MSI Raider 18 HX A14V (2024) 18"

The MSI Raider 18 HX A14V is a gaming laptop with a physical footprint of 404 mm wide by 307 mm deep and a thickness of 24 mm, resulting in a total volume of 2976.672 cm³. It carries a weight of 3,600 g, reflecting the scale typical of large-format gaming machines. The chassis uses an active cooling design rather than a fanless approach, and it does not feature weather sealing or a rugged build. On the usability side, the laptop includes a backlit keyboard for use in low-light environments.

The display on this laptop measures 18 inches and uses an LCD Mini-LED panel with a resolution of 3840 x 2400 px, yielding a pixel density of 251 ppi for a detailed, sharp image across the large screen area. It operates at a 120Hz refresh rate, which supports smoother motion in fast-paced content. The screen does not include a touch layer or an anti-reflection coating. When paired with compatible hardware, the system can drive up to 4 displays simultaneously, extending the visual workspace beyond the built-in panel.

The processor runs across 32 threads with core speeds of 8 x 2.2 GHz and 16 x 1.6 GHz, reaching a turbo clock of 5.8GHz, and is built on a 5 nm semiconductor process with multithreading and 64-bit support. The system ships with 64GB of DDR5 memory across four slots, expandable to a maximum of 192GB, paired with 2TB of NVMe flash storage connected over PCIe 5. On the graphics side, the GPU operates at a base clock of 1455 MHz with a boost up to 2040 MHz, backed by 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM and delivering 39.69 TFLOPS of floating-point performance alongside a texture rate of 620.2 GTexels/s and a pixel rate of 228.5 GPixel/s. The GPU supports DirectX 12 Ultimate but does not include XeSS (XMX) acceleration.

In Geekbench 6, the system scores 2,680 in the single-core test and 15,655 in the multi-core test, reflecting the combined throughput of its many CPU threads. On the PassMark side, the overall CPU result reaches 45,332 with a single-thread score of 4,245, while the GPU registers a PassMark G3D score of 31,814, indicating the graphics subsystem's measured rendering capability under that benchmark's workload.

Wired port options include three USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, two USB 4 40Gbps ports, and two Thunderbolt 4 ports, while a single HDMI 2.1 output handles video output to an external display; there are no DisplayPort, mini DisplayPort, RJ45, or VGA connectors. Wireless connectivity covers Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be) along with backward-compatible Wi-Fi 6E, 6, 5, and 4 standards, complemented by Bluetooth 5.4. The laptop also includes an external memory slot and supports AirPlay for wireless display streaming.

The laptop is equipped with a 99.9 Wh battery, sitting at the upper end of what is typically permitted for air travel. It supports sleep-and-charge functionality, allowing connected USB devices to be charged even when the laptop is powered off or in sleep mode. There is no MagSafe power adapter included.

For audio, the laptop includes stereo speakers and a 3.5 mm headset jack, though it lacks a S/PDIF output and does not support Dolby Atmos. A front-facing camera capable of recording at 1080p and 30 fps is built in, accompanied by a single microphone, a fingerprint scanner, and 3D facial recognition for biometric login; voice commands are not supported. On the graphics feature side, the system supports both ray tracing and DLSS, enabling hardware-accelerated lighting and AI-based upscaling in compatible titles. Motion and location sensors — including a gyroscope, accelerometer, compass, and GPS — are absent, and there is no optical disc drive.

The laptop-class CPU has a TDP of 150W, a clock multiplier of 22, a maximum operating temperature of 100 °C, and 36 MB of L3 cache, with big.LITTLE technology distributing workloads across its core types; the multiplier is locked. It supports a broad set of instruction sets including MMX, F16C, FMA3, AES, AVX, AVX2, SSE 4.1, and SSE 4.2, along with NX bit for hardware-level execution protection. The discrete GPU is based on the Ada Lovelace architecture and contains 45,900 million transistors, 9,728 shading units, 304 texture mapping units, 112 ROPs, and 32 execution units, running its memory at 2,250 MHz over a 256-bit bus for a maximum bandwidth of 576 GB/s at an effective speed of 18,000 MHz; it supports double precision floating point, multi-display output, and stereoscopic 3D, but does not include LHR. An integrated GPU with 32 execution units is also present alongside the discrete solution. The system supports ECC memory, with RAM running at up to 5,600 MHz across 2 memory channels, and the total USB port count stands at 5, with no legacy USB 3.0 or USB 2.0 ports in the mix. API support covers OpenCL 3 and OpenGL 4.6.