This super powerful MSI gaming laptop made me want to retire my PC

Desktop PC gamers get all the fun. Next-gen hardware typically lands there first, and the mobile versions eventually squeezed into their laptop counterparts usually come with a performance penalty. Well, having just seen Nvidia’s RTX 5090 laptop graphics in action on MSI’s newest and best laptops, there’s clearly still enough power on tap to do justice to all of the latest games. So much so, in fact, my not-that-old gaming PC just got thoroughly humbled.

MSI’s RTX 5090-equipped MSI Raider 18 HX AI A2XW was announced at CES in January, but Nvidia’s 5000-series GPU rollout hasn’t been especially speedy. A retail-ready video BIOS only arrived a few weeks ago at the time of writing. But that was the perfect excuse to trek over to MSI’s UK headquarters to see the laptop in action. Can it run Cyberpunk 2077? Can it ever. Just be prepared to pay handsomely for the privilege.

It’s true: the laptop pictured here will set you back a breathtaking $5000/£4900. And it’s not even MSI’s 2025 flagship model. That’ll be the Titan 18 HX Dragon Edition Norse Myth, a stunning 18in behemoth decked out in norse runes and with a dragon crest embedded in the chassis.

The Raider is more mainstream – or as mainstream as a desktop replacement with Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285HX CPU, 64GB of speedy DDR5-6400 RAM, and an RTX 5090 graphics chip with 24GB of dedicated video memory gets. Oh, and don’t forget the 4TB of PCIe Gen5 SSD storage, which gets its own dedicated heatsink for faster sustained file transfers.

Naturally it looks the part, with a per-key RGB backlit keyboard, red trim around the chonky side and rear air vents, and a generous helping of ports at the sides and rear. Its 18in screen is rather stunning, too. It’s a 4K resolution mini-LED panel, with a 120Hz refresh rate and DisplayHDR 1000 rating, meaning it gets retina-searingly bright when playing HDR-enabled games. MSI reckons a mobile RTX 5090 can’t consistently deliver the frames in brand-new games to justify a QHD resolution, 240Hz display.

Yep, even with MSI delivering a combined 260W of power to the Raider’s components (85W for the CPU and as much as 175W for the GPU), Nvidia’s latest and greatest mobile silicon still has its limits. And those limits aren’t dramatically higher than the last-gen RTX 4090, if you avoid the AI-enhanced upscaling that’s quickly becoming the norm.

Cyberpunk 2077 could only muster 26fps at 4K resolution, Ultra details, and path-traced lighting. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle hit 31fps at the same settings. That’s maybe 15% better than the RTX 4090 laptop I use for Stuff‘s games testing, which isn’t much of a generational leap as pure rasterisation goes. But that’s really only half the story.

Switch on DLSS 4.0 and Indiana Jones suddenly returns 75fps. All those extra AI TOPS are putting in a serious shift, and the visual clarity is properly impressive. A lot of the shimmering and smeariness seen on earlier versions of the tech is gone, leaving a much sharper, more convincing picture that runs as smooth as you like.

Multi-frame generation goes even further, creating multiple artificial frames for every ‘real’ one rendered. Suddenly Cyberpunk was hitting 130fps and Indiana Jones managed 124fps, both with ray tracing cranked to their highest settings. And both felt fantastic to play. The input response was superb, and ghostly upscaling artifacts were minimal. If this is the new normal, then sign me up.

Yes, a desktop-grade RTX 5090 can do even better – but it draws three times as much power from the wall. MSI’s setup is good enough for any game you’d care to name (and with 24GB of VRAM should do for a long time to come), yet fits in a backpack and manages to keep its hardware cool with just two tiny fans – and a whole lot of heatpipes.

The version of the MSI Raider 18 I got to demo isn’t even the one I’d buy if I had the funds. MSI is working on one with AMD’s Fire Range Ryzen 9 9955HX3D processor – a 16-core, 32-thread monster with 3D V-Cache. Games love this super-fast low-level memory dedicated to the CPU, with performance boosted by as much as 20%.

The big question on gamers’ minds will surely be whether RTX 5090 laptops worth the price. That’ll depend on whether you’ve got the space for a desktop – your money definitely goes further there – and how well the lower-level 5080 and 5070Ti alternatives perform. With DLSS being where the big frame rate gains are now, it’s not as cut-and-dry as previous years. Anyone with an RTX 4090 laptop can probably wait a while longer before they upgrade.

If you’ve yet to experience AI upscaling first-hand, though? A laptop like the Raider 18 will be one heck of a step up.

• Related: Asus has squeezed an RTX 5080 into my favourite small gaming laptop