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.