The MSI Raider 18 HX AI A2XW (2025) is a gaming laptop with a physical footprint of 404 mm wide by 307 mm deep and a thickness of 24 mm, giving it a total volume of 2976.672 cm³. It tips the scales at 3600 g and comes equipped with a backlit keyboard for use in low-light environments. The chassis does not employ a fanless design, nor does it carry weather-sealing or rugged construction.
The laptop features an 18″ Mini-LED display with a resolution of 3840 x 2400 px and a pixel density of 251 ppi, delivering a sharp and detailed image across its large panel. It runs at a refresh rate of 120Hz and supports up to four connected displays simultaneously. The screen does not include a touchscreen interface or an anti-reflection coating.
The system is equipped with a 24-thread CPU built on a 4 nm process, running at 8 cores at 2.8 GHz and 16 cores at 2.1 GHz with a turbo frequency of 5.5 GHz, and supports 64-bit computing with multithreading enabled. It carries 64GB of DDR5 RAM at 6400 MHz across two slots, expandable to a maximum of 96GB, alongside 4096GB of NVMe flash storage connected via PCIe 4.0. The discrete GPU operates at a base clock of 990 MHz and boosts to 1515 MHz, backed by 24GB of GDDR7 VRAM delivering 31.8 TFLOPS of floating-point performance, a texture rate of 496.9 GTexels/s, and a pixel rate of 193.9 GPixel/s, with support for DirectX 12 Ultimate; XeSS (XMX) is not supported.
In CPU benchmark testing, the laptop records a PassMark multi-core score of 62,297, reflecting its multi-threaded processing capacity, while its single-core PassMark result stands at 4,784, indicating per-core computational throughput.
The laptop's port selection includes three USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports and two USB 4 40Gbps ports with Type-C connectors, while Thunderbolt 3 and 4, USB 3.2 Gen 1, USB 2.0, DisplayPort, mini DisplayPort, and RJ45 ports are absent. Video output is handled by a single HDMI 2.1 port, and an external memory slot is present for additional storage expansion. Wireless connectivity covers Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be) along with Wi-Fi 6E, 6, 5, and 4, complemented by Bluetooth 5.4 and AirPlay support; a VGA connector is not included.
The laptop is fitted with a 99 Wh battery and includes sleep-and-charge USB ports, allowing connected devices to be charged even when the machine is in a low-power state. It does not come with a MagSafe power adapter.
The laptop includes stereo speakers and a 3.5 mm headset jack for audio output, though Dolby Atmos and an S/PDIF port are not present. A front-facing camera capable of recording at 1080p and 30 fps is built in, paired with a single microphone, a fingerprint scanner, and 3D facial recognition for biometric authentication; voice commands are not supported. On the graphics side, the machine supports both ray tracing and DLSS, while a stylus, optical disc drive, gyroscope, accelerometer, compass, and GPS are all absent.
The laptop CPU is a soldered BGA 2114 laptop-type processor with a 95W TDP, a maximum operating temperature of 105°C, and a clock multiplier of 28, supporting Turbo Boost version 2, an unlocked multiplier, NX bit, big.LITTLE technology, and integrated graphics alongside the discrete GPU. It carries 36MB of L3 cache and 40MB of L2 cache, operates across 2 memory channels with a maximum RAM speed of 6400 MHz, and supports instruction sets including MMX, F16C, FMA3, AES, AVX, AVX2, SSE 4.1, and SSE 4.2. The Blackwell-architecture GPU features 10,496 shading units, 328 TMUs, 128 ROPs, a 256-bit memory bus, a GPU memory speed of 2000 MHz, an effective memory speed of 25,400 MHz, and a maximum memory bandwidth of 811.5 GB/s, with support for OpenCL 3, OpenGL 4.6, ECC memory, Double Precision Floating Point, stereoscopic 3D, and multi-display output; LHR is not present. The system uses Intel Resizable BAR, provides a total of 5 USB ports with 2 Thunderbolt ports and no USB 3.0 ports, and no USB 3.0 legacy ports are included.
