The massive MSI Titan GT77 HX and Razer Blade 16 come rocking the latest Nvidia and Intel GPU/CPU combo. But certainly don’t come quiet or cheap.
The Witcher 3 looks absolutely stunning running on this gorgeous 4K Mini LED screen. And the latent power of both the new RTX 4090 and Core i9 13950HX hardware means I can slap everything up to max and still top 60 fps. I’m beating the scat out of this werewolf and in turn telling his would-be missus that she can honestly just do one (Witching, amirite?) and it’s a fantastic, fluid, high-res mobile gaming experience.
Except for one thing. I can barely hear what the hell is going on.
In isolation, the Audeze LCD-1 headphones I’ve jammed into the new MSI Titan GT77 HX(opens in new tab) laptop sound absolutely impeccable. The open-back operating principle and well-worn planar magnetic drivers are perfect for this sort of detailed open-world soundscape, delivering a natural audio response that you can’t quite get with traditional closed-back gaming headsets. Velen has never sounded so miserable.
But isolation is the issue here, there is none. I can hear exactly how loud the Titan’s cooling fans are getting because there is no passive or active noise cancelling on these cans. And hoo boy, they get loud and that is really impacting upon my enjoyment.
Which I actually wasn’t really expecting. I mean, I knew that the 13th Gen Intel mobile chips were going to demand some cooling, especially up at the Core i9 level. And running at 5GHz+, and that the pseudo RTX 4090 GPU with its 175W TGP would, too. But I really wasn’t prepared for the reality.
And that was after I’d already run the new Razer Blade 16(opens in new tab) through its paces with the exact same next-gen spec. That far slimmer machine gets blowy, too, just not to the same extent as the MSI Titan.