MSI’s 17-inch laptop goes up to $6,000, comes with Intel HX-series CPUs

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MSI TItan GT77

MSI refreshed its Titan laptops on Thursday. Coming in at $6,000 for a maxed-out configuration, the 17.3-inch Titan GT77 represents one of the most expensive and power-hungry consumer laptops available.

MSI’s Titan laptops are built to be powerful enough to replace your desktop. In the case of the GT77, the first new Titan since 2019, that means offering Intel’s Core HX-series CPUs, which have the same dies as Intel’s 12th Gen desktop CPUs.

The Titan GT77 is 6.82 lbs and 0.9 inch thick.
Enlarge / The Titan GT77 is 6.82 lbs and 0.9 inch thick.

MSI’s GT77 comes with an i7-12800HX and starts at $3,200. The top-end model has an i9-12900HX with eight performance cores (2.3–5 GHz) and eight efficiency cores (up to 3.6 GHz). The chip is supported by up to 150 W of max turbo power and is paired with an Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti (16GB GDDR6) laptop graphics card. With MSI’s “Overboost” feature, the clamshell supports up to 250 W of power delivery to the CPU and GPU. The GPU gets 175 W, MSI said.

For comparison, the priciest laptop from Alienware, which also sells desktop-class laptops, has an i9-12900HK (six P-cores at 2.5–5 GHz and eight E-cores at 1.8–3.8 GHz) and an RTX 3080 Ti (16GB), with 175 W max graphics power. The Alienware goes up to $4,800 for the highest-level parts, including the keyboard.

Heat management is critical in a machine like this; MSI says the Titan GT77 has four fans, seven heat pipes, and a phase-change thermal pad.

Rendering of the GT77's cooling system.
Enlarge / Rendering of the GT77’s cooling system.

The laptop comes with a 330 W power adapter and a 99.9 WHr battery, but we wouldn’t expect to be able to run this monster without a connection to an outlet for long.

MSI’s highest-end Titan GT77 also comes with 4TB of PCIe 5.0 SSD storage across two drives and a whopping 126GB of DDR5-4800 RAM across four sticks. Lower configurations are upgradeable.

Even the lower-end GT77 models get some luxuries you won’t find in cheaper laptops, like a 120 Hz 4K display that MSI says covers 100 percent of DCI-P3. You can also get a low-profile mechanical keyboard with Cherry MX Ultra Low switches and per-key RGB programmability via the SteelSeries software.

If the specs and RGB-capable keyboard don’t tell you that MSI designed this laptop for PC gamers, the configurable RGB light bar running along the machine’s spine should do the trick.

RGB light bar.
Enlarge / RGB light bar.

The Titan GT77 is expected to release this month.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1858022