MSI Raider A18 HX A9W review: Extreme power at an extreme price

Best Prices Today: MSI Raider A18 HX A9W

2025 is shaping up to be a good year if your laptop buying tastes skew towards the equivalent of a family-sized meat-and-cheese platter.

The launch of new Nvidia RTX mobile graphics—including the top-tier RTX 5090 with 24GB of VRAM—has the potential for chart-topping performance. Now it’s joined by AMD’s Ryzen 9 9955HX3D, a 16-core CPU with the company’s vaunted 3D V-Cache, an extra stack of L3 cache that can prove useful in games.

The MSI Raider A18 HX A9W brings both new chips into one chassis. And, as a bonus, it tosses in 64GB of memory and a 2TB PCIe 5.0 solid state drive. That’s incredible hardware, but the laptop retails for an equally incredible MSRP of $5,099.99.

So, is it worth it?

MSI Raider A18 HX A9W: Specs and features

The highlight of the MSI Raider A18 HX A9W is undoubtedly the combination of AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX3D processor and Nvidia RTX 5090 graphics. Each is an undisputed heavyweight in its category and should deliver a killer one-two punch of CPU and GPU performance.

With that said, however, this MSI Raider A18 HX A9W still must deal with the power and thermal constraints faced by every laptop—and it will be interesting to see the results.

The MSI Raider A18 HX A9W delivers additional technical highlights, too, like the PCIe 5.0 solid state drive and the 4K Mini-LED display.

• Model number: A18 HX A9WIG-082US
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX3D
• Memory: 64GB DDR5-5600
• Graphics/GPU: Nvidia RTX 5090 (Max 175W with Dynamic Boost)
• NPU: None
• Display: 18-inch 3840×2400 120Hz Mini-LED with HDR
• Storage: 1x 2TB PCIe 5.0 SSD
• Webcam: 1080p 30fps camera with Windows Hello support
• Connectivity: 2x Thunderbolt 5 / USB-C 4 with DisplayPort and Power Delivery 3.1, 3x USB-A 3.2 Gen 2, 1x SD card reader, 1x HDMI 2.1 (up to 4K @ 120Hz), 1x 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet (RJ45)
• Networking: Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4
• Biometrics: Facial recognition, fingerprint reader
• Battery capacity: 99 watt-hours
• Dimensions: 15.91 x 12.11 x 1.26 inches
• Weight: 7.94 pounds
• Operating System: Windows 11 Pro
• Price: $5,099.99 MSRP

Features like these don’t come cheap, of course, so the Raider A18 HX A9W rings up at $5,099.99. That’s a lot of money!

However, it’s not unusually expensive for a top-tier gaming laptop. A variety of high-end laptops retail at higher prices, from fully configured Apple MacBook Pro 16 configurations to top-end Razer Blade, Alienware, and MSI Titan laptops.

If $5,099.99 is a bit rich for your blood, MSI provides a configuration with Nvidia’s RTX 5080 for $4,099.99. It’s otherwise identical to the model reviewed here and a good bet for gamers who don’t plan to use the laptop’s GPU for creative or AI workloads.

The MSI Raider A18 HX A9W is a CPU, GPU, and storage performance powerhouse. It delivers across the board with strong results in every benchmark, from multi-core sustained CPU workloads to ray-traced gaming and even AI large language models.

MSI Raider A18 HX A9W: Design and build quality

The MSI Raider A18 HX A9W shares a chassis with its Intel-powered sibling, and it’s a substantial piece of hardware. It tips the scales at nearly 8 pounds and measures 1.25 inches thick, as well as close to 16 inches wide. It won’t even fit in a typical backpack or messenger bag meant to carry a laptop. You’ll need a special bag designed for the purpose (and MSI has a bag to sell you).

Beyond its imposing size, the Raider 18 provides a functional yet unremarkable aesthetic. The black plastic construction is punctuated by red detailing, creating a decent visual appearance that falls short of the premium feel found in more professionally oriented machines like Razer’s Blade 18. It also lacks the dramatic flair of MSI’s own Titan laptop, which serves more as a statement piece (at an even higher price). The most notable visual quirk is the LED lighting at the front of the laptop, but that trick is emulated by other high-end machines.

Still, the Raider 18 feels dependable. There’s not much flex to be found, even in traditional weak spots like the center of the keyboard, and the laptop doesn’t creak or groan when handled. Machines in this category can feel a bit rickety due to their size, bulk, and the numerous chassis components and internal PCBs they’re constructed from. The Raider 18 isn’t as solid as the Razer Blade 18, but it feels more robust than most laptops in its category.

MSI Raider A18 HX A9W: Keyboard, trackpad

MSI stretches a spacious keyboard with numpad across the Raider 18 HX AI’s deck. Most keys feel generously sized though a few, like Caps Lock, remain slightly smaller than standard. The numpad keys match the size of the main alphanumeric keys, which is a welcome change from laptops with undersized numpads.

Despite the SteelSeries branding, the keyboard’s feel disappoints. I didn’t notice a difference between this keyboard and typical competitors, including alternatives that are much less expensive, like the Asus TUF series. The large chassis provides ample room for key travel, but the bottoming action is lacking in tactile feedback. The keyboard is still fine, but the Raider’s price tag sets expectations the keyboard doesn’t deliver.

RGB backlighting saves the keyboard from complete mediocrity. Owners can customize each key individually through the Steelseries GG app, which handles both lighting profiles and macro configurations. I appreciate this software—it looks polished, works intuitively, and lets you save multiple setups. While these features aren’t groundbreaking, SteelSeries outpaces competitors like Gigabyte and Acer, which lag in software quality.

The touchpad is more of a mix. It measures roughly 5 inches wide by 3 inches deep, which isn’t large for an 18-inch gaming laptop. The surface is responsive, but unremarkable, and the physical button action produces a springy yet hollow click. Competitors like the Razer Blade 18 and Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 offer a noticeably larger touchpad.

MSI Raider A18 HX A9W: Display, audio

The MSI Raider A18 HX A9W has the same 18-inch Mini-LED display found in the Intel-powered Raider 18 HX AI. It provides 3840×2400 resolution, which is a bit higher than a typical 4K display (4K is usually 3840×2160), alongside a 120Hz refresh rate.

A Mini-LED backlight lights the display with numerous individual LEDs positioned directly behind the LCD panel. Those LEDs can turn on and off individually, which greatly improves contrast. In my testing, the Raider A18 HX can hit a minimum luminance of zero nits, which means its contrast is technically on par with OLED.

However, Mini-LED displays suffer a “blooming” issue where bright halos (or inverse shadows) appear around or inside small, high-contrast objects. The MSI Raider A18 HX does a good job of minimizing that issue, and I personally didn’t find it distracting, but it’s something to keep in mind.

The Raider A18 HX has a matte panel, rather than a glossy panel, so it doesn’t “pop” in quite the same way. Despite that, the display still provides an incredible color gamut. It’s also ultra-bright and ultra-sharp; the pixel density works out to 252 pixels per inch, which is higher than even a 27-inch 5K monitor (which has 218 pixels per inch).

HDR support is great, too, and this is an area where many gamers will prefer the Mini-LED over OLED, because OLED can’t match Mini-LED in HDR brightness.

The Raider 18 also provides solid audio performance, though it’s ultimately less impressive. The built-in speakers have plenty of volume, and the laptop includes woofers for low-end bass, but I found the audio presentation was a tad metallic, grating, and muddy as I cranked the volume up. Still, the sound system is good for a Windows laptop.

MSI Raider A18 HX A9W: Webcam, microphone, biometrics

A decent 1080p webcam is found in the Raider A18 HX A9W. It boasts 1080p resolution and provides good video quality in rooms with moderate to great lighting. Though not suitable for YouTube or other more serious work, the 1080p webcam is ideal for video calls. It also has a physical privacy shutter.

The microphone is respectable, too. It picked up my voice without issue and had decent noise cancellation.

Notably, the MSI Raider A18 HX A9W doesn’t support Windows’ built-in Studio Effects filters, which use AI for effects like background blur. That feature is supported on the Intel-powered Raider 18 HX AI.

The Raider A18 HX A9W supports biometric login with a fingerprint reader and an IR camera for facial recognition. Both biometric login options worked well in my testing.

MSI Raider A18 HX A9W: Connectivity

The MSI Raider A18 HX A9W provides top-tier connectivity.

We’re talking two Thunderbolt 5 ports, each with USB-C, DisplayPort, and Power Delivery. Thunderbolt 5 can provide data rates up to 80 Gbps bi-directional which, frankly, is way beyond what most use cases require. They’re particularly useful for people who want to use the laptop with a Thunderbolt 5 dock that has numerous downstream ports.

The Thunderbolt 5 ports are joined by three USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, HDMI 2.1, a 2.5G Ethernet port, and a 3.5mm combo audio jack. There’s an SD card reader, too. Overall, the laptop’s ports offer a great range of physical connectivity that can handle both the latest Thunderbolt and USB peripherals and older USB-A devices.

However, as with the Intel-powered MSI Raider 18 HX AI, I have a small nitpick. Both Thunderbolt 5 ports are on the right flank, and at roughly the mid-point between the front and rear of the laptop. That can lead to more cable clutter on your desk, since it’s difficult to neatly hide and route cables connected to these ports.

Wireless connectivity is great, as well, with support for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4—the latest version of each standard.

MSI Raider A18 HX A9W: CPU Performance

The MSI Raider A18 HX A9W is, on paper, one of the most expensive, exotic, and powerful laptops ever sold. It provides two heavy hitters. The first is AMD’s Ryzen 9 9955HX3D, a 16-core and 32-thread chip with AMD’s 3D V-Cache, which could improve performance in games. It’s joined by Nvidia’s RTX 5090 mobile, the most powerful RTX-series mobile GPU in Nvidia’s line-up which, by extension, makes it the most capable mobile gaming GPU available right now.

As mentioned earlier, PC World also reviewed an MSI Raider 18 laptop with Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285HX and Nvidia’s RTX 5080. It was a bit less expensive at $4,499. So, does the Ryzen 9 9955HX3D and RTX 5090 provide a useful upgrade?

PCMark 10, a holistic system benchmark, spat out a result of 8,581 on the MSI Raider A18 HX A9W. That’s highly competitive with other laptops in this category, though it doesn’t quite match some Intel-powered laptops we’ve recently tested. Still, the results here are very close, so this benchmark alone isn’t enough to make any firm statements about how the AMD Radeon 9 9955HX3D and Nvidia RTX 5090 perform.

Next up is Handbrake, a heavily multi-threaded CPU benchmark, where we use the CPU cores (and not any special encoding hardware on the chip) to transcode a feature-length film from .MP4 to .MKV.

This benchmark shows a lean towards Intel’s chips. This is perhaps due to their higher number of cores overall. The Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX has 24 total cores (though only eight are performance cores, with the remaining 16 being efficiency cores). This is a trend across all Intel and AMD chips, with the Intel P-core + E-core architecture being a better fit for this benchmark than AMD’s CPUs that only have high-performance cores, but fewer cores overall.

Next, we jump over to Cinebench 2024, the latest version of the popular benchmark, which again places a heavy load on all CPU cores.

In this test, however, the AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX3D provides performance that is more directly competitive with Intel’s best CPUs. In fact, the MSI Raider A18 HX A9W’s score of 2,111 is the second-best PCWorld has recorded from a laptop to date—coming just a hair behind the MSI Raider 18 HX A2XW with Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX. The AMD and Intel CPUs are basically tied here, and both deliver results that rank among the strongest from any laptop ever sold.

The results might seem a bit disappointing, however, at least if you’re an AMD fan. The AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX3D is great, but in PCWorld’s tests, it didn’t clobber Intel’s top-tier equivalents. But let’s be clear here. The AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX3D didn’t run away from the pack, but it’s still among the most powerful mobile CPUs we’ve ever tested, and certainly an outstanding pick for CPU-heavy workloads.

MSI Raider A18 HX A9W: GPU Performance

However, the 9955HX3D is aimed firmly at gamers, as the chip’s 3D V-Cache can often provide an advantage there. The RTX 5090 also deserves time in the spotlight, too. So, let’s move on to the 3D benchmarks.

3DMark, the gold standard of 3D gaming benchmarks, produced mixed results that ultimately favor the MSI Raider A18 HX A9W.

The AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX3D and Nvidia RTX 5090 didn’t leap ahead in 3DMark Time Spy, which is an older (though demanding) benchmark that doesn’t test ray tracing.

But in the Port Royal benchmark, which does test ray tracing, the Raider A18 HX A9W leaped ahead to a score of 16,416. That’s the new high-water mark in PC World’s testing, and by a respectable margin—it’s roughly 11 percent quicker than the quickest Intel/Nvidia RTX 5080 laptop we have tested to date.

Next up is Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which PCWorld tests at 1080p and on Highest detail, but with ray-tracing off. Here the MSI Raider averaged 230 frames per second, which is an excellent result. It’s not the best we’ve seen, however, so there’s not much benefit to selecting the RTX 5090 over the RTX 5080 in this game.

Now we move on to Metro: Exodus, which we run at Extreme detail but without raytracing turned on. Here, the Raider A18 managed to reach an average of 99 frames per second, which is an excellent result. It’s only a minor uplift over RTX 5080 laptops, however, so the RTX 5090 isn’t a compelling GPU upgrade for this title under the conditions we tested it.

We wrap up gaming testing with Cyberpunk 2077, as the graph shows, the MSI Raider 18 was quick in any situation, hitting new high scores. The uplift was often rather substantial, too—20 FPS or more at 1080p and Ultra detail, and 5 FPS or more in the Overdrive ray-raced preset (which is meaningful when most laptops average 30 to 40 FPS).

And that’s with Nvidia DLSS turned off. I also tried the game with the DLSS Transformer model in use, with Nvidia DLAA upscaling quality and DLSS Frame Gen 3x turned on. With all those options in use, Cyberpunk 2077 averaged 127 frames per second at 1080p in the Overdrive ray-traced preset. That’s an incredible result, and in general, Cyberpunk 2077 felt incredibly smooth—smoother than on any laptop I’ve tested so far.

The MSI Raider A18 HX A9W’s overall GPU performance is outstanding. With that said, the RTX 5090 is a luxury. Choosing the RTX 5090 over the RTX 5080 adds $1,000 to the Raider A18 HX A9W’s price, but provides a performance gain of about 10 percent, at best. That’s tough to justify.

MSI Raider A18 HX A9W: AI performance

When it comes to AI, however, the RTX 5090 is a bit more appealing—and it mostly comes down to the memory.

The RTX 5080 has 16GB of VRAM, which is a healthy figure for gaming, but rather cramped if you want to run AI models on your laptop. The RTX 5090, however, provides 24GB of VRAM. That increase means it’s possible to offload larger models like Google Gemma 3 27B and Qwen3 32B to the GPU. Both weigh in at a tad above 16GB, which is above the VRAM available on the RTX 5080.

Google Gemma 3 27B produced an average of 12.67 tokens per second across three prompts and replies, that spanned about 1,000 tokens each. That’s a solid result and more than twice the speed of the Raider 18 HX AI, as that laptop, which was tested with an RTX 5080, didn’t have enough VRAM to execute the model on the GPU.

On top of that, models like Google Gemma 3 27B are more intelligent than their smaller siblings. In that way, the RTX 5090 can provide a boost to both model quality and the speed at which responses are generated.

MSI Raider A18 HX A9W: SSD performance

The MSI Raider A18 HX A9W’s solid state drive performance deserves special mention. Like its Intel-powered sibling, the Raider 18 HX AI, the A18 has a PCIe 5.0 solid state drive. In this case, it’s the 2TB Samsung PM9E1.

And, wow, does it deliver on performance. I measured CrystalDiskMark read speeds of 14654MB/s and write speeds of 11046MB/s (in SEQ1M Q8T1). Those are huge figures. If you need storage performance, the MSI Raider has the goods. 

MSI Raider A18 HX A9W: Battery life and portability

The MSI Raider A18 HX A9W does all it can to provide acceptable battery life. It includes a 99-watt-hour battery, which is the largest found in laptops due to limitations on the size of lithium-ion batteries allowed on flights. It also supports hybrid graphics, meaning the powerful and power-hungry RTX 5090 can switch off, handing graphics responsibilities to the AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX3D’s miserly Radeon 610M integrated graphics.

Unfortunately, it’s not enough to provide much battery life. The Raider endured a bit under three hours of use in our standard battery test, which loops a 4K file of the short film Tears of Steel.

My subjective use seemed to provide slightly better results, but I still found that just a couple of hours of use could leave the battery with just 30 percent of its charge left in the tank.

To make matters worse, the Raider ships with a huge 400-watt power brick. To be fair, it’s not that large for a 400-watt unit, but it’s still among the larger power bricks I’ve seen so far in 2025.

While the power brick connects over a proprietary connector, the laptop can be powered over USB-C. That won’t deliver enough power to fully handle the laptop in all load situations, however, so you may see the battery discharge while connected to USB-C power.

While the Raider A18’s battery life isn’t great, it isn’t much worse than that of other laptops in this segment. In general, you’re going to get four or five hours, at most. The one clear exception is the Razer Blade 16, which stretched battery life to more than 10 hours. That’s thanks to its much less powerful, but much more power-efficient, AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 CPU.

MSI Raider A18 HX A9W: Conclusion

The MSI Raider A18 HX A9W is a CPU, GPU, and storage performance powerhouse. It delivers across the board with strong results in every benchmark, from multi-core sustained CPU workloads to ray-traced gaming and even AI large language models. Compared to its Intel-powered alternative, the Raider 18 HX AI, the A18 is broadly similar but scores small wins in gaming and storage performance. The A18 also notches a large win in AI performance thanks to the RTX 5090’s 24GB of VRAM.

It’s not a perfect laptop. The Raider A18 is thick, heavy, and not much to look at. It also suffers a mediocre keyboard and touchpad and, as you might expect, can be loud under full load. The RTX 5090 version is also quite expensive at $5,099.99; the less expensive RTX 5080 model, priced at $4,099.99, is a better value in many situations, as it has the same AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX3D CPU, and the RTX 5080 only slightly lags the RTX 5090 in games.

But at the end of the day, performance matters, and the Raider A18 HX A9W is an obvious choice if you want the best performance you can find in a modern laptop. It set records in multiple benchmarks and was still competitive in benchmarks where it didn’t top the charts.