This monstrous MSI laptop is the new king of Premiere Pro (until the next one)

Bigger is always better, right? In many cases it can be - more room in a laptop’s casing leads to better cooling and less chance of thermal throttling bringing down performance. In others, less so. A large laptop is less immediately portable, its size and weight meaning you’ll think twice about throwing it in a bag as you leave the studio.

The MSI Stealth is a gaming laptop but, as the name might suggest, not one covered in RGB lighting. It’s still not exactly stealthy - the size, enormously bright mini-LED screen and rainbow keyboard see to that - but it’s an enormously powerful addition to the list of the best laptops for video editing, as long as you’re prepared to stomach the price.

Key specifications

Design, build and display

• Unavoidably large
• Not too much gaming bling

You can’t mess about with the build quality of an 18-inch laptop. They’re so hefty that the avoidance of any bendiness needs to be at the front of the manufacturer’s mind, and the magnesium-aluminium alloy frame under the Stealth’s black plastic exterior sees that it can’t flex. This leads to a weight of almost 3kg, which is less of a problem than you’d think, as a machine like this tends to be treated as a desktop replacement that can be tidied out of the way if needs be, rather than something to take to the park to work in the sunshine. There are some little ridges underneath that lift the base of the machine slightly so that the vents can do their job, and these alone make it unsuitable for use on your actual lap.

The combination of restrained design and high-end specs is an excellent one. There are some giveaways that this is a gaming laptop: the light-up MSI dragon logo on the back of the lid, the way the WASD keys have different caps so that the light shines through them more strongly, and some gaming iconography on the arrow keys, but that’s about it. It is very black and very rectangular, but the most striking thing about it is its size rather than flashing colours.

Which brings us to the screen. In the hands of a creative, any laptop is likely to spend much of its time attached to an external screen, and the Stealth has a full-size HDMI 2.1 port for that exact reason, but to overlook the built-in screen would be a mistake. Not only is the 18-incher almost big enough to be useful - you can always keep your email or chat app on it - but it’s incredibly bright. Mini-LED backlight tech has been shown to provide excellent contrast, and the Stealth’s screen even does a little better than the mini-LED Xiaomi G Pro 27i in terms of brightness. Colour response is excellent too, hitting 100% of sRGB, 91% of Adobe RGB, and 97% of DCI-P3.

Design score: 4/5

Features

• Very bright screen
• Thunderbolt 4

With over 700 nits of brightness on offer, the Stealth 18’s screen has a lot going for it. It’s high-res too, with the 16:10 equivalent of a 4K panel and the right sort of GPU to drive it at its maximum 120Hz. And luckily, there's plenty of speed on offer elsewhere too.

Two Thunderbolt 4 ports sit on the right of the laptop as you look at it, there are two USB-A sockets on the other side, with HDMI, Ethernet and power connections at the back. The laptop can charge through a Thunderbolt port if needed, but the dedicated power adapter not only juices it up more quickly, but keeps an extra USB-C free. It’s an unusual shape, almost like a USB-A that got mangled, but is reversible and easy to insert. You just won’t be able to use it with any other laptop.

The Stealth comes with Windows 11 installed, as you’d expect, but it’s the Pro variant rather than the less capable Home. This is great news for creative users, as it allows the use of HyperV virtual machines and BitLocker drive encryption. You can still do these things, along with Remote Desktop, on Home using third-party software, but HyperV in particular is very fast compared to alternatives.

Feature score: 5/5

Benchmark scores

We test every one of our laptops using the same benchmarking software suite to give you a thorough overview of its suitability for creatives of all disciplines and levels. This includes:

• Geekbench: Tests the CPU for single-core and multi-core power, and the GPU for the system's potential for gaming, image processing, or video editing. Geekbench AI tests the CPU and GPU on a variety of AI-powered and AI-boosted tasks.
• Cinebench: Tests the CPU and GPU's ability to run Cinema 4D and Redshift.
• UL Procyon: Uses UL Solutions' Procyon software suite to test the system's ability for AI image generation in Stable Diffusion, its Microsoft Office performance and its battery life in a looping video test.
• Topaz Video AI: We use Topaz Video AI to test the system's ability to upscale video and convert video to slow-motion.
• PugetBench for Creators: We use the PugetBench for Creators benchmarking suite to test the system's ability to run several key tasks in Photoshop and Adobe Premiere Pro, as well as its performance when encoding/transcoding video.
• ON1 Resize AI: Tests the system's ability to resize 5 photos to 200% in a batch process. We take the total time taken to resize the images and divide by 5.

Performance

• Very powerful
• Fans make a whistling sound

You might expect a PC with these kind of specs to do well in the CB benchmarking suite, and so it comes to pass with the Stealth 18 near the top of the list in many of the tests. In particular, it does very well in Adobe Premiere Pro, trading blows with the M4 Max chip in the Mac Studio, and you’re going to need something like the GeForce RTX 5090 GPU to do much better than that.

In the Cinebench 2024 multicore rendering test, something most PCs dread as it works them very hard, the only chips CB has reviewed that beat the Core Ultra 9 in the Stealth 18 are Apple ones: M4 Max, M4 Pro, and M3 Max. Everything else, even other Ultra 9s, can’t keep up. It also does extremely well in the AI applications we test, flying through Topaz Video AI and beating all the 16-inch laptops CB has tested.

It’s clearly working in a different performance envelope than smaller machines (the 64GB of RAM may help here too), the extra space inside the chassis even allowing it to muster a semi-useful battery life of 2.5 hours. That’s playing a looping video with the screen at 50%, something that probably uses about 1% of its capabilities, so it will go down if you stress it, but there's enough there to take it out of the office for brief periods, as long as you can find a table.

Performance score: 5/5

Price

There's no getting away from the fact that this is an expensive machine. At £3,799 in the UK it’s the same price as the Mac Studio spec CB reviewed, while at $3,999.99 in the US you can take the top-spec 16-inch MacBook Pro and bump it up to a 16-core processor for the same amount, so this seems like the going rate for this kind of performance. It’s a rarefied market it moves in, but the sort of power you get from it, for AI, video editing and even gaming, means it might be worth it.

Value score: 3/5

Who is it for?

• Video editors and gamers

With these kind of scores in the Premiere Pro benchmark, you’re going to be throwing effects around with wild abandon. A computer that powerful is going to be useful for a lot of things, from 3D rendering all day to a spot of Doom: The Dark Ages when the doors have closed, there will always be something it can do.

Buy it if...

• You live for motion graphics
• 3D rendering pays the bills
• You like to game too

Don't buy it if...

• Something cheaper will do what you want
• You need a portable laptop
• You want a Mac

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