MSI’s Titan 18 is the most powerful 
gaming laptop I’ve ever tested. Alright, review over, thanks for coming. Ok but seriously, before emptying 
your bank account for this monster   there are some stupid issues 
that you need to know about. The Titan has a black and silver theme 
with a magnesium aluminum chassis,   though the plastic wrist rest 
area feels closer to glass. There’s also the limited edition Norse 
Myth version, but that costs even more. Build quality feels good. Screen, lid and keyboard 
flex are only minor, even when pushing down hard. The hinges feel smooth and sturdy, 
there’s no screen wobble when typing,   it’s super easy to open with one finger, and 
the screen goes back further than most others. Fingerprints are harder to see 
on the interior than the lid,   but both are easy enough to 
clean with a microfiber cloth. Unfortunately you don’t get Titan level power in 
a small package – this beast is big and heavy. The Titan tips the scales at 8lb 
or 3.6kg if you’re metric-minded.   Throw in the 400 watt charger and 
you’re lugging around 10.5lb or 4.8kg It still weighs the same as last gen,   but doesn’t quite steal the heaviest 
laptop crown from Alienware’s m18 R2. Interestingly, the older 2023 Titan 
with smaller 330 watt charger ends up   heavier when including the chargers, 
so although we’re at 400 watts now,   at least the newer charger is 
more compact than MSI’s old brick. My configuration has Intel’s 
Core Ultra 9 285HX processor,   NVIDIA’s RTX 5090 laptop graphics, 64 gigs of 
RAM and an 18 inch UHD+ 120Hz Mini-LED screen. But the price will change a lot depending 
on what specs you pick with the link below,   and if it has a good sale, we’ll have it listed on   our gaminglaptop.deals website so 
you can get it at the best price. The mechanical keyboard has per-key RGB 
backlighting, and all keys and secondary   functions get lit up. It’s got 4 levels of 
key brightness which can be adjusted with the   F8 shortcut. You can’t see the brightness of the 
keyboard change unless you stop pressing function,   but you can see the touchpad change with it, 
and the lid logo’s brightness is synced too. All lighting can be customized through 
the included SteelSeries software.   There are way more effects built in 
compared to most other laptops out there. The keyboard feels nice to type with,   but Cherry MX ultra low profile mechanical 
switches means it’s louder to type on. Only the keys highlighted in green are 
actually mechanical, the ones in red are not. The seamless haptic touchpad is 
the worst laptop touchpad I’ve   used in my entire life – even its cool 
looking RGB lighting couldn’t save it. It can be a bit awkward to use with 
the lighting off as there’s no border,   but the real problem is the click. The touchpad decides when to make a click 
based on if you’re touching the touchpad,   which sounds fine, but in practice I found things 
like double click and dragging files around to be   extremely annoying. Sometimes they work, sometimes 
they don’t. In the case of double click you have   to physically lift your finger completely off 
the touchpad between the two clicks. If you do   the first click and then just slightly loosen the 
pressure and don’t actually take your finger off   the touchpad, most of the time it doesn’t double 
click. You have to actually lift the finger up,   which just isn’t something I normally do 
because other touchpads don’t care about   that. So I just tried to double click then and you 
only heard it go once, and if I take my finger off   it’s going to release the click. That time it 
worked. Worked then, worked then, didn’t work,   didn’t work, I don’t know it’s just strange. 
And it’s just the inconsistency that annoys   me the most. Same with dragging files around, 
sometimes it’ll just unclick while moving the   mouse around which releases the dragging 
motion, and then sometimes it doesn’t. The Titan has a good amount of ports. 
I like that thicker bulky cables run   out the back and stay out of the way, 
but I would have preferred a Type-C   port on each side. It’s got plenty of 
good options for connecting monitors. I found it weird that they’ve got port 
icons underneath on the bottom panel,   but not on top where you’d actually see them 
when plugging in – that’s the wrong side MSI! Getting inside requires taking 
out 12 Phillips head screws,   all the same length. I had 
a bit of trouble opening it,   even with proper pry tools. I’ll leave a link 
to the ones I use for opening laptops below. Inside we’ve got the battery down the front, 
two memory slots above towards the middle,   and four M.2 storage slots in total. I’ve 
got 3 SSDs installed, a Gen 5 and two Gen 4,   and I appreciate that MSI are 
actually labeling which slots   support Gen 4 or Gen 5. This is a simple 
thing most other laptops aren’t doing. The primary Gen 5 slot has a cooler, and I know 
Gen 5 SSDs generate heat and benefit from cooling,   but connecting it to a heat pipe that goes 
straight to the CPU feels questionable. MSI   tells me it’s better this way to ensure the SSD 
performs well. They tell me the SSD might add 5   to 8 watts into the cooling system, and that 
they’ve got the connection to the heatpipe as   close to the exhaust fins as possible to avoid 
the heat from the CPU limiting SSD performance. All three of my 2TB SSDs came in a RAID 0 array, 
which is why the speeds are insanely fast,   but if any of the three drives 
happens to fail there would be   data loss in this configuration. 
The SD card slot is fast too. The   card doesn’t click in and sits out a 
little, so be careful not to bump it. Wi-Fi performance was decent, better than 
last year’s Titan with the same card,   so maybe the drivers just improved over that time. Alright, we need to talk about 
the downgrade from 4 sticks of   memory in last year’s Titan 18 
to 2 sticks in the 2025 model. Honestly, I think this is preferable. With 2 RAM 
sticks you can still go up to 96 gigs of DDR5-6400   memory, so faster speeds, and realistically, 
still plenty of capacity for most people. With 4 memory slots, the Intel specs 
tell us that the memory would run   at DDR5-4800 to 4400 depending on 
how many sticks you’re installing. And that was a downside of the older Titan’s 4 
slot memory configuration. The last gen version   ran at like DDR5-3600 with 4 sticks installed, and 
that’s just due to Intel’s memory limit. So yeah,   personally I would take 2 sticks of faster 
memory and have the extra SSD space. That said, my upgradability score gives 
a point for each RAM and M.2 slot,   so taking 2 RAM slots and adding 1 M.2 slot is 
the reason it’s slightly behind the older Titan   design. In any case, there are more upgrade 
options compared to most other laptops. The Titan has front facing speakers 
on either side of the keyboard,   and underneath on both sides and towards 
the front. They sound pretty good,   clear with some bass and almost no wrist 
rest vibration even with the volume maxed. The latencymon results weren’t 
good in our 5 minute idle test. The Titan is powered by a 4-Cell 99Wh battery. Display power saver is enabled by default, 
which automatically lowers the screen’s   refresh rate to 60Hz when you unplug 
the charger to save power. The change   doesn’t make the screen flash black when 
optimus is on like most other laptops do. Battery life was decent when compared to most 
other powerful 18 inch gaming laptops tested,   and better compared to MSI’s last 
gen Titan 18. Generally speaking,   you’ll get better battery life from a smaller 
laptop, especially with an AMD processor. The Titan lost 21% of its battery 
while asleep for 24 hours,   but this isn’t a fair comparison with 
the other laptops as it depends on the   size of the laptop’s battery. Here’s how much 
battery power was lost on average per hour,   but the drain isn’t looking too bad compared 
to the other laptops we’ve tested so far. Let’s check out thermals next. The CPU and GPU are 
covered by a vapor chamber cooler with two fans.   Air comes in through plenty of holes 
in the bottom panel and gets exhausted   from the left and right sides, and 
from the corners out of the back. The MSI Center software lets us change 
between different performance modes,   which from lowest to highest are eco, balanced, 
and extreme performance. Extreme mode lets you   overclock the GPU, but this isn’t enabled 
by default so we haven’t tested it. You can   also set cooler boost to max the fans out, or 
use the advanced option to customize the fans. You can also enable max fans at any time 
with the function plus up arrow key shortcut. The internal temperatures were cool at 
idle. The rest of the results are from   combined CPU and GPU stress tests which aim 
to represent a worst case full load scenario,   and the CPU was reaching thermal throttling at 
100 degrees Celsius in extreme mode. That’s not   necessarily bad, as it depends on other factors 
like the performance, fan noise, and how hot the   laptop feels, which we’re getting to. Running with 
the lid closed wasn’t much different, so no issues   if you want to dock the laptop. Using a basic 
metal stand was enough to stop thermal throttling,   and not too different from the cooling pad I test 
with at 800 RPM. Temperatures get cooler if you’re   fine with the cooling pad running louder, there’s 
a link to the one I use below. Manually setting   the fans to max speed wasn’t much cooler than 
leaving them on automatic, but it was louder.   Like many other laptops tested, maxing the fans 
and cooling pad doesn’t lower the CPU temperature. And that’s because the extra cooling allows 
the laptop to boost up significantly,   with all 8 P cores almost running consistently 
at 5GHz, crazy stuff. Extreme mode otherwise   mostly performed much the same regardless 
of what we’re doing to the temperatures.   This is good performance despite our thermal 
throttling at 100 degrees, and considering   the thermal throttle was removed with the 
stand and cooling pad, it must have only   been minor because the clock speeds don’t 
actually improve that much with it gone. The CPU was able to run at 95 watts with the 
GPU near 170 watts, which is a great result   from this sustained stress test. For whatever 
reason, to achieve that higher CPU performance   with the cooling pad seems to take away from 
the GPU power budget. You’d think the 400 watt   charger would be enough to keep the GPU maxed 
out, given the GPU is only 62 degrees here. But   I suppose it does share its cooler with the 
CPU which only has so much total capacity. Here’s how FPS looks in an actual game with the 
different performance modes in use. I’ve got the   native results without upscaling shown in purple, 
and a demonstration of the performance improvement   that’s possible by setting DLSS 4 to performance 
in red. Eco mode didn’t provide enough power to   run the game without DLSS, which is too bad, as 
it would have been nice to have the option of   gaming with less fan noise. Based on this they 
should rename balanced mode to performance,   and add a new balanced mode in between eco 
and balanced that’s actually more balanced,   because right now balanced and 
extreme aren’t that different. You can see what I’m talking about in 
Cinebench, which is a CPU only workload,   and that’s why the CPU is able to use more power 
here than before, because the GPU is idle. The   difference between Eco and Balanced is just 
crazy, MSI really needs a better in-between mode. Anyway it performs great when 
compared to other laptops tested,   however it is beaten by ASUS’s smaller 16 inch 
Scar 16 which has a lower tier processor inside.   I’ve got no doubt that the Titan could do much 
better with some custom tuning in the BIOS,   but none of that is exposed in software 
and we test with stock settings. The 27%   boost to stock multicore performance 
compared to last gen is nice though. Performance lowers significantly if 
we unplug the charger and instead   run off of battery power. Last year’s 
model was much better in this regard,   and I did notice some slowness just 
interacting with Windows on battery power. As for keyboard temps, most laptops I test 
are in the low 30 degrees Celsius range on   the keyboard at idle. The Titan was a little 
higher, but still felt cool. It feels warmer   in the higher performance modes when 
under load as it’s using more power,   and manually maxing out the fans didn’t 
really change the warm feeling center. The Titan has the hottest keyboard out of any 
gaming laptop we’ve tested in the last couple   of years. That said, the hot spot is towards the 
middle where you’re not actively resting while   gaming, and it’s also in between the keys. The 
actual keys themselves were definitely warm and   a little uncomfortable, but not hot. Let’s 
listen to how the fans deal with the heat. The fans were mostly silent when idling 
in eco mode, but would occasionally turn   on. The cooling pad at 800 RPM was 
slightly quieter than not using it,   but it only lowered temps a little. Running the 
cooling pad faster did help reduce temperatures,   but then it’s a tradeoff between temps and 
how much you can tolerate a jet engine. Fan noise was on the higher 
side compared to other laptops,   but this is also one of the better 
performing laptops we’ve tested,   so that’s not too surprising, and hey it is a 
little quieter compared to last year’s model. Alright let’s get into the screen. The Titan 
has 3 different 18 inch screen options,   but I’ve got the Mini-LED option, so expect 
different results with the other panels. The Mini-LED panel offers high color 
gamut and generally looks quite nice,   but it depends on the content that you’re 
viewing. Darker content with lighter areas   create the halo effect which I really don’t 
like. A black screen results in dimming zones   turning off for perfect contrast, but if I set it 
to grey we can confirm there’s no backlight bleed. The screen gets very bright. Brightness went 
above 700 nits in SDR mode, and got close to   1200 nits in HDR mode. This makes it the brightest 
screen we’ve ever tested in any laptop. That said,   it looks like the panel model is the same as 
last year’s Titan, so this small difference we’re   seeing here is likely down to the panel lottery 
– basically results vary a bit between panels. The MSI Center software has display 
overdrive enabled by default,   which lowers screen response time. Average gray-to-gray screen response time 
was decent for a Mini-LED panel, MSI must   have tuned the overdrive mode or something 
because the result is significantly better   compared to the same panel in last year’s Titan. 
And if they didn’t then I can’t explain this. Some of the transitions are much slower 
than others, particularly when going   from black to light, as the dimming zones 
take longer to light up from being off. The total system latency is the amount of time 
between a mouse click and when a gunshot fire   appears on the screen in Counter-Strike 2. 
it’s not really that much better compared   to last year’s version, and beaten by 
other RTX 50 series laptops tested. The Titan has a MUX switch, so you have to 
reboot to swap between optimus on and off. I said this in last year’s Titan review, but 
nothing has changed. I think it’s embarrassing   that MSI isn’t including advanced optimus in 
their top-end gaming laptop. I asked why and   apparently they don’t believe that the 
current state of advanced optimus offers   a great experience for a high end laptop like 
this. And that’s because when you swap between   integrated and discrete graphics the screen 
freezes for a few seconds and I guess some   people might wonder what’s going on. But I 
don’t agree with that being a good reason for   skipping advanced optimus. Pretty much every 
other single brand has embraced it at this   point. And even if we’re not able to educate 
users as to why the screen briefly freezes,   you could still have advanced optimus and also 
have the traditional MUX switch to let the user   choose what they want to do. Not only that, but 
there’s no G-Sync in this panel with optimus off,   which I believe is a limitation of the 
UHD+ panel that MSI are choosing to use. Fortunately you can still use adaptive sync with 
optimus enabled for tear free gameplay. And given   the difference between optimus on and off does 
matter less at higher resolutions like this, and   the difference also got smaller since Microsoft’s 
CASO update, personally I’d probably just   leave optimus on all the time and never bother 
rebooting to get the slightly better performance. The camera above the screen is 1080p, 
it’s got IR for Windows Hello face unlock,   and even a physically sliding 
privacy shutter. And this is how   it sounds while typing on the mechanical keyboard. Now for what you’ve all been waiting for – 
let’s see how the Titan performs in games! Cyberpunk 2077 was tested with the game’s 
benchmark, and the Titan was one of the best   gaming laptops tested so far, especially 
at 1440p and 1080p where presumably its   285HX processor or 6400 RAM is helping out. The 
Titan’s supremacy continues with ray tracing set   to ultra and DLSS on, but it’s not really 
that far ahead of cheaper 5090 laptops. Black Myth Wukong was also tested with the 
game’s benchmark, and again the Titan was   at the top of the charts, but we’re 
only talking about a 1-2 FPS lead,   and it’s a similar deal with ray tracing enabled, 
and these differences just aren’t something you’d   notice in a blind test if you were to run 
the games on similarly specced laptops. Alan Wake 2 on the other hand had a bigger 
improvement at 1440p and 1080p resolutions,   which again I suspect is either due 
to the 285HX or the DDR5-6400 RAM,   as these are the only real differences compared 
to the other laptops tested. And then it’s a   similar deal with ray tracing enabled, MSI’s 
Titan 18 has broken most of our gaming records. Here are the 3DMark results. Content creator results were great 
with the Titan being a chart topper   in all tests except for Adobe Photoshop, 
but it’s close if we don’t count liquid   cooled results. The extra VRAM with the 
5090 would also be good for AI work. MSI’s advanced BIOS provides you with almost 
unlimited customization once you enter the   usual cheat code to access it. You can change 
things from power limits, temperature limits,   memory speeds and far more. This is 
really what makes the Titan unique,   and with the right tuning I’m sure you could get 
it outperforming most other laptops even further. Linux support was good overall, the 
only thing that didn’t work was there   wasn’t any keyboard lighting for some reason. Pricing and availability will change over 
time, so check the link below the video   for updates and current sales. And if the 
Titan has a good sale, we’ll add it to our   gaminglaptop.deals website. We update that 
everyday to include all of the latest sales,   so make sure that you check it out regularly 
to save money on your next gaming laptop. The Titan starts from $4800 USD with RTX 5080 
graphics, while the RTX 5090 we’ve looked at   in this video will set you back an extra 
$1000, which is $300 more compared to last   year’s 4090 Titan which had double the memory 
capacity, though slower RAM and slower CPU. So is MSI’s Titan 18 worth it? 
Let’s recap the good and the bad. Starting with the good, performance is excellent. 
Granted it’s not really too different compared to   other similarly specced laptops, but it is still 
one of the best. With four M.2 slots you’ll almost   be able to fit enough SSDs to install Call of 
Duty, and the super bright screen looks great   as long as you don’t mind the small haloing 
effect that is present in Mini-LED panels. The   BIOS takes things to the next level and offers 
an almost endless level of customization for   those who want to squeeze out every last drop of 
performance, and build quality feels solid too. But it’s far from perfect. The touchpad is just 
frustrating to use and a mouse is pretty much   essential. The lack of advanced optimus and 
G-Sync at this price point is a joke. These   have been standard features on much cheaper 
gaming laptops from every other brand for a   couple of years at least. And I don’t agree 
with MSI’s reasoning for not including them. The Titan really is a specialist 
machine, and overkill for most   people. If you don’t need one of its unique 
features like 4 M.2 slots or advanced BIOS,   there are better balanced options out 
there that won’t cost quite as much. But if you’re after an 18 inch gaming laptop 
with 4 memory slots, advanced optimus, G-Sync,   even a working touchpad, you’ll need to 
look at pretty much any other option. Currently we’re working on a review of the 
ASUS Scar 18, so get subscribed for that.   Until then you can check out the only other 18 
inch gaming laptop I’ve tested this year over   there next. It’s Gigabyte’s Aorus 18, and while 
it does have its own problems, advanced optimus,   G-Sync and a working touchpad aren’t any 
of them, so I’ll see you in that one next!