MSI Raider 16 Max HX review: A chunky gaming laptop that pulls no punches

MSI is in an interesting place as far as its laptop lineup goes. Earlier this year it finally redesigned some of its most popular machines, with the new, far sleeker Stealth 16 proving a particular hit – I loved that machine.

However, the simple fact is that not everyone wants their gaming laptop to emphasise slimness and portability. A lot of gamers out there seek the most power they can possibly get in a gaming laptop, with little worrying about it being office-appropriate or whether it could pass for a productivity machine.

MSI knows it can't leave that segment behind, so that's doubtless the motivation behind the new Raider 16 Max HX, a beast from whichever angle you peek at. I've put it through its paces to see whether it holds up to its lofty billing.

Price and Availability

The sad reality is that gaming laptop prices are going absolutely mad at the moment. Consoles might be stealing a lot of the headlines and scrutiny, but the fact that my spec of the Raider 16 Max HX comes in at £3550 is frankly a little bananas.

That's not the starting price of the machine, though. It begins from £2249 / $2999, and that version has an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Laptop GPU, which shows you that there's no attempt to be entry-level here.

My review version, though, packs a 5090, paired with an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor, both high-end (although you can go even more premium on the processor front).

There's no way around the conclusion that this isn't a "sensible" laptop, even for top-end buyers – it's now extremely difficult to find pricing that feels fair, and if that angers you then you'd be best off pointing the finger at the AI boom.

Design and Spec

As I mentioned in the opening of this review, the MSI Raider 16 Max HX isn't where you should be looking if you're in search of subtlety. This is a gaming laptop that earns the 'Max' in its name, with a maximalist approach to both its design and its spec sheet.

Taking a tour around its hardware, the laptop is a hulking one even at a glance. It weighs in at a serious 2.6kg, and its footprint is actually a bit bigger than I'd typically expect for a 16-incher. It's very much in the same huge bracket as the Alienware 16 Area-51, making sense for those who are happy to take on a much bigger machine than they otherwise could.

Aesthetically, the Raider 16 Max HX has different looks when it's on or off. In the case of the latter it's finished all over in matte black, and is relatively understated; the back of the display has an MSI crest and a large but subtle embossed logo to make it stand out.

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Switch it on, though, and the RGB lighting comes into play. That crest lights up and strobes, while there's a whole strip of lighting at the bottom of the keyboard and mousepad's shelf.

That and per-key lighting control means that you have plenty to play with if you're a fan of these effects, although I wonder if some customers might prefer to just turn them all off.

That keyboard is full-size and includes a compact numpad, and a tie-in with SteelSeries makes it easy to set up macros and shortcuts, albeit through more baked-in software. The mousepad is a good enough size but otherwise mediocre, although in this sort of gaming laptop you'll really only be using it in a pinch.

Build quality is solid enough, although it's a very plastic-heavy design (which is no surprise or point of difference with most of its competition). That does mean there's a degree of flex to be found if you search it out, but I had no deeper issues with solidity in regular use.

It almost goes without saying that the size and weight aren't chosen arbitrarily – components are jammed in here, along with huge amounts of ventilation and active cooling. The number of vents for fans is quite striking, but the I/O on offer is relatively typical.

The back edge of the laptop houses the proprietary charging port, for connecting the absolutely massive power brick. It also offers an Ethernet port, an HDMI port and a USB-A port. The right-hand edge has two more USB-A ports and a 3.5mm jack. The left edge gives you a full-size SD card reader and two USB-C ports.

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Spec-wise, there aren't many chances to get a 24GB GPU in a gaming laptop, but that's what's on offer here thanks to the inclusion of the RTX 5090 Laptop GPU.

That makes this a bit of an apex predator, but there are grades of processor to pair with it. I tested the Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX, but that can be upgraded to a 290HX for a few hundred pounds/dollars if you really want it.

My tested spec comes with a 16-inch WQXGA IPS display at a resolution of 2560x1600, with a refresh rate cap of 240Hz, and it backed up its main specs with 32GB of DDR5 RAM in a 2x16GB configuration. Storage-wise, it has a 1TB SSD – and it's one of the many annoyances of RAMageddon that this sort of pricing doesn't get you more storage than that.

Performance

So, if you're going to make a multi-kilo laptop the size of a small planet, you'd presume that it'll need to have fairly staggering performance to make up for that inconvenience, right? Well, thankfully that's something that MSI has taken care to ensure, and the power on offer in the Raider 16 Max HX is indeed class-leading.

There's no point hanging around – I got straight into benchmarking when I turned my loaner machine on, and it pretty immediately impressed. Cyberpunk 2077 remains the gold standard where benchmarking is concerned thanks to its huge array of presets and almost every graphical integration on Nvidia's side.

Starting off modest, I picked the Ray-Tracing Low preset at native resolution, a preset that I think delivers excellent visuals without necessarily turning on expensive extras that don't add too much. An average frame rate of 120.9fps speaks for itself, frankly, and looks superb. Whacking on frame generation to the 4x mark as an experiment boosted this to a ridiculous 310.9fps.

Clocking that the laptop had more performance headroom than I anticipated, I went straight to the big guns and used the Ray-Tracing Overdrive setting next, maxing out almost every setting. I got back an average of 60.87fps, another staggering result for a portable machine. With 4x frame generation, this leapt to 189.67fps, for outrageous smoothness.

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The power draw of this sort of performance is really significant, of course, but I was impressed to see that even playing unplugged (something you really aren't going to intentionally do much at all), I could still get a playable 31fps from the Ray-Tracing Low preset, making it doable in a pinch. The battery wouldn't last long, of course.

The display, meanwhile, is an interesting case. It's a pretty excellent IPS panel, and I don't really have any complaints in isolation. It's sharp, precise and really accurate – but for this price I would like to get an OLED in such a laptop, for the deeper blacks that you get with it. That upgrade is available in some territories and from some retailers, but it's not cheap.

The keyboard is decent in use, I'd say, but there is a little flex underneath it to bring down the impression of quality formed by the performance you'll be enjoying. The same goes for the mousepad, but I used a mouse in my testing, as I'd expect anyone to if they're spending this much on a gaming laptop.

The amount of venting on the Raider 16 Max HX had me a little worried that it would sound like a jet engine under any amount of load, and while I can't say it's whisper-quiet, it's not as loud as I feared.

Of course, you should still pair it with one of the best headsets out there for immersion's sake, but I think the thermal management is done quite well here. That also means the laptop never got uncomfortably hot in my testing.

There is quite a lot of nonsense pre-installed on the machine, though, with Norton's pop-ups proving particularly irksome – so be prepared to do some proper pruning once you're all set up, if you want to enjoy a more peaceful computing future.

Verdict

MSI's beastly laptop feels like a good summary of where gaming hardware is at in a more general sense. It brings unearthly amounts of power in a form factor that can't be called anything less than chunky, and gives you the option of playing the latest games at incredibly high frame-rates – which can't be sniffed at.

However, it demands an absolute wedge of your money to get that performance, and I think there are parts of the package that lag a little. For this price, I want more than 1TB of storage, and I don't want to feel any flex in the build (even if it's plastic). I'd also like an OLED panel without shelling out for an upgrade.

If you're in the market for a gaming laptop with very few compromises, though, the MSI Raider 16 Max HX should definitely figure in your calculations. The question of whether its price is right is ultimately likely to come down to your personal affordability.

Also consider

Of the MSI machines I've tested this year, I think I'd rather have the new Stealth 16 AI+, despite its less powerful starting specs. Its redesign puts it far ahead of the Raider 16 in terms of aesthetics, and I think it's easier to fit into regular life, for when you do just need a regular laptop.

That said, if you're perfectly happy to go with something absolutely massive, and want a different option, then the obvious pointer would be to look at the Alienware 16 Area-51, which is a total monster. It has a different look and feel, which makes it more divisive, but I think it competes pretty directly with what MSI's doing here.