What does nearly $6,000 of gaming laptop get you?

It’s easy to get into the weeds on a hobby, especially if you’re into PC gaming and dreaming of the highest levels of graphical performance. But how much is too much for hardware? Spending top dollar on graphics power, processing, RAM, storage, etc. — like many things — eventually leads to diminishing returns. When it comes to gaming laptops, MSI’s $5,699.99 Titan 18 is well beyond that inflection point. But it’s also like nothing else.

It’s not very logical to spend that much when other excellent gaming laptops are nearly as powerful but cost almost half as much. While the Titan is an absolutely reckless purchase, it’s also a joyous one that goes all out for specs and wide-eyed coolness factor.

The Titan goes hard on just about everything, though execution is a mixed bag. The 18-inch Mini LED 4K HDR display has a resolution of 3840 x 2400 and a variable refresh rate up to 120Hz. It looks fantastic. It’s not as contrast-y as an OLED, but it has a colorful punch with enough brightness to be easily visible in even a sun-drenched room. SteelSeries made its mechanical keyboard with Cherry low-profile switches, and it’s one of the most tactile and loudest laptop keyboards I’ve ever touched. It’s got a ping-y metallic undertone in its key presses, which I normally don’t want in a mechanical keyboard, but for some reason I love it in the Titan.

The seamless trackpad is edge-to-edge illuminated by customizable RGB lighting instead of being invisible like on a Dell, and its haptic feedback has a satisfyingly hefty knock that’s unlike any other. But like the Dell XPS 13 I tested earlier this year, it’s not the most reliable at detecting finger clicks. If it had this feedback combined with the reliability of a MacBook’s trackpad, it would be my all-time favorite. And the Titan is flush with ports and expandability, including two super-fast Thunderbolt 5 ports, three USB-A, two user-accessible RAM slots, and four M.2 SSD slots. Cap off the Titan’s specs with its top-tier Nvidia RTX 5090 laptop GPU, Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX CPU, 64GB of RAM, and 6TB of SSD storage, and the lofty $5,700 price starts making more sense.

The Titan 18 is unapologetic about its status as a desktop replacement. It’s 7.94 pounds / 3.6kg of “you paid out the nose for me to sit in one spot and crush AAA games or churn through processing-heavy tasks, and that’s what I’ll do.” And with its massive 400W power adapter, the whole package weighs 10.5 pounds / 4.76kg. I lugged it with me on a road trip, and having a machine this powerful when visiting family was awesome — even if traveling with it wasn’t so fun, since it didn’t fit in any of my bags. While it’s easier than moving a full desktop PC and monitor, you’ll feel just as tethered to a wall plug. The Titan’s 99Whr battery can barely eke out 2.5 hours of basic Chrome, Slack, Google Docs, and chat app usage before it’s drained — and that’s in Eco mode with Windows Energy Saver turned on the whole time. While playing a game on battery, even with Nvidia’s BatteryBoost optimizations enabled and targeting just 30fps, it dies in about an hour or less.

But when you’re plugged in and going full-tilt on a visually demanding game, the Titan is a joy to use. It can play Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra settings in 4K with ray tracing and DLSS 4 turned on at around 60 frames per second (or higher with frame generation). Turn ray tracing off or some settings down, and you can comfortably play at well over 60fps. Early levels of the Battlefield 6 campaign ran confidently at 60–75fps on the Ultra graphics preset and at the panel’s native 4K resolution. There were infrequent dips into the mid-to-high 50s during chaotic moments in larger areas, but everything remained smooth and snappy. If you want to push frame rates to the Titan’s max 120Hz refresh or even slightly higher, you can bump the resolution down to 2560 x 1600, and it still looks adequately crisp. But keeping the game in 4K Ultra and turning on DLSS 4 Quality yielded a happy medium of 90 to 100fps, while adding single-frame generation comfortably boosted it to 120 to 140fps.

Fan noise, while loud, isn’t as bad as some 16-inch gaming laptops I’ve tested. The Titan’s large chassis allows for more effective cooling under load, pumping out lots of hot air from its flanks. The keyboard deck near the laptop’s hinge gets incredibly hot to the touch, but thankfully, your fingers on the WASD keys are spared. The width of the chassis also means the six-speaker sound system can help a tiny bit in identifying directional game sounds like gunfire. Though the speakers are sadly just okay for movies and music, lacking depth and much low-end.

There are two elephants in the room with the Titan: the looming temptation of a proper desktop gaming PC and the class of 16- and 18-inch gaming laptops with RTX 5080 GPUs that sit below it. You can get a much more powerful desktop PC for half the Titan’s price, add a 240Hz QD-OLED monitor, and still have enough money left over for an M5 MacBook Pro or even an Asus ROG Zephyrus G14. But let’s be honest, if you’re considering an 18-inch, 8-pound gaming laptop, you’re probably moving it around enough that this combo won’t work. But in that case, you could save around $2,400 on a gaming laptop with a 5080 like the Asus ROG Strix Scar 16 and get, on average, within 7 to 10fps of the Titan’s performance.

Running benchmarks on the Titan’s RTX 5090, which runs at its full wattage, I was struck by how close 5080 laptops were nipping at its heels. For $2,100 to $2,400 more than an Asus ROG Strix Scar 16 or Lenovo Legion Pro 7i, the Titan only yields an extra 7fps on average in 4K or about 9fps more in 2.5K. The screens on those laptops are a little smaller and lower-res than the Titan, but they have lovely 240Hz OLED displays with deeper blacks, bolder colors, and a stronger contrast. As much as I love the size and brightness of the Titan’s Mini LED, I prefer the look of those OLEDs. Even the 5090-equipped Razer Blade 16 and 18, pricey machines in their own right, cost $1,000 less than the Titan. The half-inch-thinner, 3-pound-lighter Blade 16 is much more versatile and travel-friendly, and its performance is mostly on par with the Titan. Though the Titan has a higher-end CPU (with twice as many cores), greater cooling (for quieter fans), user-accessible RAM slots (though not easily accessible), faster Thunderbolt 5 ports, and two more M.2 SSD slots.

The sickos who pony up for the Titan are still getting a machine that isn’t quite like anything else. It’s an illogical purchase, far from any semblance of pragmatism or value-for-dollar shopping — even if you’re aiming for a little futureproofing. But despite its shortcomings and super high price, it’s still a beastly laptop with its own boisterous charm.

Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge