MSI Stealth 18 HX AI review: THE killer gaming laptop right now

When you're surveying the best gaming laptops in a given year, much comes down to Nvidia's latest rollout of graphics cards – and in 2025 that's been quite a stop-start process. MSI is one of many laptop makers that has had to play things slowly, but now its lineup of 50-series laptops is starting to become widely available.

The Stealth 18 HX AI isn't its single most beastly laptop option, but it is very much the one that marries high-end specs with a less shouty design, and I've had it for a couple of weeks to see how the new generation fares. Can it prove its worth at this price premium?

Price & Availability

The Stealth 18 HX AI is available to order now from a few different storefronts, and unsurprisingly comes in a few different specs. The cheapest you'll find it at launch is £2899, but different models can go right up to £3799, with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070Ti and 5080 speccable. You can also get the Stealth A18 AI+, which has an AMD chip at its heart instead of an Intel one. Regional pricing can be seen in the shopping widget, above.

That is obviously quite a wedge of cash to drop on a new gaming laptop, but the idea here would be to use it as a desktop replacement that can also do some portable work when needed. Still, it's also worth highlighting that competing 50-series laptops from other big companies like Asus and Razer are potentially even more expensive. There's also a Stealth 16 AI+ version for those who want the smaller 16-inch footprint.

Design

As I've mentioned, the 2025 Stealth 18 is far from the shouty maximalism of some of other gaming laptops, both from MSI and its competition. It's all-black with a metal casing and only has a small protusion behind its display.

That sort of rear has become a crutch for many bigger laptops to fit in more hardware and cooling options, but in this case it's impressively contained. Still, there's absolutely no getting away from the fact that an 18-inch gaming laptop with the Stealth 18 AI+'s capabilities is always going to feel sizeable.

It weighs in at 2.9 kg, which means that while you can very much choose to play with it on your lap if you like, you'll be way better off finding a surface to rest it on. This obviously would be alleviated if you chose the 16-inch version, which wasn't available at the time of testing.

The race to produce a truly stealthy gaming laptop has honestly already been won by Razer, which has a Blade lineup that can genuinely pass for a black MacBook at a glance. Still, MSI gets closer than I expected here – when it's folded up on a table, this is a nice-looking bit of kit.

It doesn't have much external RGB lighting to speak of, beyond an MSI crest on the back that can be easily controlled using baked-in software. When you open it up, there are some keyboard design choices that make it more 'gamery', but this is again all very easy to tweak.

That keyboard is also full-sized, because MSI insists that people want the numpad for controls in their games – and who am I to argue with its stats? Those keys are fairly soft to actuate, without the clackiness of true mechanical alternatives, but they do have a solid amount of travel.

MSI has partnered with SteelSeries here, and brings per-key backlighting to let you really customise how much or how little showiness you want. The WASD and power keys also get transparency for a little flash of unique design.

The trackpad below them, meanwhile, is sizeable and performs fairly typically – with the ability to click anywhere on its surface. Just next to it is a fingerprint reader for some more biometric security.

To the left and right of the laptop's keyboard section, there are two speaker grilles, which are made of a contrasting metal that I found fingerprint-prone and slightly odd to look at – but that might just be a matter of personal taste.

Display & Spec

The Stealth 18 can be kitted out in a variety of ways, from AMD to Intel chips, and with various Nvidia cards at its heart. In the case of this review, a GeForce RTX 5080 paired with an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX, with a whopping 64GB of RAM to boot, and a 2TB SSD for all your actual storage.

That's a crunchy combo, but there are plenty of variables where its display is concerned. My unit had a 120Hz Mini-LED panel with a native resolution of 3480 x 2400, which means that you can indeed aim at full 4K gaming if you like (with a slightly different-from-normal aspect ratio).

That said, you'll often find that dropping down to the equivalent of 1440p is the way to go, as I'll come to when discussing performance. You can also get the laptop slightly more affordably with a standard IPS panel, which will bring some slightly less deep blacks – with the boost of 240Hz refresh rates, and the loss of HDR support.

There's a nice matte coating here which really helps reduce glare and reflections to almost a non-issue, but the screen isn't the all-time brightest I've encountered. Still, if you're trying to use this laptop outdoors, you might already be chasing defeat.

Ports-wise, you get a nice range here. On one side of the laptop, you'll find two Thunderbolt 4 DisplayPort plugs with power delivery, along with an SD card reader. On the other there are two USB-A ports, an audio jack and a loop for Kensington locks. The back of the laptop, meanwhile, hides an HDMI 2.1 port, an Ethernet port, and the DC-in port for the included (and very large) power brick.

Performance

The star of the show in this laptop, whether you pick up its AMD or Intel flavour, is going to be one of Nvidia's new laptop GPUs. Here, the 5080 really stretches itself when you power up a recent release or two – and underlines that fact that Nvidia's recent focus on upscaling and frame generation are hugely impactful on portable gaming.

That is to say, performance is harder than ever to assess, or at least discuss, because there are so many variables at play. I booted up the new remaster of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which I've been sucked into of late, and found that its performance could vary hugely (noting it's a very heavy title at this stage).

Loading into the open world, and leaving the auto-detected settings on "high", at full 4K resolution, I was looking at a fairly stable 30fps situation. Drop that down to 1440p and I got a boost to around 45fps.

Head to the settings and turn on frame generation, though, which is basically the flagship feature of these GPUs, and things jumped up north of 100fps and stayed there – the sort of figures you really want to see from such a pricey machine. Similarly, DLSS sharpness can be tuned to make a huge difference to image quality, such that dropping down to 1440p doesn't feel like much of a compromise.

Just like I found on my desktop rig, which boasts a full-scale 5070Ti, frame generation is basically a killer feature right now. The jump it's made in the last year is huge, and I'm very much won over by it.

That used to often bring a bit of weird fuzziness, but now manages to stay sharp – even in frenetic scenes. And while I understand the reservations about optimisation that many enthusiasts harbour, from a generalist perspective this all makes for impressive results.

Drop into a range of other titles and you'll find results that trend similarly, although few will be quite as challenging on the GPU as Oblivion. You'll get impressive frame-generated performance in the likes of Cyberpunk 2077, for example, but turning the feature off will make you likely to seek a drop in resolution.

As is fairly classic in the world of gaming laptops, this all comes with a chunky power draw, which means that you can expect a whole heap of fan noise while you game. At times, the laptop kept those fans going for a good while after I closed the lid, too, as it continued working to cool down. This also meant for an extremely hot lap when I did try to game that way, as ill-advised as it may have been.

The computer's 99.9Whr battery life, meanwhile, is either solid or mediocre, depending on your perspective. Keeping to light tasks and web browsing I got a couple of hours at a time from the laptop, but the moment you start gaming, this will crater, and you will need the chunky power adapter that comes with the laptop. Again, though, few people buy an 18-inch 5080 laptop with the idea that they'll use it for 10 hours between charges.

MSI Stealth 18 HX AI review: Verdict

The MSI Stealth 18, tested in its HX Intel variant, does exactly what it says on the tin – with the key caveat that the tin has been sensibly priced. It's not the smallest laptop you could find, even in the 18-inch category, but there are only a handful of alternatives that come slimmer with the same spec.

That means those looking for a gaming laptop that doesn't shout about its status from the rooftops should pay attention. If you're happy with merely solid battery life, and want to play at either 1440p or 4K with the latest Nvidia bells and whistles, this is a great, premium way to do so.

Also consider

If you're looking at my photos of the Stealth 18 and thinking that it might just be a little too big for you, then you're probably going to be more enamoured with the newest Razer Blade 16, which is as stealthy as a gaming laptop gets – and still impressively powerful.

If you think you'd rather save a little cash and get performance that doesn't drop off too badly for less, then keep an eye out for a laptop sporting a 40-series Nvidia GPU – they're likely to come down in price a little through the year.