MSI’s Raider offers crazy power at a reasonable price.
LAST ISSUE
, we took a look at MSI’s gargantuan Titan 18 HX gaming laptop. It is, without a shadow of a doubt, an absolute beast, complete with gargantuan form factor, a spec list longer than this journalist’s arm, and a price tag that would make even Jensen Huang blush (probably, we haven’t asked him). It’s an absolute monster, and you can price the thing up to $10,000 in its full-tilt configuration, complete with 24GB of PCIe storage and 128GB of DDR5 RAM. There’s a lot to like about it, too, once you get past the price tag. In its base config, complete with RTX 4090, full-fat 14900HX, and a beautiful screen, it’s a joy to use, albeit more of a desktop replacement than a laptop.
But the price, and that spec list? It just didn’t make sense. It was too much. The reality is, for the vast majority, unless you’re spending your days working with hours upon hours of 4K video footage, justifying that much storage and cost in a laptop is, well, difficult. For most modern-day gamers and PC enthusiasts, two to four terabytes is just, well, enough. Combine that with a wildly divisive mechanical keyboard and the most underwhelming RGB ‘haptic’ trackpad, and the Titan just struggled to impress. Technically brilliant, but realistically flawed. That’s where the Raider 18 HX comes in. On the surface, it’s incredibly similar to the Titan, but with a lot of that extra nonsense shaved off. Oh, and it’s cheaper too—a lot cheaper. You still get the Core i9-14900HX, the RTX 4090, and the beautiful 18-inch MiniLED display, but the ridiculous keyboard has gone, the haptic trackpad banished to the ether, and you only get two M.2 ports rather than the four found in the Titan.
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The best part, though? The price. Instead of $5,400 in its base configuration, the Raider 18 HX, with RTX 4090, sidles in for an impressive $3,870 (you can get it cheaper than this too, but you do move down to a less powerful GPU). That’s over $1,500 in savings by comparison, for what effectively amounts to the same performance, certainly where it counts. Let’s be clear: the screen’s the same, and the internal hardware for it is the same. It’s just $1,500 less, and yeah, okay, you do lose 2TB on the PCIe storage, but to be fair, you could just grab a Crucial T500 for about $130 and chuck it in yourself to make up for that. As for performance—well, it’s as you’d probably expect, given they’ve got the same kit and the same cooling solution. beastly CPU grunt, nailing 1,751 points in Cinebench 2024’s multi-core test and 125 on the single core. Equally, gaming falls where we’d expect, too. 1080p Ultra easily demolished with figures well above the 100fps mark across the majority of our testing suite, and that native 4K+ panel seeing frame rates from 40-60fps in all of our test titles (with a little help from DLSS, of course). Battery life is still no better than before, perhaps unsurprisingly, and this really isn’t a laptop you should ever be taking away from its power lead, anyway. Nonetheless, it’s got enough in it to last at least a few hours for the odd meeting here and there, and it’s seriously quick to charge. So then, the Raider. Honestly, it’s just bizarre. It’s a usurper to the crown, but it does that while coming from the same lineage as the Titan line. Why MSI decided to build this, that’s so aggressively priced sat alongside the Titan, is a mystery, yet one that’s more than welcome for those of us who want crazy power at a reasonable price.