Titan 18 HX: a silly little boat anchor for the Zephyrus G14, G16, and whatever you want to do with a gaming laptop
The Titan features an edge to edge illuminated trackpad, as well as the usual per-key RGB lighting found on most gaming laptops. It is a small sight to see up close, as the front deck is made of glass with the lighting up in the middle. It has a look and uses MacBook-like movements to make it feelclicky when you press it. It’s silly and fun and lands squarely in the “I know nobody needs this I’m glad it exists. Because, come on, if you’re actually going to spend $5,000 on a gaming laptop, it should offer a bit of flair as well as have the specs to back it up.
The Titan 18 HX sports an 18-inch Mini LED display with 3840 x 2400 resolution and 120Hz refresh, Intel’s new 14th Gen Core i9 14900HX processor, an RTX 4080 or 4090 GPU with DLSS 3.5 support, up to 128GB of DDR5 RAM in its four slots, three M.2 SSD slots (one of which is PCIe Gen 5), a six-speaker audio setup, a SteelSeries-made mechanical keyboard, and a new vapor chamber cooler with a slick-looking exhaust design on the laptop’s elevated underside.
It has a lot of ports and can fit a full-size SD card reader. While all of this costs an eye-watering $5,000, it also weighs a shoulder-tiring 7.94 pounds / 3.6kg. Unlike other newMSI laptops, it has a performance profile that can be tailored to make the machine more efficient based on tasks like video conferencing. I think most people buying this giant will not be moving it around, because they will only play games with it. This desktop replacement machine is meant to mostly live in one spot and play games as it lets its colorful peacock feathers of RGB lighting shine.
The only other laptops that are over the top are the ones byMSI, but the one that is the most garish is the titan 18 HX A14V, a boat anchor of a gaming laptop that costs as much as a beater car.
What isn’t new for the Zephyrus G14 and G16 are their GPUs, which are still using last year’s class of Nvidia discrete graphics cards. G14 and G16 can be configured with up to an RTX 4070 and 4090 respectively. That’s totally fine, as I’m sure we’ll be waiting a while for laptops with Nvidia’s 40-series Super GPUs, and the quality-of-life benefits of the Zephyrus redesign far outweigh most year-over-year chip improvements. Neither laptop has 40-series cards that support Frame Generation or Ray Reconstruction.
The respective 14-inch and 16-inch OLED screens on both laptops are vivid and crisp. I was surprised by how good the new speaker array sounded from a 14-incher. The keyboards are better now than before and feel like some of the best around. The trackpads are very good — they’re large and spacious, if still a little stiff and not very clickable toward the top third. And I even dig the slash lighting on the lid, which, by default, turns off when you’re on battery but lights up in preset or custom lighting patterns you can finely tune in Asus’ built-in Armoury Crate software. It’s a nice bit of flair that isn’t too attention-grabby, and I’d wager you could even sneak through some in-office meetings without anyone noticing you’re on a gaming laptop (unless, of course, someone looks close at the REPUBLIC OF GAMERS stamp at the bottom of the lid).
Port selection on both new Zephyrus laptops is more than adequate for such thin laptops (the G14 is 0.64 inches / 1.59cm at its thickest point, and the G16 is 0.69 inches / 1.64cm at the same). One of the ports on the G14 has a left-mounted plug, which you can use to charge at slower speeds. The G16 has a single left- side port and also has a single right-side port with power delivery, as well as a full-sizeSD card slots with UHS-II speeds.
While at the Asus press briefing, I overheard some chagrining about these laptops opting for a proprietary charge connector in lieu of a barrel plug, but as someone who dislikes the latter, I’m fine with the slim and reversible power cord here. I have mostly been using USB-C for charging both laptops when just doing work or browsing on them anyway, and that’s been totally fine. It is possible to keep the power bricks on reserve until it is convenient to play some graphically demanding games.
Elsewhere in Republic of Gamers land, Asus is giving much more modest updates to the ROG Strix and Strix Scar. The Strix and Strix Scar are now equipped with 14th Gen Intel processors, up to the 14900HX. The models have the same 16:10 QHD screens that hit 240Hz and can be loaded with an RTX 4080 (STRIX) or 4090 (STRIX Scar). The laptops come in two sizes, a 16-inch and 18-inch, but the Strix Scar starts at $2,999.99 for the 18-inch. But of course, it can be specced to the stars and back to prices upward of $4,000. The pricing for the ROG Strix was not shared before publishing time.
We’ve followed up with Asus for pricing information on its new laptop lineup. The Zenbook Duo and Vivobooks are scheduled to release later this quarter, while release dates for the TUF gaming laptops are yet to be confirmed.
There is a new line of TUF- branded gaming laptops, including the A16 and A15 models. The A16 has an HD 7970 and the F16 has an Intel Core i7 13650HX. Both have the choice of up to 32gigabyte ram, and 2 terabytes of storage. Meanwhile, the smaller TUF Gaming A15 is available with an AMD Ryzen 8000-series processor with an RTX 4070 GPU, a 15-inch 2.5K LCD display with a 165Hz refresh rate, up to 32GB of RAM, and 2TB of storage. All three laptops can be upgraded with more RAM and storage.
The Asus Zenbook Duo is more modern than it’s competitor due to being launched a year later. It can be specced with up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 185H processor and 32GB of RAM, up to 2TB of storage, and a 75Wh battery. The laptop can use a stylus with the 3.5mm jack, and there are two Thunderbolt 4 ports. The keyboard can be used to charge the laptop by attaching to pins on the edges of the lower screen.
It is the same approach that was taken with the last year’s Yoga Book 9i. You can use the virtual keyboard or detach the physical keyboard on the lower screen. But what’s different here is that Asus’ keyboard has a trackpad built in, so you don’t have to use it in combination with an on-screen trackpad.