Eighteen-inchers are the Liam Neesons of laptops: They have a very particular set of skills, running today’s fastest games at high resolutions on huge (and decidedly bulky) displays. Broadly speaking, that's what the MSI Raider A18 HX promises. Does it deliver? It's incredibly fast and churned through our benchmarks—what you'd expect from its gaming-focused Ryzen AMD 9 9955HX3D ("Fire Range") processor and top-of-the-line Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 GPU. That power comes in the usual gamer-aesthetic package, with highly customizable RGB effects and per-key lighting. But the Raider's not perfect, in particular its curiously low refresh rate in a machine that topped $5,000 in our test model. We are bigger fans of MSI's own Intel version of this machine, the Raider 18 HX AI, which we tested at $3,999 and graced with an Editors' Choice award a few months back.

Configurations: From 'Expensive' to 'Very Expensive'

In the US, the Raider A18 HX comes in two flavors. The entry-level model costs $3,799 and features an AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX3D CPU, 64GB of speedy DDR5-5600MHz RAM, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 GPU, a 2TB SSD, and an 18-inch UHD+ (3,840-by-2,400-pixel) mini LED display. The high-end configuration, which I reviewed, has identical specs except for an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 GPU, which raises the price to $5,099.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

That's a hefty premium, even with the faster GPU. And our benchmark tests show that you'll only get a slight increase in frame rates for the extra $1,300.

Furthermore, the Fire Range X3D CPU is layered with AMD's much-lauded 3D V-Cache memory. 3D V-Cache is well known for being a frame-rate amplifier for high-end GPUs, particularly at 1080p and 1440p, removing potential CPU bottlenecks to gaming performance. It's a CPU architected for pairing with fast graphics and is ruthlessly effective on desktop PCs against all comers.

That all sounds great on paper, but on this laptop, the 120Hz display could be cause for concern; it could be a "bottleneck," of sorts, for high frame rates in its own way: It's only useful up to 120fps at a given resolution. Higher peak refresh rates are available in other lower-resolution (1600p and 1200p) display configurations, but they're not in US models.

Design: Very Large, and Very Much in Charge

Hauling this laptop is a chore. The Raider A18 HX is massive in every dimension, hitting a 1.26-inch maximum thickness and straining the scales at 7.94 pounds. Oh, and it's wide and deep besides, to fit the 18-inch display.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Still, MSI makes great use of all that space inside the chassis. The laptop's thermal design has large fans and heat pipes to keep things cool over extended gaming sessions, so the system can run at up to 260 watts of total power.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Aesthetically, the Raider is unmistakably a gaming rig from any angle (and, for that matter, from across the room). With the power off and the lid closed, your eyes are drawn to the aggressive, red-accented venting along the sides, and from the rear, you’ll see the kind of jet-engine exhausts—also red-emphasized—that adorn so many gaming machines. It’s a very functional design, but MSI gives it some visual appeal.

Power up the Raider A18 HX, and you’ll notice the RGB lighting along the front and the per-key RGB lighting on the keyboard, with additional accents for the WASD and arrow keys. The setup looks more subtle than some other gaming laptops, but no fear: The lights still stand out and synchronize well with gaming sessions. You can control the illumination with MSI’s Mystic Light utility, which gives you a fair amount of customization. (Incidentally, that utility is just one of the many you can install via the MSI Center app, which also gives you control over system performance.)

Keyboard, Touch, and Webcam: A Great Keyboard, an Only Okay Touchpad

The SteelSeries board provides plenty of spacing and large keycaps, and it includes a numeric keyboard (something gamers will appreciate). The switches are deep and tactile, great for gaming and comfortable for standard productivity work.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

I wasn’t nearly as impressed with the touchpad. It’s too small, to begin with, given the amount of space available. At first, I kept pressing on the palm rest when I was trying to click a button. I mostly got used to that after a while, but overall, you wouldn't want to use the touchpad for actual gaming. That said, most gamers might not be too disappointed, since they'll likely be using an external gaming mouse.

The Raider A18 HX comes with an industry-standard 1080p webcam that works fine for videoconferencing, even if you can find higher-res offerings on the market. MSI provides a selection of AI tools, although this particular Ryzen 9 processor doesn’t have a separate Neural Processing Unit (NPU). Of course, the GPU has the fastest AI performance around, much faster than dedicated NPUs—it just won’t run AI tasks as efficiently. That’s okay, because you’ll rarely want to run this laptop on battery alone.

Display and Audio: An Awesome Screen That’s Just Too Slow

The Raider A18 HX flaunts an impressive 18-inch UHD+ (3,840-by-2,400-pixel) mini LED display that’s very bright, colorful, and sharp. The high brightness offers excellent support for high dynamic range (HDR) content. But beware: The panel runs up to only 120Hz, a disappointing peak refresh rate for a laptop with practically maxed-out internal components for gaming.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The Raider does give you a creditable six-speaker system for audio output, comprising two woofers and four tweeters. It pumps out decent volume with clear mids and highs, and it delivers some bass. You'll note some distortion if you crank the sound all the way up, but most users will probably use gaming headphones, anyway. The fans, meanwhile, don’t get terribly loud even at full speed.

Ports: Lots of Connectivity on a Roomy Chassis

When it comes to ports, the Raider A18 HX takes good advantage of its size, serving up a fine selection of connections. The left side has two USB Type-A 3.2 ports and a full-size SD card reader; on the right, you'll find two USB Type-C ports with Thunderbolt 4 (the Thunderbolt's surprising on a laptop with an AMD CPU), another USB-A 3.2 port, and a 3.5mm audio jack.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The rear of the chassis houses an RJ-45 port, an HDMI 2.1 output, and a proprietary power connector. The latter port takes a very large 400-watt power brick, so prepare to lug even more weight when you move the laptop around.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The wireless connectivity is fully up to date, with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 if you don't want to rely fully on the Ethernet jack and the hardwired ports.

Performance Testing: One Wildly Fast Laptop

Our comparison group here comprises several recent gaming machines. The Razer Blade 16 ($4,499.99 as tested) used a slower AMD chip (the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370) but the same Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 as the Raider A18 HX. The Asus ROG Strix Scar 16 and Alienware 16 Area-51 ($3,399.99 as tested) both used the Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX and the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080. Finally, I included the MSI Raider 18 HX AI mentioned up top ($3,999 as tested), which is similar to the AMD model but uses the Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX and RTX 5080 GPU.

Productivity and Content Creation Tests

Our primary overall benchmark, UL's PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC's storage throughput. 

Three more tests are CPU-centric or processor-intensive: Maxon's Cinebench 2024 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs' Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.

Finally, workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Creators rates a PC's image editing prowess with a variety of automated operations in Adobe Photoshop 25.

The Raider A18 HX came in first or second across each of our productivity and content creation tests, blasting through tasks with its 16-core, 32-thread AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX3D. Overall, the chipset is evenly matched against Intel’s top-of-the-line Core 9 Ultra 275HX and 285HX, and will make light work of even the most demanding CPU-intensive workflows. In fact, in most of our tests, the Raider A18 HX was one of the fastest laptops we’ve ever tested.

Graphics and Gaming Tests

We challenge all systems’ graphics with a quintet of animations or gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite. The first two, Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K), use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. The next pair, Steel Nomad's regular and Light subtests, focuses on APIs more commonly used for game development, like Metal and DirectX 12, to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. Last, we turn to Solar Bay to measure ray tracing performance in a synthetic environment.

Our real-world gaming testing comes from the in-game benchmarks of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and F1 2024. These three games—all benchmarked at the system’s full HD (1080p or 1200p native) resolution—represent competitive shooter, open-world, and simulation games, respectively. If the screen is capable of a higher resolution, we rerun the tests at the QHD equivalent of 1440p or 1600p. Each game runs at two sets of graphics settings per resolution for up to four runs total on each game.

We run the Call of Duty benchmark at the Minimum graphics preset—aimed at maximizing frame rates to test display refresh rates—and again at the Extreme preset. Our Cyberpunk 2077 test settings aim to push PCs fully, so we run it on the Ultra graphics preset and again at the all-out Ray Tracing Overdrive preset without DLSS or FSR. Finally, F1 2024 represents our DLSS effectiveness (or FSR on AMD systems) test, demonstrating a GPU’s capacity for frame-boosting upscaling technologies. The degree of these frame-rate boosts changes with the version of frame-generation tech available, with DLSS 2 and 3 stitching in one AI-generated frame for every originally rendered frame, and the latest DLSS version (DLSS 4) inserting up to three additional frames. (FSR can generate up to four new frames per original, while XeSS can stitch in only one new frame per original.)

The Raider A18 HX took the lead in our graphics and gaming benchmarks—unsurprising, given its heap-topping Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090. The Raider even managed to beat out the Razer Blade 16 with the same GPU. These results are as fast as you’ll see in a gaming laptop today and for the near future.

The only question: Are these frame-rate advantages enough to justify the $1,300 upcharge from the RTX 5080, especially since the RTX 5080 is more than fast enough for all but the most hard-core gamers? Many users might be willing to “settle” for the slightly lower frame rates to get the very significant savings.

Also, take another consideration. If you dial back any in-game settings by much, depending on the game, you may butt up against the 120Hz refresh-rate ceiling of the Raider's screen before you run out of frames to push. That's, to an extent, a problem most users wish they had with their gaming laptop—but it's not one you want to pay $5,000-plus to encounter! It double-underscores why the RTX 5080 in the AMD or Intel version of this Raider laptop may make more fiscal, and common, sense.

Battery Life and Display Tests

We test each laptop and tablet's battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

Ouch! There’s a 99.9-watt-hour battery packed inside the Raider A18 HX's massive chassis, but the huge 18-inch mini LED display isn't exactly a low-power panel. The other components also drink a lot of juice, even if you turn down the performance settings. So, I wasn’t at all surprised to see the laptop shut down just short of two hours into our battery test, and mind that our test is something of a best-case battery scenario. You likely won't be using this machine unplugged very often, so plan on taking the bulky power brick everywhere you go.

The mini LED display didn’t disappoint. It’s very bright at 527 nits—good for HDR—with solid colors, coming in at 100% of sRGB, 90% of AdobeRGB, and 100% of DCI-P3. Those are just short of OLED-grade numbers but well above what you see from IPS displays, so you can count on the Raider's image quality to both handle creative work and dazzle in games. Again, though: The display’s one weakness, and it might matter a lot to some gamers, is its 120Hz maximum refresh rate. Competing machines offer refresh rates that can be twice as fast, or more, and this laptop has the ultimate frame-pusher in the form of the RTX 5090.