MSI Crosshair A16 HX D8W (2025) 16"

The MSI Crosshair A16 HX D8W (2025) is a gaming laptop with a 21mm-thin profile and dimensions of 359mm wide by 266mm deep, giving it a volume of roughly 2005 cm³ and a weight of 2,500 grams. It features a backlit keyboard and comes with a two-year warranty. The chassis is neither weather-sealed nor ruggedized, and it relies on an active cooling system rather than a fanless design.

The laptop features a 16″ IPS, LED-backlit LCD panel with a 2560x1600 resolution at 188 ppi, delivering a reasonably sharp image across the screen. It runs at a 240Hz refresh rate, making it well-suited for fast-paced content, and can drive up to four displays simultaneously. The panel does not include a touchscreen or an anti-reflection coating.

The laptop is powered by a 16-core, 32-thread 64-bit processor built on a 4nm process, running at 2.4 GHz base with a turbo clock of 5.3 GHz, and supports multithreading. It comes with 16GB of DDR5 RAM across two slots, expandable up to 96GB, paired with a 1024GB NVMe SSD for flash-based storage connected over PCIe 4. On the graphics side, the GPU carries 8GB of GDDR7 VRAM with a base clock of 2235 MHz and a boost of 2520 MHz, delivering 23.22 TFLOPS of floating-point performance, a texture rate of 362.9 GTexels/s, and a pixel rate of 121 GPixel/s, with full DirectX 12 Ultimate support; XeSS is not supported.

In PassMark testing, the laptop achieves an overall CPU score of 51,227 with a single-core result of 3,860, reflecting the processor's multi-threaded and single-threaded capabilities respectively. The GPU registers a PassMark G3D score of 19,987, indicating its measured graphics rendering performance.

Wired connectivity includes one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port, three USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, one RJ45 Ethernet jack, and one HDMI 2.1 output; there are no USB 2.0, DisplayPort, mini DisplayPort, Thunderbolt, or VGA connections, and no external memory slot. On the wireless side, the laptop supports Wi-Fi 6E (802.11ax) alongside Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 5, and Wi-Fi 4, paired with Bluetooth 5.3, and also includes AirPlay support.

The laptop is equipped with a 90Wh battery and supports sleep-and-charge on its USB ports, allowing connected devices to be charged even when the system is powered off or in sleep mode. It does not use a MagSafe power adapter.

The laptop includes stereo speakers, a 3.5mm headset jack, a single microphone, and a front-facing camera, though it lacks Dolby Atmos, an S/PDIF output, and an optical disc drive. On the graphics feature side, it supports both ray tracing and DLSS. Biometric and motion-sensing capabilities are absent, with no fingerprint scanner, 3D facial recognition, voice commands, gyroscope, accelerometer, compass, or GPS on board, and no stylus is included.

The CPU has a clock multiplier of 24, a 50W TDP, a maximum operating temperature of 100°C, and an unlocked multiplier, with support for NX bit, Double Precision Floating Point, and instruction sets including MMX, F16C, FMA3, AES, AVX, AVX2, SSE 4.1, and SSE 4.2; it does not use big.LITTLE technology. Cache configuration spans 1024KB of L1, 16MB of L2 at 1MB per core, and 64MB of L3 at 4MB per core, with two memory channels and a maximum RAM speed of 5200 MHz. The discrete GPU is based on the Blackwell architecture and features 4608 shading units, 144 TMUs, 48 ROPs, a 128-bit memory bus, a base memory speed of 2000 MHz, an effective speed of 25400 MHz, and a maximum bandwidth of 405.8 GB/s, with support for OpenCL 3, OpenGL 4.6, stereoscopic 3D, multi-display output, ECC memory, and Intel Resizable BAR, while LHR is not present. An integrated Radeon 610M GPU is also included, and the system supports up to 2 GPU execution units alongside the discrete solution.