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

[SACbomber]

New conditions:

 

-25 mV undervolt on CPU (ALL cores plus cache through Intel XTU)

+300 MHz GPU memory, +350 MHz GPU core through MSi Afterburner 4.6.6.16555 beta 5

 

Time Spy: 22 391 https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/131773151

Time Spy Extreme: 11 559 https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/131773338

Steel Nomad: 5 523 https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/131772990
Speed Way: 5 924 https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/131772897

 

 

Edited April 23 by SACbomber
got my GPU core and memory backwards

[SACbomber]

+300 MHz GPU memory, +450 MHz GPU core through MSi Afterburner 4.6.6.16555 beta 5

 

This OC setting pushed Speed Way to over 6000: https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/131777578

 

+500 MHz on GPU core crashed the card immediately when entering Speed Way.

Edited April 23 by SACbomber
got my GPU core and memory backwards

[SACbomber]

+450 MHz GPU core is not stable. CP2077 crashes immediately upon starting benchmark. Trying +400 MHz mem, +400 MHz core. Not done yet. Historically GPU mem has been a lot more overclockable than core. More to come.

[SACbomber]

+2000 MHz GPU memory, +400 MHz GPU core, Steel Nomad results compared to stock clocks: https://www.3dmark.com/compare/sn/5571886/sn/5571836

 

Same conditions, Speed Way compared to stock clocks: https://www.3dmark.com/compare/sw/2183503/sw/2183493

 

Expected more gains honestly. This thing can go faster. Can feel it. Shunt mod is the way.

[1610ftw]

11 hours ago, SACbomber said:

+2000 MHz GPU memory, +400 MHz GPU core, Steel Nomad results compared to stock clocks: https://www.3dmark.com/compare/sn/5571886/sn/5571836

 

Same conditions, Speed Way compared to stock clocks: https://www.3dmark.com/compare/sw/2183503/sw/2183493

 

Expected more gains honestly. This thing can go faster. Can feel it. Shunt mod is the way.

 

Shunt modding seems quite risky but indeed probably what this guy has been doing with his MSI Vector:

https://www.3dmark.com/spy/54976166

 

I would not risk it for this kind of performance increase and prefer to have a warranty 🙂

[1610ftw]

By the way, video review from notebookcheck:

 

 

He mentions that the Titan is of much higher build quality than the Asus Scar.  I have to say that this would not even make me consider the Asus any more as I do not like that el cheapo feeling in a laptop that would be a bit less but not that much less than the Titan.

 

In any case the 5070 Ti and the 5080 seem to be the GPUs to get for this generation, the 5090 is just too much and  with 175 to 175W does not give a sufficient performance increase - it would need a TDP boost to at least 200W to make used of its otherwise superior hardware and preferably to 225W.

[win32asmguy]

8 minutes ago, 1610ftw said:

Shunt modding seems quite risky but indeed probably what this guy has been doing with his MSI Vector:

https://www.3dmark.com/spy/54976166

 

I would not risk it for this kind of performance increase and prefer to have a warranty 🙂

 

I have seen some people run their shunts for over a year without an issue. Maybe its fine if cooling is at its peak performance.

 

That Vector 16 is performing better than the X580 in both CPU and GPU. I would probably still opt for a 5090M before shunting.

 

Now the Raider 18 is available locally with 285HX, QHD+ 240hz and 5090M. So far the Titan 18 is only listed with UHD+ 120hz displays. Its a shame as they might as well offer the lower resolution as everyone else does on their flagship models as well.

[1610ftw]

5 minutes ago, win32asmguy said:

 

I have seen some people run their shunts for over a year without an issue. Maybe its fine if cooling is at its peak performance.

 

That Vector 16 is performing better than the X580 in both CPU and GPU. I would probably still opt for a 5090M before shunting.

 

Now the Raider 18 is available locally with 285HX, QHD+ 240hz and 5090M. So far the Titan 18 is only listed with UHD+ 120hz displays. Its a shame as they might as well offer the lower resolution as everyone else does on their flagship models as well.

 

I would assume that shunt modding up to 220W is pretty much safe when temperatures are kept in check and it should give most of the performance improvements.

Still I doubt that it would go unnoticed with the manufacturer so it would void the warranty. As these laptops can also break for other reasons I would want to keep that in mind.

 

That Vector is crazy indeed and probably not in anything close to stock condition, wonder if they managed to do all of that with the stock cooling solution and regular fans but I strongly doubt that:

 

 

It is a shame that MSI still does not have QHD LED panels but then none of the other manufacturers has the MSI panel either so there seems to be some exclusivity involved here. The Raider also has an impressively tacky keyboard this gen which would make it an easy pass even with 4 memory slots:

 

[SACbomber]

1 hour ago, 1610ftw said:

 

Shunt modding seems quite risky but indeed probably what this guy has been doing with his MSI Vector:

https://www.3dmark.com/spy/54976166

 

I would not risk it for this kind of performance increase and prefer to have a warranty 🙂

Would shunt mod my Titan only after the warranty period ends. Not risking anything right now. That core clock is definitely from some sort of mod alright. Disappointed that 3DMark doesn't record the GPU power level.

 

53 minutes ago, win32asmguy said:

 

I have seen some people run their shunts for over a year without an issue. Maybe its fine if cooling is at its peak performance.

 

That Vector 16 is performing better than the X580 in both CPU and GPU. I would probably still opt for a 5090M before shunting.

 

Now the Raider 18 is available locally with 285HX, QHD+ 240hz and 5090M. So far the Titan 18 is only listed with UHD+ 120hz displays. Its a shame as they might as well offer the lower resolution as everyone else does on their flagship models as well.

My 5080 temperature never went above 71 degrees and it usually holds around the high 60s while sustaining 170+ W of power draw. There's some headroom here to take advantage of.

 

The Raider looks incredibly gaudy for sure although that image is simulating the keyboard lighting.

[1610ftw]

24 minutes ago, SACbomber said:

Would shunt mod my Titan only after the warranty period ends. Not risking anything right now. That core clock is definitely from some sort of mod alright. Disappointed that 3DMark doesn't record the GPU power level.

 

My 5080 temperature never went above 71 degrees and it usually holds around the high 60s while sustaining 170+ W of power draw. There's some headroom here to take advantage of.

 

The Raider looks incredibly gaudy for sure although that image is simulating the keyboard lighting.

 

After the warranty period is of course different. It is 3 years over here so that would be a rather long time..

 

It would indeed help if they did include peak power draw of the GPU and CPU and also highest combined power draw. That would explain a lot.

 

As for your temperatures you could check what happens when you keep the GPU temperature at an average of ca. 60C or less in TimeSpy where you now have 67C in your latest run here:

https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/131773151

 

Just as a test with everything else being the same. Nvidia used to downclock quite aggressively in previous generations  and lowering temperatures will probably get you a boost and a couple of hundred extra points in the GPU score.

[win32asmguy]

6 hours ago, SACbomber said:

My 5080 temperature never went above 71 degrees and it usually holds around the high 60s while sustaining 170+ W of power draw. There's some headroom here to take advantage of.

 

The Raider looks incredibly gaudy for sure although that image is simulating the keyboard lighting.

 

I regularly run mine with fans limited to 45db or less, so it can get quite a bit hotter even at lower wattages. I miss the days of monsters like the X170 and GT75 that could sustain good performance with that constraint.

 

Gaudy chassis was the nail in the coffin for the Raider 18 last year too. There is one called a CreatorPro X18 which has the best aesthetics of them all. Membrane white backlit keyboard, regular track pad, gray accents instead of blue or red.

[1610ftw]

11 hours ago, win32asmguy said:

I regularly run mine with fans limited to 45db or less, so it can get quite a bit hotter even at lower wattages. I miss the days of monsters like the X170 and GT75 that could sustain good performance with that constraint.

 

I have a MSI GT76 with the 10900K and the 2080 Super, same gen as the X170, and it also can be set up so that it is astonishingly quiet at about 90% of max performance. It also has a very nice fan control called silent option that I am sure you will remember - those were the days...

 

 

 

11 hours ago, win32asmguy said:

Gaudy chassis was the nail in the coffin for the Raider 18 last year too. There is one called a CreatorPro X18 which has the best aesthetics of them all. Membrane white backlit keyboard, regular track pad, gray accents instead of blue or red.

 

The previous Raider chassis is actually the most stealth and completely black chassis option minus the red accents, at least it is only red and black and nothing else.

Had both the Titan and the Raider and very much prefer the Raider as I am much more of a red than a blue guy plus the Raider was a lot less and had the QHD option.  All black would of course be much better but then MS probably thinks that this is too boring. The keyboard obviously can be any color you want but I remember you had an issue with RGB at bootup that I imagine could be rather annoying in corporate style meetings... 

 

Having lately had the pleasure to check out the CreatorPro 18 this is indeed the one I would want if it wasn't for the fact that it only has two NVME slots which is a really bad joke on behalf of MSI. The chassis is basically a Raider chassis but only in shades of grey / silver and with a bluish-white keyboard and the vapor chamber / 400W power brick that it shares with the Titan. Looks very nice "in person" but the keyboard deck still has more flex than the Titan 18 that is more solid in that area.

[win32asmguy]

2 hours ago, 1610ftw said:

I have a MSI GT76 with the 10900K and the 2080 Super, same gen as the X170, and it also can be set up so that it is astonishingly quiet at about 90% of max performance. It also has a very nice fan control called silent option that I am sure you will remember - those were the days...

 

The previous Raider chassis is actually the most stealth and completely black chassis option minus the red accents, at least it is only red and black and nothing else.

Had both the Titan and the Raider and very much prefer the Raider as I am much more of a red than a blue guy plus the Raider was a lot less and had the QHD option.  All black would of course be much better but then MS probably thinks that this is too boring. The keyboard obviously can be any color you want but I remember you had an issue with RGB at bootup that I imagine could be rather annoying in corporate style meetings... 

 

Having lately had the pleasure to check out the CreatorPro 18 this is indeed the one I would want if it wasn't for the fact that it only has two NVME slots which is a really bad joke on behalf of MSI. The chassis is basically a Raider chassis but only in shades of grey / silver and with a bluish-white keyboard and the vapor chamber / 400W power brick that it shares with the Titan. Looks very nice "in person" but the keyboard deck still has more flex than the Titan 18 that is more solid in that area.

 

The GT76 is another good one too. The older chips are not as efficient or powerful as the new models but they are so much easier to cool in a proper chassis.

 

Yeah I suspect the Raider would be an RGB light show on bootup until Steelseries GG loads (or in the case of booting Linux, always). We can unplug the front bar and put a sticker over the lid logo. I believe the keyboard itself saves the lighting level to hardware so it can just be left at zero brightness upon shutdown too.

 

MSI Feature Manager is a bit closer to what silent option used to be.

 

I guess in the case of the new Raider it really depends on if the display output wiring is actually changed. If its not then its mostly the same feature set as the previous generation but just with double the price.

[SACbomber]

Decided to upload BIOS files for this Titan since MSi removes old versions from their support site. Just in case someone (like myself...lol) needs them in the future. Downgrading BIOS is possible after unlocking a setting in the advanced BIOS.

 

E1824IMS.112

 

E1824IMS.113

 

On 4/24/2025 at 9:18 AM, 1610ftw said:

As for your temperatures you could check what happens when you keep the GPU temperature at an average of ca. 60C or less in TimeSpy

I'll see about doing that somehow. Might start playing with the voltage curve in Afterburner. More to come.

[SACbomber]

More notes:

 

+400 MHz GPU core is not stable. Had no issues running video tasks or benchmarks/gaming but OCCT's power test would catch an error before 5 minutes, guaranteed. Dropped core to +350 MHz and saw no more errors. 

 

CPU wise, running -60 mV on all cores crashed the system at idle. No stress test could crash the system or catch any errors, yet idling with a few tabs open made the system reboot. Thought that was really funny. Dropped my undervolt to -50 mV on all cores and cache. 

 

3D applications would sometimes not make the GPU draw full power for some reason. Boot system, start CP 2077, see 170+ W power draw on GPU, makes sense; close CP 2077 then start it again, only draws 65 W with frames down to 35. Try another 3D application such as another game right afterwards, same issue. Have to reboot to resolve. Seem to have mitigated this issue by setting affected applications to "prefer maximum performance" in nVidia Control Panel's "Manage 3D settings -> Power management mode". Going to call it a driver issue for now. Blackwell drivers have been troublesome since launch. Did check MSI Center, was on Extreme Performance mode all the same.

[SACbomber]

Decided to update my BIOS for fun.

 

Follow the instructions provided in the BIOS ZIP file but read the following for unwritten details. Format a USB drive to FAT32 and load the BIOS file onto it. Boot into BIOS, load optimized defaults then reboot. Here's the fun part: BIOS optimized defaults have VMD enabled and SSDs 0 and 1 RAIDed. Since I removed the RAID configuration and reinstalled Windows 11 on SSD 0 (the PCIe 5 one), the laptop naturally couldn't boot into Windows, with the bootloader throwing an "inaccessible boot device" blue screen. Don't panic. Reboot and enter BIOS by mashing the DEL key. Or you could interecept the reboot after you've loaded optimized defaults so you never see this scary blue screen.

 

Now stick the USB in there and select BIOS update. The BIOS might throw a bunch of warnings at you. I saw messages such as "Battery at 58 < 80. Wait?" and "CPU fan not spinning. Proceed anyway?" Don't worry about them. Ignore these messages (click Yes where appropriate) as long as you have the adapter plugged in. At one point you might see a "Continue with reboot?" message or some such. You want to click No, otherwise the laptop reboots into the Windows bootloader blue screen unless you intercept it.

 

After the BIOS update, again, the laptop reboots, natch. Again you will want to intercept the reboot, enter the BIOS, disable VMD, re-enable overclocking and undervolting and all that. Then finally you can enter Windows! Phew!

 

Regarding the "3D applications would sometimes not make the GPU draw full power": This is most definitely an nVidia driver issue (and hopefully not a VBIOS issue) because force-reloading the driver (through Windows device manager -> select Display adapters -> right click on the RTX 5080 and select Disable device -> monitor goes dark then comes back weird-looking -> don't panic -> right click on the RTX 5080 and select Enable device ->  monitor goes dark then comes back normal-looking) immediately fixes it. Updating to BIOS 113 as described above did nothing. A clean install of nVidia driver 576.28 did nothing. "Prefer maximum performance" in nVidia Control Panel's "Manage 3D settings -> Power management mode" did nothing. Running nvidia-smi -q -d POWER always shows a 175 W power limit.

 

  

On 4/19/2025 at 4:56 AM, 1610ftw said:

you can create your own fan curve in MSI center

Thanks for the awesome tip. Went and set the minimum values of both fans to 10%. Now I get no more fan pulsing.

[SACbomber]

 

Broke the teraFLOPs barrier using custom Linpack Xtreme settings. 

[1610ftw]

On 5/7/2025 at 3:36 AM, SACbomber said:

[...]Went and set the minimum values of both fans to 10%. Now I get no more fan pulsing.

 

I think that the fan control is a big relief as pulsing is worse than a certain minimum level of fan noise that can be tolerated. 

How are the fans controlled this gen - do they actually get more quiet below 25 or is that still the minimum and below that they do not reduce their noise level any further? 

 

[SACbomber]

On 5/9/2025 at 3:02 AM, 1610ftw said:

How are the fans controlled this gen - do they actually get more quiet below 25 or is that still the minimum and below that they do not reduce their noise level any further?

Can tell you that having the fan speeds set to 25% sure sounds different than 10%.

[1610ftw]

33 minutes ago, SACbomber said:

Can tell you that having the fan speeds set to 25% sure sounds different than 10%.

 

That is very cool as for the last gen nothing changed between 1 and 25! Sent that to MSI as feedback and also the lack of fan blades and this year there are more fan blades and also the fan speed has a bigger range - well done!

[SACbomber]

Regarding the "3D applications would sometimes not make the GPU draw full power": This might not be a power draw problem. This is looking more like a "sometimes the GPU core clock wouldn't go above 960 MHz" problem. Normally see 2200+ MHz in demanding games like CP2077. Seen 2500+ on occasion. Happens with or without any GPU (core/memory) overclocking.

 

Base clock of the RTX 5080 laptop is 975 MHz. Figure 960 MHz is too close to 975 to be convenient. 

 

Don't know what to do anymore aside from reloading the graphics driver when it shows up. Hope nVidia is working on it. Blackwell sure is looking to have had quite a bad launch.

 

On 5/10/2025 at 3:53 PM, 1610ftw said:

That is very cool as for the last gen nothing changed between 1 and 25! Sent that to MSI as feedback and also the lack of fan blades and this year there are more fan blades and also the fan speed has a bigger range - well done!

Good to hear! Hope MSi provides BIOS/EC updates to fix that in its older laptops.

[br2]

Thank you and @win32asmguy for the great docs. Sounds like you're both happy enough with your choice. Doesn't help me make the decision though...

I really need to move before the pre-tariff stock is gone. Eeny meeny...

[SACbomber]

2 hours ago, br2 said:

Thank you and @win32asmguy for the great docs. Sounds like you're both happy enough with your choice. Doesn't help me make the decision though...

I really need to move before the pre-tariff stock is gone. Eeny meeny...

Glad to help! Whatcha looking for in a laptop? Telling ya, that Raider 18 HX sure looks interesting with the 9955HX3D processor and RTX 5090 laptop. 

[br2]

1 minute ago, SACbomber said:

Glad to help! Whatcha looking for in a laptop? Telling ya, that Raider 18 HX sure looks interesting with the 9955HX3D processor and RTX 5090 laptop. 

I just pulled the trigger on a 580 from Xotic. I have a 2 year old Titan now. I'm not going to tweak anything, just want max stock performance.

128 gig, uhd/5090, 2tb Samsung 9100 system drive, 4tb 990 pro raid 0 storage. Don't want to say out loud what i spent on it... ouch.

[win32asmguy]

3 hours ago, br2 said:

Thank you and @win32asmguy for the great docs. Sounds like you're both happy enough with your choice. Doesn't help me make the decision though...

I really need to move before the pre-tariff stock is gone. Eeny meeny...

 

I actually ended up returning the X580 to Sager. Primarily due to its lack of tuning features for the price. I expect undervolting and memory tuning to be available.

 

Back in late February I had also pre-ordered a Hydroc G2 from Eluktronics. It shipped last week and this laptop has it all. Here is its run down of good points:

• Premamod bios - full CPU and memory tuning
• Tuning of GPU TDP and dynamic boost configuration up to 175W
• 420W Power supply
• 2x SODIMM with supplemental cooling for better memory tuning
• Full sized right shift key and more solid keyboard with better travel
• miniLED with local dimming switch
• TB4 port wired to iGPU (also mDP and HDMI wired to dGPU)
• modular GPU board
• excellent fan noise - no whine, along with full fan curve and hysteresis control
• decent speakers (unsure of their wattage)
• boot override configurability for all RGB zones

Here is a run of AIDA64 at 6400 CL38 Gear2. I guess there is the Raider 18 with 285HX + 5090M + QHD+ at Micro Center for $4100 but to be honest I don't like its RGB configuration support so its not something I would be interested in regardless of its performance. There is still no solid information about if its TB5 ports can be driven by the iGPU either.