Gaming laptops are becoming more and more appealing every year. No one likes how quickly the current generation of consoles is aging, and while PC building is a brilliant alternative, a gaming laptop offers you style, portability, and some ridiculous power. Of course, there are plenty of gaming laptops to choose from, but none are quite like MSI.
The brand has been making super-powered gaming laptops for a while now, and its most recent designs show you why that experience is important. The MSI Titan 18 HX and MSI Sword 16 HX both sport the latest Intel processing power, but their GPUs are where their value really comes from. The Titan harnesses a GeForce RTX 4090 laptop GPU, which is as good as it gets right now. Meanwhile, the Sword 16 makes use of a GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU.
NVIDIA’s 40 Series graphics cards have some stunning architecture, there’s no doubt. Ray Tracing support simply isn’t as good elsewhere, and the value for money compared to the previous 30 series offerings is barely comparable. In truth, however, it's NVIDIA’s DLSS technology that provides a secret weapon for MSI’s latest range of 2024 laptops.
For those who aren’t clued up, DLSS 3.5 is probably one of the most significant bits of gaming software invented in recent times. It uses an AI-powered algorithm to generate pixels and frames in a huge range of video games. That means that even if you use a lower-end NVIDIA graphics card to play a game in a higher resolution, or with ray tracing, DLSS technology will provide you with smooth gameplay experiences. All of this adds up to providing almost 2x performance boosts in demanding games like Alan Wake 2, for example.
In MSI’s impressive gaming laptops, however, you also get Ray Reconstruction, which essentially does the same thing but with Ray Tracing effects within games. This pixel generation means less intensive work for developers to work their magic and much more immersive experiences for players without the hassle of fiddling in settings menus to find the best performance.
Now that we’re all up to speed with the technology that’s keeping MSI’s engines revving, let’s take a closer look at the laptops MSI has to offer.
The MSI Titan 18 HX
Armed with that aforementioned GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop GPU, the new MSI Titan 18 HX sets the bar for gaming laptop performance. Thanks to some clever innovation, it sports an 18-inch 4K Mini LED display in a 17-inch chassis. To make the most of all that graphical power, it has a 120Hz refresh rate too, so you’ll be able to crank out some really competitive frame rates. For those wanting a top-drawer gaming laptop that won’t be doing much travelling, the Titan 18 HX offers about as much portability as you’ll find at this size - and doesn’t compromise on power either.
Content creators have a viable option here too thanks to MSI’s support for up to 192GB of DDR5 RAM, and up to 12TB of storage space. That’s quite honestly an obscene allowance for memory and storage - especially when you consider that the entire Game Pass library added up to 10TB as of last year.
Now, admittedly, all this power isn’t going isn’t going to come cheap, but versus a PC with similar specs from a brand this well-versed, you’d struggle to find a price match. The Titan 18 HX has a total combined CPU and GPU power of 270W - which leads the market thanks to MSI’s homegrown Overboost Ultra technology. The Titan 18 HX is available now at Scan, as well as at other UK retailers.
The MSI Sword 16 HX
On the lower end of the price scale, the MSI Sword 16 HX sports a 16-inch, 1440p, 240Hz display that’s primed to make use of the GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU’s prowess at lower resolutions. To get more technical, the display is actually QHD+ - which means that it puts 1440p image quality into a 16:10 aspect ratio, giving players more vertical FOV.
MSI has redesigned its Sword chassis compared to older models, and the new version allows for improved cooling thanks to six exhausts. For competitive players who aim to squeeze every last frame-per-second out of their gaming hardware, it doesn’t get much better than this. The Sword 16 HX is now available to purchase at Overclockers and other UK retailers.
