MSI GT77 Titan Review | PCMag

MSI's GT77 Titan (starts at $3,199; $5,999 as tested) is a 17.3-inch gaming laptop that is truly titanic. With its massive size—this might be the largest laptop sold today—comes performance approaching that of top-end desktops, thanks to a 12th Generation Intel Core HX processor, a high-wattage Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 Ti graphics card, and quad storage drives. It made record-breaking runs through our benchmarks, yet somehow managed near-all-day battery life. It also has exotic creature comforts, including a mechanical keyboard with Cherry switches and extensive RGB lighting.

All told, the GT77 Titan elevates laptops to entirely new performance levels and claims an Editors' Choice award among ultimate gaming rigs. If you want the baddest, fastest gaming notebook on Earth, here it is. Just don't look for it in our best budget laptops list anytime soon.

Intel Core HX: Desktop-Class Performance

At the heart of the GT77 Titan is Intel's new “Alder Lake” Core HX CPU, a mobile chip designed for high-end workstations with more cores and a higher power rating than Intel's H-class laptop processors. The range-topping Core i9-12900HX in our MSI test unit packs 16 cores (eight Performance, eight Efficient) and 24 threads and hits a turbo speed of 5.0GHz just like the desktop Core i9-12900K. Our first Core HX tests show it coming within 10% of the desktop CPU's performance and outrunning Intel's previous fastest mobile chip, the Core i9-12900HK.

Our GT77 Titan is also equipped with an unusually high-wattage 16GB GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics card; its 175-watt total graphics power is the highest we've seen from any laptop. On top of that, the Titan supports 128GB of DDR5 memory via four SO-DIMM slots, plus four PCI Express storage drives, with one of the M.2 slots supporting PCI Express 5.0 solid-state drives when they arrive.

The Design: It's Big—Like, Really Big

Jumbo-screened laptops are not uncommon, but the GT77 Titan is big and then some, measuring 1.5 by 15.6 by 12.9 inches (HWD). That's over an inch deeper and significantly thicker than the Alienware x17 R2 (0.82 by 15.7 by 11.8 inches) and the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 (1.1 by 15.6 by 11.1 inches). It's heavier, too, at 7.2 pounds versus 6.4 for the Asus and 6.82 for the Alienware. Plan on buying a roller bag, and don't forget about the big 330-watt power brick that adds several pounds by itself.

(Credit: Charles Jefferies)

Size aside, however, the Titan's all-black design isn't outlandish. It cuts a distinctive gaming look without overdoing it with unnecessary curves or graphics. The chassis is plastic, though most of the visible surfaces including the lid are sturdy aluminum.

(Credit: Charles Jefferies)

A nearly three-inch rear protrusion houses most of the MSI's cooling system. The aft edge is one continuous vent lined with—count them—27 RGB lights, with another on top of the protrusion. The MSI shield logo on the lid is also RGB-illuminated. You can configure the lighting with the SteelSeries GG app; if complex effects are your thing, the program won't disappoint. SteelSeries GG also controls the keyboard's per-key RGB backlighting and can be used to remap keys and create macros.

The Cherry-switch mechanical keyboard is one of the Titan's highlights. It's exclusive to this model, not found on MSI's step-down GE76 Raider, which uses a membrane keyboard. The mechanical keys have long up-and-down travel and fantastic tactile feedback. The clicks and clacks they make as you type are reminiscent of a desktop mechanical keyboard.

(Credit: Charles Jefferies)

Only the keyboard's layout lets it down; the two-thirds-size numeric keypad layout is awkward and the only place to find dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys. There's no left-side Fn key, though the provided MSI Center app lets you swap the left-side Windows key and right-side Fn key, making Windows-key shortcuts clumsy. On a brighter note, the buttonless touchpad is luxuriously sized and clicks smoothly.

Audio is another area where the Titan does well. The system has four speakers, two straddling the keyboard and two under the palm rest. Bass isn't overwhelming, but the overall sound is loud and clear, probably on par with a basic Bluetooth speaker, and will easily entertain a table gathering. I used the included Nahimic app's equalizer to tame what I found slightly harsh treble and overly boosted bass.

(Credit: Charles Jefferies)

Unlike most gaming laptops, the Titan sports a biometric fingerprint reader and an IR face-recognition webcam for password-free Windows Hello logins. The webcam's picture disappoints, with meager 720p resolution and noisy static, and the camera lacks a privacy shutter.

The MSI's extensive physical connectivity includes three USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports and two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports; a full-size SD card reader; an HDMI 2.1 port with support for 8K displays; a mini DisplayPort; a headphone jack; and Ethernet. The leftmost connector on the left side isn't a USB port, but a proprietary power jack.

(Credit: Charles Jefferies)

(Credit: Charles Jefferies)

Our review unit has a full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) display with a 360Hz high refresh rate. It's a treat to look at, with a peak brightness of 333 nits and 100% sRGB and 79% DCI-P3 color gamut coverage in our tests, but that's about all I’ll say about it. Titans sold in the USA so far all appear to have a 4K (3,840-by-2,160-pixel) screen that should look even better and provide finer detail, albeit at a lower 120Hz refresh rate. Our benchmarks suggest the Titan will have no trouble producing fluid gaming frame rates at 4K.

Four Fans to Keep Its Cool

The GT77 Titan's cooling deserves a heading of its own. This laptop meets the challenge of desktop-level heat in a confined chassis with four fans and vapor-chamber heatsinks.

(Credit: Charles Jefferies)

The setup is none too quiet, but no louder than other high-end gaming laptops I've tested. Fortunately, the noise level is minimal for less stressful tasks like web surfing and running office apps.

(Credit: Charles Jefferies)

The cooling system is undoubtedly effective. Here's the big MSI under a Flir One Pro during a 20-minute 3DMark Time Spy stress test.

(Credit: Charles Jefferies)

The right side of the keyboard is the only real hot spot at 108 degrees F, but that's acceptable—surface temperatures up to 110 degrees F are safe to touch. Impressively, the Titan passed the stress test with a 97.2% rating, a real feat for a gaming laptop since it requires very stable thermal performance.

Love and Thunder: Testing the MSI GT77 Titan

The closest GT77 Titan model to the sample tested here is the $5,999 model 12UHS-063. It has the same core components—a 16-core Intel Core i9-12900HX processor, 16GB GeForce RTX 3080 Ti GPU, and 4TB of solid-state storage, but comes with 128GB instead of 64GB of RAM and the higher-resolution 120Hz 4K screen as opposed to 360Hz 1080p. Windows 11 Pro is standard, and it's backed by a one-year warranty.

The 4TB of storage in our model is actually four 1TB PCI Express 4.0 M.2 SSDs, two of which are RAID 1 (mirrored) and the other two non-RAID, so Windows sees 3TB total. As I mentioned, one of the M.2 slots supports PCIe 5.0 drives that should offer much higher data transfer speeds. The Core HX is Intel's only mobile CPU that supports PCI Express 5.0.

You don't have to spend six grand to get a GT77 Titan, however. The $3,199 “base” model (12UGS-009) is already a strong performer, with a Core i7-12800HX chip that has the same core count as the Core i9-12900HX but slightly less cache and a lower 4.8GHz turbo speed. That system has 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and an 8GB GeForce RTX 3070 Ti. Be prepared for sticker shock if you want Nvidia's 16GB RTX 3080 Ti, as the cheapest config with that is the $4,199 model 12UHS-007, which otherwise matches the base model. That's right, it costs a cool $1,000 to step up from the RTX 3070 Ti to the RTX 3080 Ti. The base model is unquestionably the best value of the bunch.

Competition-wise, few other Core HX laptops exist as of this writing. The $3,499 Asus ROG Strix 17 SE(Opens in a new window) is one, featuring a Core i9-12950HX (essentially a Core i9-12900HX with Intel vPro remote management support), a 16GB GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, 16GB of memory, and 2TB of solid-state storage. But that machine tops out at 64GB of RAM and only accommodates two storage drives. As such, it's not quite in the same league as the Titan, which seems to be in a class of its own for the time being. Expect more Core HX systems in the coming months.

Enough foreplay; let's get into our performance testing. I pitted the MSI against the fastest gaming laptops we've reviewed, including the Alienware x17 R2 with Intel's flagship Core H chip the Core i9-12900HK; the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 (model G733); MSI's other flagship gaming rig, the GE76 Raider; and the sleek Origin EVO17-S. Every member of this high-octane group boasts a Core i9 CPU and (except for the Asus) a 16GB RTX 3080 Ti card. That said, graphics comparisons won't be wholly apples to apples because of varying GPU power ratings. (See why GPU wattage matters.) Then again, there is no other such apple as the 175-watt Titan.

Productivity and Content Creation Tests

Our first test is UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive. The Titan is the only laptop we've tried that scored north of 8,000 points in the primary test, which is flagship gaming desktop territory (and double the score we consider a sign of excellent productivity for apps like Microsoft Office).

Three other benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).

Our final productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop(Opens in a new window), which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The Titan dominated—none of the other laptops came close. It scored 23% better than the next fastest machine, the Origin, in Cinebench, and was about a minute quicker than its rivals in HandBrake. Both of those tests stress the CPU to the max. (See our Core HX first tests for more detailed testing, including a match against our Core i9 lab desktop.)

Graphics and Gaming Tests

For Windows PCs, we run both synthetic and real-world gaming tests. The former include two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for systems with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). Also looped into that group is the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which we use to gauge OpenGL performance.

Our real-world gaming testing consists of the in-game benchmarks of F1 2021, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege, representing simulation, open-world action-adventure, and competitive/esports shooter games respectively. On laptops, we run Valhalla and Siege twice at different image quality presets and F1 with and without Nvidia's performance-boosting DLSS anti-aliasing.

The Titan's dominance continued; its Core i9 HX chip and 175-watt GeForce RTX 3080 Ti were unstoppable. Nowhere is its processing power more obvious than in the CPU-centric Rainbow Six Siege. Note that our laptop gaming tests are run at 1080p resolution; as I said, production Titans seem to have a sharper 4K display, which will be much more demanding. However, given its performance, the mighty MSI should easily exceed 60fps at UHD resolution in most games.

Battery and Display Tests

PCMag tests laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with screen brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100% until the system quits. Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting are turned off during the test.

We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its brightness in nits (candelas per square meter) at the screen's 50% and peak settings.

Of course business laptops and ultraportables do better, but nearly a full workday of battery life from a hulking monster like this is remarkable. The test was done with the Titan in its default hybrid graphics mode, letting it switch to the Intel integrated graphics to save power. The provided MSI Center app lets you disable the integrated graphics and use the Nvidia GPU exclusively, which esports players may want to do to eliminate input lag. Battery life will naturally suffer, but switching back to hybrid graphics simply requires a restart.

Better Than a Desktop

The MSI GT77 Titan is a phenomenon, delivering near desktop-level performance and expansion capacity with surprising battery life. Our Core i9-12900HX and GeForce RTX 3080 Ti system surpassed the performance of all other gaming laptops we've tested by significant margins. This laptop also breaks ground by supporting four solid-state drives, including one PCIe 5.0 device, and doesn't skimp on creature comforts like a mechanical keyboard. All told, the Titan is the pinnacle of gaming laptop evolution. Massive size and price aside, it's a sure way to experience pre-Olympian deity status.