MSI is synonymous with gaming laptops, and its Raider line-up is one of the top gaming platforms on the market. But MSI has always been just a little more modest, leaving the most interesting ideas and the most powerful configurations in the Titan line-up MSI’s Titan series has always offered something special. Something different. Something unique. look back to 2015’s insane MSI GT80 Titan, which merged a full desktop keyboard into an 18.4-inch laptop; the MSI GT76 Titan is a full desktop Core i9- in a more traditional 17-inch form factor with a 9900K processor.
Intel’s latest offering for its powerful notebooks is the Alder Lake HX series processors, part of the 12th generation Core family. And while the naming of these chips is similar to Intel’s previous H series, the new HX platform is very different. Intel’s HX processors are repackaged desktop processors rather than the laptop-specific H line-up: compared to the Core i9-12900HK, the Core i9-12900HX has two additional P-Cores for a total of eight, and the E Core has the same eight. This means that the Core i9-12900HX has a total of 24 threads: 16 performance threads and 8 efficiency threads.
Perhaps because it is so huge, MSI is giving away a full keyboard and numeric keypad with SteelSeries’ Cherry mechanical RGB keyboard. As a photographer and journalist as well as a gamer, I really appreciate this keyboard. It has the click and tactile feel that many gamers, including myself, want. It may be a little lacking for general typing, but I quickly got used to it. It’s certainly not quiet, but it’s not going to antagonise people around you in a library, for example.
The display is Full HD (1,920 x 1,080 pixels) with a high refresh rate of 360 Hz. Peak brightness of 333 nits, colour gamut coverage of 100% sRGB and 79% DCI-P3 are impressive, but only just. All Titans sold in the US so far appear to have 4K (3,840 x 2,160 pixels) screens, which should look even better and provide finer detail, albeit at a lower refresh rate of 120 Hz. According to our benchmarks, the Titan seems to have no problem producing smooth gaming frame rates even at 4K.
The 4TB of storage is actually four 1TB PCI Express 4.0 M.2 SSDs, two of which are RAID 1 (mirrored) and the other two non-RAID, so Windows shows a total of 3TB. one of the M.2 slots supports PCIe 5.0 drives, which data transfer speeds should increase significantly; the Core HX is the only Intel mobile CPU to support PCI Express 5.0.