MSI Titan GT77 HX Laptop Review: Killer Gaming And Creator Performance
MSI Titan GT77 HX Gaming Laptop: Thermals, Acoustics And The Final Word
The MSI Titan GT77 HX has four fans and multiple heatsinks linked by eight heat pipes inside its chassis to help keep its internal components cool. One of the fans inside the systems runs constantly, but at idle or when the machine is under a light workload, you cannot hear it. You have to put your ear up against the bottom of the system to hear anything at all when the machine isn’t under load. As such, nothing would register on our sound meter in the lab, which has a sound floor in the low 30dBa range. Although it’s an immensely powerful machine, during basic tasks, the MSI Titan GT77 HX is surprisingly tame.
MSI Titan GT77 HX Thermal And Acoustic Performance
The fans in the system will spin up considerably when under load, however. So, to get a sense for acoustics and thermals under load, we fired up the F1 2021 and looped its benchmark for 20 iterations after previously running multiple in-game benchmarks, to warm up and saturate the system's cooling hardware. The heat and noise generated by the MSI Titan GT77 HX with these tests should be indicative of what a typical, prolonged gaming scenario might produce.
When under load, the fans in the MSI Titan GT77 HX spin up and get considerably louder. When we held the sound meter about 12" from the display, we measured approximately 59.3dBA. That's pretty loud relative to some other gaming notebooks we tested (it's about 4dBA higher than the previous gen of this machine). Despite the relatively high volume though, the noise character has a low pitch and is not particularly irritating on the ears. The fans emit a strong whir as hot air is exhausted from the chassis, which is somewhat louder than some other notebooks in this class, but not off-putting in our opinion.
The vast majority of the body of the MSI Titan GT77 HX does not get too hot to the touch. The hottest we could find on the surface was near the back, above the GPU at the top right-corner of the keyboard. Here we measured about 109°F. Once we moved down to the keyboard though, the keys typically registered in the upper 80s or lower 90s.
PCMark 10 Hardware Health Data
The hardware health data gathered during a PCMark10 run, which features content creation and gaming workloads, shows how this system behaves thermally. As you can see, the CPU in the MSI Titan GT77 HX will often jump up in the 90°C range, and can jump up the 100°C mark with multi-threaded workloads. Despite is relatively powerful cooling hardware, the Core i9-13950HX in the machine is designed to use as much thermal headroom as it can to maximize performance, and that means temps are going to creep fairly high under heavy loads. It’s a different story with the GeForce RTX 4090, however.
3DMark Time Spy Hardware Health Data
With a gaming / graphics workload, that taxes both the CPU and GPU, CPU temps in the MSI Titan GT77 HX are somewhat similar to PCMark, with peaks of 90°C+. The GeForce RTX 4090 always remained under 80°C.
MSI Titan GT77 HX (2023) With 13th Gen & RTX 4090: Our Verdict
If you took the time to peruse all of the benchmark data, it will be painfully obvious the MSI Titan GT77 HX is an absolute performance beast. With Intel’s and NVIDIA’s latest and greatest, high-end mobile platform technologies at play, in addition to a powerful cooling solution and well-ventilated chassis, it’s no surprise the latest MSI Titan GT77 HX is as fast as a gaming notebook comes.A powerful 7.3lb machine packing a 17.3” display, with less than stellar battery life will obviously disqualify the MSI Titan GT77 HX for some users. For its intended audience of hardcore gamers and creators, however, the MSI Titan GT77 HX may be just what the doctor ordered. Our overall experience over the last few weeks testing and playing with the machine was overwhelmingly positive and we think anyone considering a machine in this class should take a close look at the MSI Titan GT77 HX.
There are a multitude of configurations available for this laptop, spanning a couple of generations, at prices starting around $2,200 and approaching as high as $6,000. The particular configuration we tested isn’t for sale anywhere, but a higher-end setup with the Core i9-13980HX and 128GB of RAM can be found for about $5,900. That is exclusive pricing territory, no doubt, but this is a bleeding-end, premium machine from top to bottom and its performance is stellar, so a hefty price premium is expected.
Gamers or content creators shopping for a powerful gaming notebook with a large, high-quality display like the MSI Titan GT77 HX, should absolutely give this machine some serious consideration. At the high-end, it offers class-leading performance and features, but MSI also offers an array of options if the absolute top-of-the-line isn’t in the card.
