CES 2025 | MSI announces Vector 16 HX AI with Arrow Lake CPUs and Nvidia RTX 50 series GPUs

MSI announced a lot of gaming laptops, and while the Titan series remains MSI's flagship, the Vector 16 HX offers high-end specs with a few minor sacrifices.

The MSI Vector 16 HX AI, as its name implies, features a 16-inch display with a resolution of 2560x1600 and a 240 Hz refresh rate. The IPS panel covers 100% of the DCI-P3 color gamut. Internally, the laptop runs on either Intel's new Core Ultra 7 255HX or Core Ultra 9 275HX processor. Graphics are managed by either the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 (16 GB GDDR7) or the RTX 5070 Ti (12 GB GDDR7). (Keep in mind these are the laptop versions of these GPUs.)

The Vector 16 HX AI has two PCIe Gen 5 x4 storage slots for dual NVMe drives and supports up to 96 GB of DDR5 SODIMM RAM (via 2 slots). I/O includes two Thunderbolt 5 ports (both supporting DisplayPort and PD 3.1), two USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) ports, an SD card slot, one HDMI 2.1 port (8K/60 Hz or 4K/120 Hz support), a 2.5 Gbps Ethernet port, and a combo headphone/microphone jack. The laptop has two 2W speakers and supports either WiFi 7 or WiFi 6E via an Intel Killer BE1750 or AX211 wireless card, respectively. These cards also support Bluetooth 5.4 or 5.3, respectively. The Vector 16 HX AI ships with either Windows 11 Home or Windows 11 Pro. 

The laptop is the exact same size as its 2024 predecessor, measuring 357x284x28.55 mm. This makes it relatively large for a gaming laptop with a 16-inch display. The larger case helped the older model with heat management, so that's something to watch for with the model announced today. The Vector 16 HX AI packs a similarly-sized 90 Wh battery (4-cell, Lithium polymer) as its older brother. It comes in at 2.7 kg (5.95 lbs). 

MSI did not announce pricing at press time.