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If your current rig just barely drags on, enter the Dragon Edition.
Tony Ware
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I’ve loved Sid Meier’s Civilization games for decades, so I’m really excited about the upcoming Civilization VII. What I’m not excited about is how my current laptop probably won’t be able to handle one turn, let alone … just one more turn. But this wouldn’t be an issue if I had the latest MSI Titan 18 HX gaming laptop.
I’ve spent the last few days in Las Vegas at the annual Consumer Electronics Show, where I’ve been eye-to-eye with the latest tech (more of which I’ll share in the coming days). Few things, however, have been quite as eye-catching as the Titan 18 HX Dragon Edition Norse Myth … and I might have caught its acid-etched eye, too.
If you’re wondering where the laptop gets its name, well, there it is, right there, carved into the magnesium-aluminum alloy lid. It’s an incandescent dragon’s eye peering out from its textured motif, complete with Norse runes that mean “Dragon.” (The same mythical beast can be found on the medallion embedded in the laptop’s palm rest.) As for what’s inside the Dragon Edition, well, that’s fire, too.
First there’s the 18-inch Mini-LED 4K 120Hz 16:10 screen with VESA DisplayHDR 1000 certification, which is run by an NVIDIA RTX 5090 GPU with 24GB of GDDR7 VRAM (another CES 2025 big reveal). There’s an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor and up to 96GB of DDR5 RAM, plus four M.2 NVMe slots in a Super RAID 5 configuration capable of read speeds of up to 18,000MB/s. And OverBoost Ultra gives up to 270W of headroom for pushing intense campaigns and applications. As for the I/O giving all that somewhere to go, there are two Thunderbolt 5 USB-C ports, three USB-A 3.2 Gen. 2 ports, HDMI 2.1 with up to 8K60 output, and a full-sized SD card reader.
If all that sounds like it might run as hot as an angry dragon, it might if it wasn’t for an exclusive Vapor Chamber Cooler and a dedicated heat pipe for the one PCIe Gen. 5 SSD (the rest are Gen. 4) to avoid thermal throttling. Powering this desktop-level nearly 8-pound transportable is a 99.9WHr battery, plus a 400-watt power supply. Rounding out the features are Intel Killer Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4, a Dynaudio-designed six-speaker system (featuring two subwoofers), a SteelSeries keyboard with Cherry MX switches and per-key RBG illumination, and a “Mystic Light” seamless haptic RBG touchpad.
OK, so you might need some of Smaug’s treasure to afford the Dragon Edition. But if you, like me, plan to do some expansive worldbuilding, you can always opt for the standard, more subdued Titan 18 HX and get the same specs and screen real estate without the styling (or choose step-down components if the budget’s tighter). Or there’s the rest of the 18-inch laptop family, including the new Raider, Stealth, Vector, and Crosshair Series. These offer many of the same core features, like the GeForce RTX 50 Series, but don’t stack quite as many slots or push quite the same output. You can also opt for AMD processors and different SoC packages. Plus, they’ve got differing aesthetics—some more gamer and others more office-friendly. MSI’s options make it easy to strategize the best way to play your strategy games (and anything else, for that matter). The one thing they would all have in common if I had them is me angrily muttering about grain, Gandhi, and gameplay mechanics.
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