The MSI Raider 18 HX Distills the Best and Worst of Gaming Laptops

I’m curious about the folk with deep-pockets who dare hope to remain budget conscious, even while they’re considering a $4,000 laptop like the MSI Raider 18 HX. Will those same consumers balk at spending another $100? How about $500? What about $1,000 or more? What would you pay for peak performance? How much would you spend for perfection? Because the 18-inch gaming laptop certainly has its share of drawbacks—many of the same flaws shared between practically every large gaming laptop released this year.

I started out 2025 by reviewing the MSI Titan 18 HX, a monstrous and monsterously powerful gaming laptop that packed in everything I could ever want in a desktop replacement device. Its more-than $5,000 price tag is what helps you come back down to earth. Due to tariffs, MSI routinely boosted the costs of its gaming behemoth over and over throughout 2025. So now, the Raider 18 HX costs closer to $4,000 (it’s $3,740 on Amazon at the time of this writing) for a model whose specs include an Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX CPU, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 GPU, and a whopping 64GB of RAM and 2TB of storage. Laptops on the whole cost more now than they did in January. It’s a bad situation for everybody. It’s likely to get worse next year.

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There are glaring obvious reasons why the Raider 18 HX is appealing. Hell, my model—the A2XWIG-1009US—sports an 18-inch 4K mini LED display. You don’t see that too often, even on this size of laptop (probably because it just makes the whole thing cost more). It’s the main reason you go for the Raider 18 HX above something like an Alienware 18 Area-51 or an Asus ROG Strix Scar 18, even though those laptops feel better to use. In that way, the Raider 18 HX feels like a one-trick pony. It’s for gamers who want to feel like gamers, never mind whether you’re getting the best possible experience for your rmoney.

We don’t know what next year’s laptop designs may yield, but I’m not expecting anything spectacular. The jump to RTX 50-series GPUs brought us our most powerful gaming laptops yet. Unless AMD makes a Ryzen 7 9850X3D CPU for notebooks, that probably won’t change.

Do you need a 4K screen on a laptop when the mini LED isn’t going to offer you the best image quality? Will taking up so much space on your desk matter if the keyboard doesn’t feel that premium? That’s up to each buyer. If all you want is performance, then the Raider 18 HX has your back. And considering what’s on the horizon, maybe all high-end gaming laptops will cost $4,000 not long from now.

When you’re this large, you better look good too

When I first tipped open the lid of the Raider 18 HX, the first word that came into my head was “plastic.†First time buyers are greeted with black plastic bezels and a black plastic palm rest. Even the small red fan embellishments that scream “gamer†aesthetic are plastic. The internal components, such as the fan grills along the rear shelf, are aluminum, so I’m not inferring the laptop will melt under stress any time soon. Instead, the few trims on the interior panel feel far too Mattel for a $4,000 gaming rig.

The plastic parts don’t make this laptop any less weighty at 7.94 pounds. When you factor in the 400W power brick that comes with the laptop, you come to realize quickly that this is not a machine for taking out on the town—at least not if you don’t want a back and shoulders workout. The weight should come as expected. Even a 16-inch model like the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i needs a similar-sized 400W doorstop for power. What’s less acceptable is the keyboard. The keys feel fine to type on, but they’re on the squishy, less impactful side with their shallow travel.

Also, surprisingly for a laptop of this size, the per-key RGB behind the keyboard really isn’t as bright as I would want, even in dimly lit environments. You need to change the keyboard lighting through the SteelSeries GG app that comes pre-installed. At least, the Raider 18 HX is free of other bloatware except for MSI Center, which is one of a few ways you can change the laptop’s performance settings.

Even if the chassis doesn’t feel premium, the port and connectivity selection on offer definitely is. The device comes with three USB-A on the sides plus two Thunderbolt 5 USB-C ports. That means the laptop can accept 240W of power delivery through its sides if you don’t want to go for the 400W brick (however, you’ll still need it for gaming). There’s an additional SD card slot, a headphone jack, and an HDMI and Ethernet port on the rear panel. It’s the perfect placement of ports, meaning the power goes out the back while the sides are left free for all your dongles and peripherals.

4K display isn’t everything

I won’t knock anybody for wanting the pixel density of a 4K display, especially at this size of laptop. If you’re stacking an RTX 5080 GPU inside a laptop, you damn well should want the highest-end display. But that’s not the only thing you should consider about screens, especially for a premium.

The mini LED screen on the Raider 18 HX looks fair in most dimly lit rooms. The colors are vibrant, and the blacks are deeper than the “dark gray†you may find with other LCD-type displays. That being said, mini LED is the type of screen with a matte layer that doesn’t so much as reduce glare as it diffuses it and spreads it across the screen. In a room with a few lights in the background, you may see distortion that could completely mar the viewing experience, depending on your desk placement.

In the right conditions, a Raider 18 HX will be a great small-scale all-in-one entertainment experience. The laptop contains four 2W speakers alongside two 2W woofers made by Dynaudio. What came out of the laptop’s audio suite can be both loud and bassy, without any of the unnecessary spine-tingling lows that don’t actually impact immersion. The speaker setup is so good I didn’t imagine I’d need to reach for anything but the more expensive soundbars to enhance it. You’d need thick thighs if you imagine putting this beast on your laptop to watch Netflix. If you do, it will offer a solid miniature theater so long as you can ignore the fan sounds blasting out the back.

Does extra RAM mean extra performance?

The current memory crunch is making every PC buyer antsy—both for the future of desktops and laptops. RAM is going for such a premium, you’re probably wondering how much 64GB of RAM makes a difference compared to many other laptops from this year that only have 32GB. In my tests, the Raider 18 HX does slightly better for base productivity tasks. As for gaming—what you’re paying $4,000 for—how much better more RAM gets you depends on the game.

For instance, in Geekbench 6 and Cinebench 2024 tests, the CPU scored just above that from other laptops like the ROG Strix Scar 18. And yet, in 3DMark tests, the Raider 18 HX underperformed slightly compared to many of the other 16- and 18-inch gaming laptops I reviewed this year—all with very similar specs. An Alienware 16 Area-51 hit about 200 points higher in 3DMark “Speed Way†test and 100 points more in the “Steel Nomad†test. It did even worse compared to a Lenovo Legion Pro 7i. Both those gaming laptops were running with the same RTX 5080 GPU and an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU, a step down from the Raider 18 HX’s Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX. Compared to MSI’s own Titan 18 HX with RTX 5090 GPU, the Raider 18 HX does around 500 points worse in both these 3DMark tests.

I can’t stress enough how little differences in synthetic benchmark actually matter for real-world performance. Throughout all my benchmarks testing games like Cyberpunk 2077, Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, and Assassin’s Creed Shadows, I could get more than playable frame rates with high settings at 4K, though it necessitated some amount of upscaling in every case. In Cyberpunk 2077, when set to “Ray Tracing Ultra†settings with DLSS on balanced mode, the Raider 18 HX netted me around 49 average fps with a low of 41 fps. That may not be enough for some, so if you drop the ray tracing settings down a smidge, you can equal the fabled 60 fps.

In tests for some other titles, like Black Myth: Wukong, the Raider 18 HX excelled. With the game set to “Cinematic†settings and ray tracing on very high, the laptop benched more than 100 fps. That’s with DLSS enabled and set to its default “balanced†setting. Total War: Warhammer III was an excellent experience at 4K, especially at “Ultra†settings, proving I could do 92 fps in battle scenes and just under 90 fps in the campaign map. It’s a very CPU-intensive game, so the more RAM and better CPU will help it compared to competing laptops.

There’s a lot to like about the in-game performance on the Raider 18 HX. Similarly, this hefty gaming laptop does well in my tests with 3D rendering tasks as well. When rendering our test scene of a BMW on the CPU using Blender, it takes a few seconds less than on similarly sized gaming laptops with a lesser Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX. Rendering the same scene on the GPU takes just a few seconds, of course. The only ever reason to not push the GPU is if you’re trying to save what little battery you have.

Gaming laptops have given up on battery life

There is no gaming laptop you want to leave without a plug. That’s the case for 14-inch models all the way up through clamshells as humongous as the Raider 18 HX. MSI’s brand does a little better than some others thanks to its smart use of software to auto-switch from CPU graphics to the discrete GPU. Let’s face it, you’re not carrying this thing around with you anyway. It’s packing a 99.9Wh battery, which sounds good enough on paper.

The Raider 18 HX is also plenty loud when it starts going. It’s not enough to eclipse the max sound of the speakers. Still, you’ll need to bump up the volume if you expect to play at your desk. The cooling apparatus keeps the heat well away from the palm rest and your fingers. The surface temperature could hit around 100 degrees Fahrenheit near the center of the keyboard. Still, it wasn’t enough to cause any real discomfort.

When you spend so much money on a laptop, the last thing you want to feel is that you’re leaving something behind—especially for the sake of a desktop replacement computer as big as this one. And at its price point, the Raider 18 HX’s lame chassis containing such a lame keyboard feels more insulting. In the same vein, if all I wanted was performance in games, these specs help me reach the fabled land of 4K, and I may not feel the need to buy an extra monitor or soundbar for that premium experience.

These are the sacrifices of the 2025-era laptops. So many different flavors of the same crusty lollipop combine in the mouth until all I can taste is sugar. Everybody likes sugar, but I’m craving something distinct. I don’t know if I’ll get that anytime soon with next year’s gaming laptops. At least the sugar high is just as good with MSI’s devices.