MSI GT77 Titan review

For a laptop that costs as much as a car, the GT77 Titan needs to floor the competition with its innards and justify that big price tag. Our review unit is on the pricier end of that starting price. It’s got an Intel 12th Gen i9-12900HX, 64GB of DDR5 RAM, 3TB Gen4 NVMe storage and an Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti (16GB). All of which are really powerful insides for a gaming laptop.

To put things in perspective, we started our review by comparing this to our office-kept Apple Mac Studio that comes with the latest Apple M1 Max. An export of a 38min FullHD raw video file took 7mins on the Apple machine while the MSI GT77 Titan finished the same work in 4mins. That’s roughly 40% faster than the Apple machine but that’s largely thanks to the Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti.

Funnily enough, the MSI GT77 Titan barely breaks a sweat when doing productivity work. Things like Photoshop, Premier Pro and InDesign barely push this machine to even crank up its fan to full speed. So we did what any sensible (read as rich) gamer would do, hook it up to a 4K telly and crank up the game settings to ultra.

Forza Horizon 5 Hotwheels DLC runs at a solid 60FPS at 4K resolution with graphics settings set to Extreme. The laptop can churn out up to 80FPS but our telly support was up to 60Hz. Nevertheless, it’s apparent that the MSI GT77 Titan can churn out the latest triple-A titles at native 4K with more frames than your telly can handle. Moving to Age of Empires IV and the MSI churns out frame rates that are higher than your expectations.

Switching to another blockbuster title, God of War on PC is an absolute delight to play on the MSI. The frame rate ticker kept moving between 65-75FPS on 4K without DLSS enabled and on the highest graphical settings. On FullHD we got around 85 during action-packed scenes and up to 100FPS during calmer scenes. 

On just FullHD, the MSI GT77 Titan is another beast altogether. Almost all heavy-hitting games score above 60FPS but if you roll down the graphics you can easily hit the 200+ frames for competitive games.

Speaking of which, our GT77 Titan came with a FullHD display variant which supports a 360Hz refresh rate and with MSI’s True Color calibration. Bear in mind that if you update the Intel and Nvidia drivers, the True Color profile can reset which causes the display to appear washed out. After which MSI will promptly send you on a scavenger hunt to fix the display’s colour inaccuracies. Although it was an easy process, we don’t think someone like our designer or anyone who isn’t a Windows geek will have the patience to prowl around the web following MSI’s DIY methods of fixing the driver issues.

Regardless of the minor setback, the True Color calibration is punchy, colourful and well balanced. It’s calibrated for gaming primarily and that’s where you should be spending most of your time with this machine. Colour grading work is fine too but we rather plug a better monitor into this thing.

MSI also allows you to switch to the dedicated GPU inside at all times and also directly connect an external display to the GPU when you use the HDMI port. If you use a USB Type-C port to connect to an external monitor, you won’t get a connection directly to the GPU.

Not just as a gamer but also as a writer, it’s hard to separate yourself from the MSI GT77 Titan because it has a phenomenal keyboard typing experience. It’s got a SteelSeries keyboard with Cherry MX Ultra Low Switches and per-key RGB with brilliant key travel and wonderful clickity sound. It’s slightly loud for folks who are not used to mechanical keyboards but for those who love these sort of things, the keyboard here has to be the best in class.

MSI has also put a generously large touchpad with a smooth multi-touch surface. The touchpad is not haphazardly put within the chassis, nor is it of a low quality. These are top spec materials and they better be for that wallet-punching price.

The MSI GT77 Titan is also built to be a tailored experience. You get four RAM slots with up to 128GB of RAM support and four M.2 slots for up to 32TB of storage support. The GT77 Titan also has four fans to keep the monstrosity from overheating and it pretty much gets the job done. At no point did we face issues like thermal throttling and the fans are intelligent enough to gauge stress load and adjust accordingly. In short, you’ll hear less of the fans whining sounds and more of your game audio. It also uses a phase-change thermal pad for better granular surface contact between the heatsink pipes and the heat-causing menace.

Let's face it, the entire laptop is just meant to be plonked on your desk and only moved when necessary. In hindsight, it’s still sufficiently portable because we made it to the office and back with it but whether we’ll repeat that routine is debatable. At 3.1kgs with a bulky charger, the MSI can easily tease your muscles for lacking.

This won’t probably make it to your cart and it’s actually not meant to woo everyone. It’s a  poster boy for both, Intel and MSI. The desktop-esque Intel processor churns out tons of computing power and MSI has managed to keep the entire package phenomenally cool even at peak gaming loads. This is significant, especially for the Intel processor, and how Intel has managed to almost overcome the excess heating problems with their i9 processors. This Intel 12th Gen i9-12900HX got a Cinebench score of 20187 in the multicore test which is almost double of the Intel 9th Gen i9 mobile processor. Those 16 cores that are split into 8 efficiency and 8 performance cores on the 12th Gen perform smoothly under any realistic workload. 

The MSI cooling is also top-notch. It keeps the insides of this beast tamed without letting the heat reach your palms. With sustained gaming loads, the heat will eventually reach below the number keys on the right side of the keyboard but this shouldn’t be an issue because your hands only sit there while typing.