CES 2024 | MSI Raider 18 HX: High-end gaming laptop presented with flagship hardware and mini-LED screen

MSI has switched up the gaming for its Raider series of gaming laptops. It has ditched two letters (for, e.g. Raider GE78 HX) and streamlined it to Raider 18 HX. It is still a high-end gaming powerhouse, rivalled only by the equally colossal Titan 18 HX. MSI will reveal its price later, but one can easily expect it to be north of $3,000.

An Intel Core i9-14900HX processor powers the MSI Raider 18 HX. MSI hasn't specified if lower-end options are available. One can pair it with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, RTX 4080 or RTX 4070 graphics card. Memory tops out at 64 GB of DDR5 5,600 RAM (expandable up to 256 GB) and storage at 2 TB. MSI has also thrown in an extra PCIe Gen5 slot for high-performance drives.

MSI offers the Raider 18 HX with two screen configurations: UHD+ (3,840 x 2,400) 120 Hz and QHD+ (2560x1600), 240Hz. The former uses a mini-LED panel that covers 100% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut and VESA DisplayHDR 1000 certification. It isn't clear as to what type of panel the QHD+ variant uses. Like most high-end gaming laptops, the Raider 18 HX has a 99.9 Wh battery that requires a beefy 330 Watt charger.

There is no dearth of I/O on the MS Raider 18 HX. You get two Thunderbolt 4.0 ports, three USB Type-A ports, an HDMI 2.1 port, a micro SD card reader and a 3.5 mm combo audio jack. Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 are also supported, along with Windows Hello, which is enabled via the IR sensor that sits alongside the 1080p webcam. Thunderbolt 5.0 support would have been excellent, as it is one of the advertised features of 14th-gen HX processors.