX AI 2025 (Intel Arrow Lake/nVidia Blackwell)

[SACbomber]

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+.

[SACbomber]

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.

[SACbomber]

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. 

[SACbomber]

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

[incendery]

fantastic post very well written, thanks for your insight into this one 🙂 

[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?

[song_1118]

Thank you for sharing!
Very nice photo!

 

MSI： 

You need 4 M.2 SSDs, right?
I'll arrange it for you, PCIe SSD5.0 also comes with a heat sink!
You don't accept 3600 MT/s of memory, do you?
I cut off two memory slots with a single blow and went straight to 6400 MT/s!

 

Me：

Ah ah ah! I still need four memory slots!
 

[win32asmguy]

On 4/16/2025 at 7:29 PM, SACbomber said:

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.

 

The X580 does use a shared heatpipe cooler, so both fans can assist both the CPU and GPU. Its actually doing far better than the previous year X370 model which was a bit thinner and smaller. This one also has lots of mesh on the bottom panel so modding it as you did on your Asus ROG is probably not necessary.

 

With the X580 the big difference is just with tuning. The bios is locked so no undervolting or other configuration beyond modifying ratios, PL1/PL2 and VR currrent in Performance mode. The RAM is also limited to JEDEC profiles so no XMP or manual memory tuning.

 

Its otherwise pretty good regarding expansion and configurability!

[qadhi79]

Excellent write-up and congratulations on your new purchase.

 

Did you manage to remove RAID 0 successfully?

 

 

[song_1118]

2 hours ago, qadhi79 said:

Excellent write-up and congratulations on your new purchase.

 

Did you manage to remove RAID 0 successfully?

 

 

Titans18 HX AI 2025 has four SSD slots, one of which supports PCIe 5.0.

If I were to use it, I would choose one of the following three arrangements:

 

1. Enable VMD mode, install the operating system on the PCIe 5.0 SSD, and use the other three PCIe 4.0 SSDs to form RAID 5.

2. Enable VMD mode, install the operating system on the PCIe 5.0 SSD, use two PCIe 4.0 SSDs to form RAID 1, and install a spare operating system on another PCIe 4.0 SSD.

3. Disable VMD mode, install the operating system on the PCIe 5.0 SSD, and use the other three PCIe 4.0 SSDs freely.

 

I will definitely not assemble a RAID with PCIe 5.0 SSD and PCIe 4.0 SSD together.

[SACbomber]

Got more info. Minimum display brightness is measured at 143 cd/m2 which is still really bright.

 

Speaking of the display, you know what, I take back what I said about the MSi True Color software. It's made in partnership with Portrait Displays, maker of Calman. If you're a photographer or videographer, or have read in-depth TV/monitor reviews then you will know Calman. True Color has a highly automated calibration tool. Bought a supported screen calibrator and ran the tool. Fantastic. Forget ccProfiler, forget ArgyllCMS, forget DisplayCAL, forget about setting WLED vs. PFS-phosphor. If you're lucky enough to own a display supported by MSi True Color, buy a supported screen calibrator and all your color problems will disappear.

 

One obvious difference between the Balanced and Extreme Performance (EP) modes is that nVidia Dynamic Boost is essentially disabled in Balanced. Was running the Cyberpunk 2077 and Final Fantasy XV benchmarks with MSi Afterburner OSD and was wondering why GPU power capped at 149.7 W. Turns out I was somehow back in Balanced mode. Switched to EP and behold, GPU boosting to 172 W. Earned a fair-few frames in the CC77 bench.

 

To check this for yourself, open cmd/Powershell and run nvidia-smi -q -d POWER. Take note of the following:

 

In EP mode, Current Power Limit = Requested Power Limit = Max Power Limit = 175 W, confirmed running the aforementioned benches. In Balanced mode, Max Power Limit is still 175 W but both Current and Requested are at 150 W, again confirmed running the aforementioned benches.

 

Speaking of benchmarks, I'll have proper numbers soon. Promise. Ran Cinebench 2024 for 10 minutes while looking at HWinfo and saw the CPU sustaining 200 W. Amazed. Flirted briefly with a Dell Precision which had an i9-11950H. Could barely sustain 75 W. Think Intel was serious when they boasted about how much more power-efficient Arrow Lake is compared to the previous generation.

 

Still, this 285HX is power limited. Short term power is 220 W, long term power is 200 W. At least it can sustain that 200 W. 

 

11 hours ago, song_1118 said:

Thank you for sharing!
Very nice photo!

 

MSI： 

You need 4 M.2 SSDs, right?
I'll arrange it for you, PCIe SSD5.0 also comes with a heat sink!
You don't accept 3600 MT/s of memory, do you?
I cut off two memory slots with a single blow and went straight to 6400 MT/s!

 

Me：

Ah ah ah! I still need four memory slots!

Thank you. Don't think 4 sticks can run at 6400 MT/s. 4400 or 5600, sure.

 

3 hours ago, win32asmguy said:

 

The X580 does use a shared heatpipe cooler, so both fans can assist both the CPU and GPU. Its actually doing far better than the previous year X370 model which was a bit thinner and smaller. This one also has lots of mesh on the bottom panel so modding it as you did on your Asus ROG is probably not necessary.

 

With the X580 the big difference is just with tuning. The bios is locked so no undervolting or other configuration beyond modifying ratios, PL1/PL2 and VR currrent in Performance mode. The RAM is also limited to JEDEC profiles so no XMP or manual memory tuning.

 

Its otherwise pretty good regarding expansion and configurability!

Good to know about the heatpipe configuration in the X580. Stand corrected. Wonder why they didn't just go with a vapor chamber instead of laying nine pipes.

 

Disappointed about that locked BIOS, though. Thought Clevo was a tweaker-friendly brand. The Titan's BIOS has a massive amount of options. Certain I can brick this thing through the BIOS.

 

2 hours ago, qadhi79 said:

Excellent write-up and congratulations on your new purchase.

 

Did you manage to remove RAID 0 successfully?

 

 

Thank you. Yes I removed RAID 0. Delete the virtual disk and disable VMD in the advanced BIOS. Note that you will have to repartition and reinstall Windows after doing that. I wanted to reinstall Windows out of the box anyway so I wasn't bothered. Didn't know it came with RAID 0 though.

[1610ftw]

Very cool to hear from an owner of the new Titan 18 - 4 SSD slots with up to 128GB memory might be tempting if I did not have an intense hatred for the blue accents on this one. With 200W sustained it will be interesting to hear how far you can go in CB R23 with and without undervolting.

 

About the fans I agree that having them turn on and off is a big annoyance but if you use extreme performance mode then you can create your own fan curve in MSI center which indeed is a less than great piece of software with a look that I guess appeals to 12 year old wannabe gamers.

 

Anyway, with your own fan curve you can let them run at a certain base speed at all times which makes for a smoother user experience and it is also better for memory, SSDs and chipset temperatures.

 

Would be interesting to hear how good the new fans are - do they still run at the same speed between 1 and 25 or do they go down further?

The new design with more blades was long overdue so this is great news!