MSI Vector A18 HX review: this laptop is big in every way

MSI wants you to know that this isn’t a gaming laptop. It is, of course, because nothing else comes with rainbow-backlit keyboards like this, but MSI would prefer you to think of it as an engineering laptop. The overwhelming combo of a 16-core Ryzen CPU and a top-end Nvidia GPU isn’t for getting enormous framerates in whatever extraction shooter is currently riding high in the Steam charts, but for rendering aircraft parts, visualising office developments, and maybe crunching the enormous quantity of numbers required for local AI models, making it an instant contender for a plum spot on our list of the best laptops for CAD.

It will do all of these things. And it will also give you exceptional results in Photoshop and Premiere Pro, helped by a large screen that, while not very high-res (though there's a version of this machine out there with a 4K Mini-LED display that we begged to be sent, but were left disappointed) is large and sharp enough to be useful. Overall, this engineering laptop has the potential to be a handy creative machine too, especially if you’re in the market for a desktop replacement.

Key specifications

Design, build and display

• Big, heavy case
• Large charger too

The 18-inch laptop is not a subtle thing. This one is particularly heavy at 3.6kg, which makes it an absolute brick compared to the slim and svelte machines manufacturers like to push. This has its advantages, such as a full-sized keyboard with numpad (though as the Fn, Copilot and an additional \ keys are to the right of the space bar, that particular key is shunted quite a large distance left, which may not be to everybody’s taste) and a trackpad that’s not fighting for space, but also means you’re not going to be slipping this into a fashionable messenger bag and taking it to the coffee shop. For one thing, the battery life is pretty low, so you’ll have to lug the 400W (not a typo) charging block too.

You get a metal casing for your money, and the build quality is high overall. There are two substantial hinges at the back of the screen to keep it attached, and it feels solid on the desktop. The HDMI, charging and Ethernet sockets are arranged on the rear edge rather than the side, meaning less desk clutter if you’re hooking it up to an external display, while the USB4 ports are at the sides for your SSDs.

The screen, an IPS on this model with a gaming-focused 240Hz refresh rate, is capable of 500 nits of brightness and can display almost all of the DCI-P3 colour gamut, making it a good choice for videographers or anyone who cares about the accuracy of their colours. It’s not particularly high-res, but maybe that’s what external monitors are for.

Design score: 3/5

Features

• USB4 and HDMI 2.1
• Excellent screen

Most of what makes the Vector A18 HX stand out is concentrated on the inside of the casing, but it’s nice to see a decent selection of ports on the outside. As already mentioned, many of the most important ports are on the back edge, but around the sides you’ll find two Type-C USB4 ports (which are Thunderbolt compatible and can also be used to charge the laptop if you’ve got enough wattage in your charger) as well as three Type-A ones and an SD card slot.

Being able to plug a lot of peripherals in is more important to engineers and creatives than it is to gamers, who tend to use wireless gear. You’ll be able to load up the Vector A18 HX with keyboard dongles, SSDs, external displays, card readers and more without needing to resort to a hub, though if you’ve got a Thunderbolt dock on your desk already, you’ll be able to hook up to that too.

Windows 11 comes with a suite of AI applications these days, and while most of them use off-site processing the combination of a multi-core CPU with one of Nvidia’s best GPUs - and a decent though not overwhelming dollop of RAM - bodes well for AI applications run locally too.

The IPS screen turns out to be excellent for colour display - it hits 100% of the P3 and sRGB colour gamuts, while managing 89% of Adobe RGB. And it does all this with a peak brightness of 545 nits and a 240Hz refresh rate. That beats a lot of other laptops on the market.

Feature score: 4/5

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
• Low battery life

These 18-inch gaming laptops always do well in the creative app tests, and so it proves for the MSI Vector A18 HX. The CPU inside it has 16 of AMD’s latest Zen 5 cores, each with hyperthreading, for 32 simultaneous software threads. It’s the sort of thing that would have been inside a Threadripper workstation not so long ago, and it tears through our tests, coming close to the top of the chart for Premiere Pro and beaten only by the latest MacBook Pro in Photoshop.

It’s one of the few non-Apple laptops to pass the 3,000-point mark in the single-core Geekbench test we use to put the CPU through its paces (in fact, at the time of writing, it’s the top non-Apple machine in the chart).

Then there's the GPU, which can handle all the ray-tracing games you care to throw at it, then process video effects including AI-assisted slow motion and image resizing.

The downside of all this is usually heat: lots of hot components in a small space means there's nowhere for the heat to go, and you have to aggressively cool them or face thermal throttling as the chips fight to avoid going over their maximum operating temperature.

MSI has worked some magic here, as not only did the Vector’s processors not get close to their thermal cutoffs during our testing, but the fan noise really isn’t too bad, being a (noticeable) rush of air rather than a grinding and squeaking nightmare.

And the other downside is battery life. Creative Bloq’s endurance test involves playing a video non-stop until shutdown, a task the Vector managed for about two hours, but when asked to do something more strenuous - gaming benchmarks - it collapsed after just an hour and three minutes. This is common, as even with the extra space of an 18-inch chassis there's only so much battery you can cram in.

Performance score: 4/5

Price

An 18-inch laptop of this spec is always going to be a large investment, and £/$3000 is a lot of money, but it can be worth it if it will sufficiently accelerate your workflows. You could buy a pair of lower-spec laptops for the same cost, however, so if you’re working primarily in 2D art, then that may be a better option. If you’re determined to spend the money, then shop around, as there are a few different 18-inch, RTX 5080-equipped portables out there, and you can snag a 5090 too if you spend a bit more.

Value score: 3/5

Who is it for?

• Heavy renderers

This laptop tears through 3D and motion graphics work, so would suit anyone looking to save time in those disciplines, or who just wants to play games after office hours.

Buy it if...

• You can afford it
• Rendering is your passion
• You need a laptop, not a desktop

Don't buy it if...

• You work mostly in 2D and aren’t a gamer
• You want something long lasting to use at the coffee shop
• Value is important

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