MSI Stealth 18 HX AI Review

The larger one is always better in calculations. Just don’t try to tell the boys from SFF with their fractal terrases and shapely cable routing. But in these categories, the 18-inch game laptop is a replacement beast on the desktop; This is the largest form of a laptop and a crazy idea that pushes the idea of ​​a portable computer of actually portable in handling higher TDP and more fans.

I mean it is still portable. But only in the way the desktop computer is portable, if you lift it and put it elsewhere.

But of course they are usually quite good, if you have a nearby concrete desk and you don’t try to exploit them on your lap. A sturdy combination of weight and the very amount of heat forced to the bottom soon becomes an uncomfortable experience if you try to rest a stationary exchange anywhere in organic place.

However, the MSI 18 HX AI trick does it slightly differently. It is a game laptop that wants to be taken seriously, which does not want to stand out more than such a huge plastic and metal plate. It avoids a vast amount of fancy lighting and flashy logos, which are an ordinary costume, in which gaming laptops are eminent for, and instead chooses ordinary black chassis and an illuminated keyboard.

The MSI logo on the cover is also illuminated, but it is not very offensive. “Slim. Sharp. Stylish” is the slogan of MSI for the machine, suggesting that its appearance, not its rendering force, and if you want more This Look at MSI Raider HX AI (which is more steep).

It is also diminutive, although it is definitely a relative term here. A bulky boy, such as the MSI 16 HX AI vector (cheaper than hiding), can be a thickness of up to 28.5 mm, thanks to which hiding seem positive in just 22 mm, while Blaste 14 (cheaper, but lower in Dave’s review) is only 16.2 mm at the thinnest point. Weight is also a problem: with hair below 2.9 kg, stealing weighs up to two ASUS ROG FLOW Z13.

Fortunately, it is about twice as much, especially in GPU tests. The RTX 5080 is buried in sneaking, along with the same Core Ultra 9 processor, this year the top -class laptop is used: Ultra 9 275HX, which has 24 cores divided between 8p to 16E. This is a sturdy combination, as evidenced by all other laptops that decided to exploit it, such as Gigabyte Aorus Master 16 and Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10. But these are laptops from games, without trying to blend and be “hidden”-this 18-inch MSI in Cyberpunk 2077, at Baldur’s Gate 3, and in many other ways you will be able to discover using charts on this page.

Why is it? Well, first, GPU works at 150 W, not 175 in the RTX 5080 watched in other laptops. The rest probably boils down to cooling. While Stealth 18 has a very impressive heat scattering system, which includes a refrigerated chamber cooler and a pair of intra -compressed fans to exhaust sizzling air at the back and sides.

Under the magnesium housing there is a plastic ridge, which slightly lifted it from above – another sign that it is not intended for exploit on the knees, because they are quite pointed – to improve air flow and noticeable ventilation holes, of which the sizzling wind (and some output) blows when the processors are under load. It does not become much warmer than comparable machines (in fact, the processor’s results in the metro exodus are actually cooler than others), but then it is not accurately pumping the same number of frames per second.

This does not mean that he is a bad contractor. It gets good at 1080p in the Benchmark PCG apartment and can even move its native 4K resolution to 60 FPS in many titles if you turn on the frame gene. The benefits of the GPU from the RTX 50 series are well known, and multi -member generations push these numbers even higher, with 4x enough to get closer to the maximum maximum screen of 120 Hz in Cyberpunk, with all its pieces on.

In fact, there is little to complain about Stealth results, but I suspect that people intend anyway, because larger is always better … and this also applies to numbers. This is not a affordable machine, and if you can get better results from a laptop with a similar specificity, why would you not have this alternative? The 18-inch form of the form is the most useful if you do not intend to connect it to an external monitor and you want every inch that you can get from the built-in display. If you are going to exploit one of the best game monitors in your laptop, why not get something cheaper?

Fortunately, the display is very good. Minled quickly becomes my favorite display technology and I am aware of how a complete catcher makes me sound. My reasoning is that OLED, although perfect, has several disadvantages that may not be completely universal, but which make them over. First of all, they are quite reflective, thanks to which all exploit in a radiant garden is illuminating the test. And as someone with sweaty bear paws instead of hand, I think that the way OLEDS collects blurred fingerprints to be unbearable.

So my Nemesis is my nemesis.

On the other hand, the miniled is very radiant and contrasts without these dispersion. The Stealth’s panel hits the huge 715 rivets and can display a 97% color range DCI-P3, has a resolution of 16:10 4K and this refresh rate of 120 Hz. What not to like?

Picture 1 With 10

There are more. Thunderbolt 4 gives many options for combining speedy peripheral devices and more screens, although the full -size HDMI 2.1 also deals with it, and you even get the SD Express card gap to add more space for the game library. Pass away and the SSD is clearly disclosed, potentially enabling the user’s update, if 2TB becomes a bit tight.

The life of the Stealth battery is quite low, for less than an hour and a half, so you need to carry a vast brick of power with you, adding additional weight, but it is not really a portable computer, it is a replacement of desktop computers that can be easily sailed, a type of computer computer that can consider a lot of space. It looks good, the performance is not so far from the sign, but only its gigantic price (the model assessed here is not even the highest line), it should stop.