MSI Titan GT77 (2023) Review

What better time is there for gaming laptop makers to go all-out on performance than when Intel and Nvidia revamp their CPU and GPU lineups with hot new hardware? Alongside the launch of 13th Generation Core HX processors and GeForce RTX 40-series GPUs, MSI delivers the latest iteration of its Titan GT77 powerhouse laptop (starts at $4,299; $4,599 as tested) with an Intel Core i9-13980HX CPU and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 GPU. A 4K 144Hz display, 64GB of memory, and 2TB of storage only pump up the experience further, allowing you to play virtually any game at high settings on a roomy display.

MSI's cost of entry is not for the faint of heart, truly aimed only at enthusiast early adopters with a nearly limitless budget, but the performance is also a clear step above the previous generation. Still, even though value doesn’t come into play so much in this maximalist category, we’d recommend the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18—which uses the same new components—as a better deal and an often superior performer.

The Design: Make Room for the Titan

This performance-first laptop is naturally beefy, though it’s not as monstrous as some Titan laptops we’ve seen before. It has a large footprint, to be sure, but it isn’t as thick as some past versions: It measures 0.9 by 15.6 by 12.9 inches and weighs 7.27 pounds. The Titan GT77 we reviewed last year is much meatier, at 1.5 inches thick, though it weighs the same.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

That makes it a pretty hefty system to carry around, and one that will take up a lot of room in your bag. This laptop may not be as thick, but it’s still a big slab, thanks in large part to a chunky rear thermal block—non-negotiable, really, for the amount of power inside. We’ll get to those components in a moment. The portability is only diminished further by a massive power brick, twice as thick as the laptop itself. You really only want to move this machine when you absolutely have to.

MSI's design is on the minimal side, but that’s a smart choice for such a large laptop. Even if it’s only a visual trick—you can’t change the dimensions with style—the unadorned, all-black look with no flourishes makes it seem sleeker. The build quality is mostly sturdy, though we feel some flex around the touchpad area if you push. Ultimately, a plastic construction for this much money is underwhelming.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

That rear block does emit customizable RGB lighting, as does the keyboard, providing pretty much all of the visual flair for this machine. It looks pretty appealing, all told, which isn’t always a given for a giant laptop. Even the fact that the display is somewhat set forward from the rear block, like the previous model, adds a little class. The lighting is all customizable via the included SteelSeries GG app (which is a little confusing when you first look for the correct software).

The roomy display is a natural positive of the sizable chassis: This is a 17.3-inch mini LED panel with a 4K resolution (3,840 by 2,160 pixels) and 144Hz refresh rate. Mini LED is becoming more common, with the chief upside of being quite bright—the display is rated for HDR 1000, and we measure its maximum brightness at 585 nits. The screen looks excellent in person (how could it not with those specs?), delivering a desktop-like experience with higher quality than many monitors.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

This screen's refresh rate of 144Hz is much higher than the “standard” 60Hz usually found in non-gaming machines, but you’d be right to think it sounds a bit low for such a powerful pricey system. A big part of that ties into the 4K resolution: Hitting 144Hz with the components in this laptop is a breeze at 1080p, but maintaining or even reaching that at 4K with any GPU, never mind a laptop one, is a much more difficult task—we’ll see how it fares in the performance section below.

I mentioned the keyboard’s RGB lighting, but I have plenty more to say on that score. This is a Cherry-designed mechanical keyboard, delivering a much more tactile and satisfying typing experience than most laptops. The previous Titan used these Cherry key switches, too, so it’s not a wholly new innovation, but we are seeing them more on high-end 17-inch machines.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

MSI's solution doesn’t quite feel up to par with a mechanical USB keyboard, but these keys still produce a lot more travel and feedback than a standard laptop keyboard. A condensed numeric keypad also populates the right side, and a low-profile fingerprint scanner is just under the right side of the keyboard. The touchpad, meanwhile, is a roomy but fairly unremarkable buttonless pad.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Naturally, this chunky chassis is bursting with connectivity. The left flank holds the power jack, two USB Type-A ports, an SD card slot, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. The right side includes two USB Type-C connections with Thunderbolt 4 support, an HDMI port, another USB-A port, a mini DisplayPort connection, and an Ethernet jack. Unlike some laptops this size, MSI includes no ports on the rear block—just thermal ventilation.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The many ports aside, I have to voice some dismay that the webcam is still only 720p. Particularly as this is a desktop-replacement-class laptop, and one so expensive, I’d really expect a full HD camera in 2023. The video quality is serviceable but quite grainy, and not especially high-quality when the lights are low.

Components and Costs: Top Power Means Top Price

I’ve touched on the high-end parts that make up this system’s price and power, but let’s take a closer look. Even the base model of this system isn’t messing around: The starting 13th Gen Titan GT77 is priced at $4,299 for an Intel Core i9-13980HX processor, 64GB of memory, a 2TB SSD, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 GPU. That also includes the same display as our unit, described above.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

If that's not enough power, our review unit bumps up the GPU to an RTX 4090—the peak offering in Nvidia’s new RTX 40 series mobile GPU stack—for $4,599. That combines with the crown-jewel 13th Gen Core i9 CPU, making for a hard-to-beat laptop, as you’d hope for the price. An even more expensive model is also available at $5,299, containing a wildly high 128GB of memory and 4TB of SSD storage alongside the RTX 4090.

If you’re not super-familiar with these cutting-edge components, we have you covered: Check out our in-depth explanation and testing pieces on the Core i9-13980HX CPU and the RTX 4090 laptop GPU. These two parts were analyzed using this very MSI Titan machine and another powerhouse laptop, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18, to gauge the generational leaps over their predecessors and competition.

Suffice it to say: These top-end CPU and GPU options are for true enthusiasts. This 13th Gen Core i9 processor is a 24-core (eight P-cores and 16 E-cores), 32-thread monster that adds eight E-cores to the already proficient 12th Gen Core i9 equivalent. The RTX 4090 is equipped with 16GB of VRAM, and so it should be more proficient than the 30 Series at high resolutions and ray tracing, particularly with Nvidia’s new DLSS 3.0 technology in the handful of games that support it.

Testing the MSI Titan GT77: Performance (and Noise) of Titanic Proportions

While this laptop was put through its paces for those testing articles we mentioned earlier, we’re still going to run down our usual benchmark suite and analysis here in the context of this review. Below are the laptops we’re comparing this machine with, and then a breakdown of the tests and results.

I’ll also say this up front rather than on any individual tests: This laptop is loud, making noise even when idling on the desktop most of the time. If you turn the fans to active mode, even at the desktop it’s disruptively loud. When under load—as when gaming or running these benchmark tests—the laptop's cooling system fills the room with fan noise, which can be headache-inducing over long periods. You’ve been warned!

Productivity Tests

Our primary benchmark, UL's PCMark 10, simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage.

Three further 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 workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, 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.

While you can see the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 holds the edge on occasion, the takeaway here is that this processor is extremely fast and represents a significant upgrade on previous-generation rivals. Those extra cores are put to work on the multi-threaded benchmarks, churning through media tasks. The physically beefy, previous-generation 2022 Titan hangs much closer to these new machines than the others, but it still gets left in the dust; eight more cores will ultimately win out in the end, and that's baked into the top-end 13th Gen Intel chip.

To put it simply, the new Titan is a powerhouse editing and creation machine if you plan to use it for those purposes—not just gaming. This should be expected for the price, but it bears repeating just how effective the new CPU looks, in particular, at these workloads. Gaming will likely see diminishing returns on the CPU side compared with the gains on tests like these, which (aside from PCMark 10 and Photoshop) push the processor specifically to its full extent.

This is an expensive way to attain this CPU if your main goal is media editing, it should be said—not everyone needs the gaming-centric features or even the high-end GPU. But will it ever do the job!

Graphics and Gaming Tests

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark: Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). Two more tests from GFXBench 5.0, run offscreen to allow for different display resolutions, wring out OpenGL operations.

In addition, we run three real-world game tests using the built-in benchmarks of Rainbow Six Siege, F1 2021, and Assassin's Creed Valhalla. These represent a mix of multiplayer-shooter, simulation, and open-world action-adventure experiences. We run the first two games twice at different image quality presets, and F1 2021 with and without Nvidia's performance-boosting DLSS anti-aliasing. We run these tests at 1080p resolution so results can be compared fairly among systems.

Frustratingly, the Titan had a software conflict with Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and the game would not launch, but we're keeping in the test with the Scar 18’s score to give you a ballpark idea since they share a GPU. We imagine this will be resolved in short order.

The graphics results are just as impressive—maybe more so—than the CPU scores. Taking the first test displayed, Time Spy, as a chief example, the Titan and Scar 18 nearly double up on the scores of the next-best, third-party performer from the last generation, the Legion. GFXBench shows an astounding 100% increase over the Legion, too. On raw GPU power based on these synthetic results, the RTX 4090 blows the 30 Series out of the water.

Regardless, it would be unreasonable to expect doubled frame rates in real-world games—these things are not 1:1 with synthetic tests. We still see a sizable increase even at just 1080p on F1 2021 and Rainbow Six: Siege, so 171 frames per second (fps) and 443fps on the highest settings, respectively, are nothing to sneeze at. And even on Valhalla, the Scar 18 isn’t actually too far off doubling up the Legion’s frame rate. Of course, these laptops have more going on here than just the GPU upgrade, given the CPU and amount of memory, but the gains are still real if you can afford the Titan or Scar 18. Outside of head-to-head comparisons, these frame rates are of course more than good enough for any gaming scenario.

However, this brand-new GPU series also requires us to go a bit deeper than normal. Many of Nvidia’s claims with the RTX 40 Series revolve around performance with ray tracing active, at high resolutions, and with DLSS 3 active—the last something only the new GPUs have. As such, we cranked up the resolution, switched on the fancy real-time lighting features, and tested a couple DLSS 3-enabled titles, too. The scores below show results for F1 2021, F1 2022, and Cyberpunk 2077, with DLSS off and on, plus the new frame-generation feature (listed as “FG” in the legend) in the latter two titles. Only the two new DLSS 3-capable laptops are on display here.

We won’t belabor this too much because the results are right there for you to see: DLSS 3 and frame generation help Nvidia's modern GPUs massively, when you can employ them. Without them, the frame rates are still steady, but using the demanding Cyberpunk as an example, that’s about where the previous-generation GPUs were topping out too; hitting or maintaining 60fps in big 3D open worlds is difficult at 4K.

Without DLSS active at all in Cyberpunk, 30fps at 4K isn’t achievable even for the mighty RTX 4090. The other less-demanding games fare better, but it’s a similar story. Super-sharp 4K panels reached consumers before the hardware was ready, and only through these advanced resolution techniques can we now reach the minimum “acceptable” high-end frame rate in the most demanding games. Because of this, 1440p is still a much better resolution dial-down for most gaming scenarios, even if you have a 4K panel. You can see that in the F1 2022 4K-versus-1440p tests.

Battery and Display Tests

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100% until the system quits. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows 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 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

MSI's battery life is pretty decent considering the size, power, and resolution of this laptop. You really aren’t going to take this laptop on the go frequently, but hours off the charger even at home are still welcome as needed.

We mentioned the brightness of the mini LED display earlier, and you can see those luminous numbers reflected here. They are joined by wide-ranging color coverage results, making this an excellent all-around screen for those content creators who are also attracted to the performance.

Verdict: Go-for-Broke Next-Gen Performance

Yes, we intend the double meaning of “broke” here: MSI's price is non-negotiable for the vast majority of shoppers, we know. This laptop is both a proof of concept for what a no-holds-barred gaming laptop can do as we enter 2023, and it's the physical manifestation of bragging rights for deep-pocketed enthusiasts. If you’ve only come to be wowed by the price and power and aren’t considering buying, the Titan likely did its job there.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

If you are considering buying, it’s hard to consider this a decent value, per se. This laptop is prohibitively costly, and you’re really just agreeing to meet the price of entry because you want the latest and greatest parts—there are better ways to get a high-performing (and more mobile) laptop. On top of that, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 is much less expensive due in part to a different display and half the memory, but still often performs better.

If you are shopping in the higher-than-$3,500 price range and want the latest parts, we’d recommend the Scar 18 over the MSI Titan, despite the latter's undeniably impressive performance. If you can accept last-generation parts for a more reasonable (but still premium) price, our favorite big-screen pick of the moment is the 16-inch Acer Predator Triton 300 SE.