An entire gaming desktop machine in a 3.6kg chassis? That's what the MSI Raider 18 HX AI offers to players with the means to buy one of these laptops. You'll never use it in a coffee shop, unless you're only staying for five to ten minutes, and everyone will hear the processor taking up any load you put on the hardware, but if you put it where it's supposed to be, it'll gobble instructions and spit out frames faster than you actually need them.
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Design
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Display
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Performance
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Features
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Value
It’s been some time since Stuff saw one of MSI’s Raider notebooks in the office. The newest version, the Raider 18 HX AI (A2XW), sticks to what makes the series an excellent one. Expect beefy hardware, enough weight to curve your spine if you attempt to use it as a portable device, and truly abysmal battery life. At least it’s not as heavy as the company’s Titan range.
You also needn’t expect much in the way of imaginative design. MSI’s gaming notebooks haven’t evolved much over the years, with the largest change being more aggressive accents while keeping the same design notes we’ve become used to over the past decade or so. Red and black dominate, but the Raider 18 HX’s chassis is mostly just a place to keep the gaming hardware and plug in your doubtless-expensive mouse.
Raider from the East
And that’s fine. The Raider 18 HX, like previous models, is a desktop computer in laptop shape. You’re supposed to buy one, take it home, set it up, and never move it unless it’s travelling with you on holiday. Even then, we’d think twice about lugging its 3.6kg frame around in a backpack at the airport. This sucker is heavy.
There’s a lot going on here, all of it geared towards gaming. The laptop frame hosts an excellent 18in 4K MiniLED IPS panel, a decent enough backlit (and customisable) keyboard, and a trackpad that you’re immediately going to swap for a mouse, so it doesn’t matter that the corners dip a bit too enthusiastically.
The edges are where the magic happens. The right-hand line hosts a 3.5mm audio input, a USB-A, and two USB-C (Thunderbolt) inputs. The left? Dual USB-As and an SD-card reader. The rear, and this is how you can really tell that you’re not supposed to move the Raider, features the rectangular power input, a full-sized HDMI, and an Ethernet port.
The design would be almost bland if not for the hyper-aggressive cooling vents on the rear and sides, the similarly intricate cooling effort along the Raider 18 HX’s underside, and the RGB trim along the leading bottom edge and at the MSI emblem on the lid. It’s a black box built for games. Just like all the others.
Inner brutey
It’s not what’s on the outside that matters; it’s what’s inside that counts. Right? And MSI’s efforts have mostly been directed inward, with an incredibly speedy Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX (which is where the Raider 18 gets one of its suffixes) mated up with an RTX5080 and 64GB of DDR5 memory, making up the majority of what you’re spending on this. A 2TB SSD also contributes to the price in your shopping cart, while removing one of the potential bottlenecks to blistering performance.
The same goes for the 18in 3,840 x 2,400 120Hz display, which isn’t an OLED but does a pretty decent impression of one. That’d be the MiniLED tech talking. Combine all these internal components, and you’ve got something that justifies the monster 400W power brick juicing up the 99.99Wh battery inside the Raider 18 HX. You’re going to have to drag that with you everywhere, by the way, because even when not under load, the Raider’s battery performance is awful.
But, as mentioned above, that’s intentional. This machine is not supposed to be portable. It’s a desktop replacement, and you wouldn’t stuff a desktop gaming PC into a bag without its cables.
High-performance highlight
In operation, MSI’s newest Raider lives up to its frankly ridiculous price tag. It’s not for everybody, but for the folks with a hundred grand to spare (more or less), expect anything you throw at it to bounce convincingly off. The combination of CPU, GPU, and enough RAM to make an AI bro irritated that it’s not in his data centre translates to excellent frame rates across the board. If you want benchmark data, look elsewhere. We didn’t bother with those, opting instead for real-world gaming to access performance.
Whether you’re running shooters, Cyberpunk 2077 (which is almost-but-not-quite-a-shooter), or anything short of a fully simulated Boeing cockpit, the Raider 18 HX will spit out acceptable-to-stellar frame rates depending on your game and/or settings. If you swung your budget over to a machine with an RTX 5090 — MSI doesn’t offer it as an option for this one — you’d see better performance, but it may not be high enough to justify the price increase. We’re not wholly sure on that one, because everyone’s too scared to give Stuff an RTX 5090. They’re right, too. They’re not getting it back.
MSI’s computing performance pairs very well with the excellent 18in display, and there’s even been an effort to stuff acceptable audio inside this Raider. There are six speakers with highly-tuned sound, but the audio setup is farting against the thunder of the 18 HX’s cooling system. Put it under load and the fans will kick in. Heck, leave it standing idle and sometimes the fan will kick in. As good as the audio can get here, we still suggest you swap it out for some noise-cancelling headphones.
MSI Raider 18 HX AI (A2XW) verdict
You’ll find MSI’s Raider 18 HX AI available anywhere from R85,000 to R97,000, which is the hardest thing about recommending this hardware to anyone but the most ardent gamer. There’s plenty of performance and features to drool over and, for proper gamers, the Raider may just outlast some of your favourite franchises. If you’re just playing Fortnite, this is overkill. If you just play three annually-releasing games, it’s a solid choice (since one of those games is probably the increasingly absurd Call of Duty). But it’s not perfect.
It’s heavy, it’s loud, it’s got no battery life to speak of. In any other laptop, these would be serious drawbacks. In MSI’s machine, it’s by design. Set it up, leave it there, play any game released over the next five years without blinking. That’s the plan. It works out to almost R20,000 per year to do that, not counting the price of the game, but every year beyond this point you make the MSI Raider 18 HX last brings the overall cost down. When you look at it in those terms… okay, fine, it’s still expensive, but it’s just… so… quick.
