MSI Crosshair 16 HX AI (2025) review

Following the trend of slapping the AI tag on everything, MSI's newest additions to the Crosshair gaming laptop family highlight the fifth-generation Tensor Cores of Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs. It's a testament to just how proud laptop manufacturers are to play host to some of the most proficient gaming technology today. Whether the MSI Crosshair 16 HX AI can handle the wayward power of the RTX 50-series without all the upscaling magic, we'll get to in a moment. First, let's talk aesthetics.

There's something about the MSI Crosshair HX series' updated design that makes me want to pinch its little cheeks. Leaning away from sharper looks, this lightweight 16-incher in 16:10 form factor features cutesy rounded corners with faint Cyberpunky patterning on the chassis. It's giving fun-size, practical, and a little rambunctious. The typeface on the keys is a little over the top, with the WASD keys also featuring a translucent top that makes them unreadable with RGB on, but you are expected to know what those keys are for with this lappy.

The rest of the detailing is subtle enough for this gaming beastie to masquerade among your average workplace machine, too. It's the kind of laptop you'd take notes on in class, then show off your K/D ratio at lunch. Like a backwards mullet, the MSI Crosshair HX appears very party in the front, business in the back. That is, until you look at the rendering benchmarks. Then it's all business.

As an ex game design student I wish Intel had even invented the Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX back in 2018. It would have saved me a heck of a lot of time on rendering runs… and been portable. With Cinebench multi-thread sampling rates matching that of the £3,600/$3,500 Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10, the MSI Crosshair 16 HX AI really isn't messing around when it comes to rendering prowess. The synthetic benchmarks all speak volumes, though the thermals appear to be holding it back a little against other Core Ultra 9 275HX machines. I saw CPU temperatures topping out at 100 degrees Celsius which, while only causing a minor drop in performance, is enough to make the cheaper yet similarly-specced Acer Predator Helios Neo 16 AI—with its RTX 5070 Ti—look even more tempting.

GPU temperatures aren't looking too bad and are backed by some stalwart numbers across the PC Gamer benchmarking ringer. It beats out the far more expensive Razer Blade 14's RTX 5070 model, thanks in part to its size, though against others in its weight class it's a little on the slower side.

Whacking on a bit of Nvidia's Frame Generation tech manages to save the Crosshair HX AI from some shocking frame rates in Cyberpunk 2077, particularly at its native 2560 x 1600 resolution, but all that AI goodness only manages to drag it up to par with the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14's 120 W RTX 5070 Ti. And that's without the magic of upscaling backing it up. This is a machine that shines when it can lean on that dastardly CPU, such as in games like Metro Exodus Enhanced that are a little more CPU intensive. Go a little easier on it, turning the resolution down to 1080p, and we start to see what this machine is really meant for: Low res gaming with upscaling switched on.

Image 1 of 4

That and, as the name suggests, AI image generation. Topping laptops costing over a thousand dubloons more, this little beastie is swifter and more proficient when faced with our preferred Stable Diffusion benchmark than many of those in its weight class, though notably doesn't beat the compact Blade 14, which may reflect on the slim amount of memory here.

Sure the PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD MSI has popped under the hood is a little on the slower side compared to similar laptops that instead make the most of PCIe 5.0, but it's not measly in size and there's a spare M.2 slot to add a PCIe 5.0 drive should you feel the need. When it comes to outer ports everything's very much up to scratch, with a Thunderbolt 4 port accompanying three speedy USB 3.2 Type-C ports there's more than enough to keep most people going without a dock. And while this machine would struggle to play games at 4K/60 Hz, there's a DisplayPort that allows for it if you want to watch a movie between rounds.

As far as gaming laptops go, the MSI Crosshair 16 HX AI is in close pursuit of other laptops in the current generation of GPUs, but there are far better machines on the market today for gaming alone. If you're not too concerned about battery life, it's possible to get a few more frames per second and a little less thermal throttling for cheaper with the RTX 5070 Ti-powered Predator Helios Neo 16 AI, too.

Of course it all depends on your priorities. 1440p+ gaming aside, its maneuverable size and a battery life of over an hour and a half make the MSI Crosshair 16 HX AI a highly portable machine with reasonable rendering and AI generating capabilities thrown in. Just don't go pushing your luck gaming at high resolution with ray tracing turned on, without employing Nvidia's Frame Generation tech.