MSI Stealth A18 AI+ Review

Introduction

The MSI Stealth A18 AI+ is the 18-inch gaming laptop to consider if you don’t want one that looks like an 18-inch gaming laptop.

After all, the whole point of MSI’s Stealth lineup of laptops is that they aren’t as brash or bold as the typical gaming laptop is – the smaller MSI Stealth A16 AI+ (2025) is a pleasant example of this.

The model I have is the ‘base’ in the lineup, with an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor and an Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti laptop GPU for a beefy core, plus 32GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD. Plus, there’s the 18-inch 2560×1600 120Hz IPS screen, and a hefty 99.9Whr battery to contend with.

All of this is going to run you £2899/$3300 in terms of retail pricing, making this a very expensive laptop for the spec, considering the likes of the Medion Erazer Major 16 X1 undercutting MSI’s choice with similar specs, and the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16S AI that is nearly £1000 cheaper.

I’ve been putting the Stealth A18 AI+ (2025) through its paces for the last couple of weeks to see if this is one of the best gaming laptops out there. Let’s find out if MSI’s big-screened brute has done enough to come out on top.

Design and Keyboard

• Understated alloy chassis
• Excellent port selection
• Snappy keyboard but lacklustre trackpad

The Stealth A18 AI+ (2025) leans into its namesake with a look to it that’s a pleasant halfway house between all-out gaming monsters and more ultrabook-style choices. Granted, the larger size of this machine gives it more presence, but it’s still a decent-looking choice with a pleasant blue hue to its metal chassis. This provides it with an understated look against other brasher gaming laptops, both in MSI’s own lineup and from rivals. 

A 2.89kg weight means this isn’t really that much of a portable laptop, though. This isn’t necessarily MSI’s fault, though, as lots of bigger-screened laptops suffer from this weight issue. With a hefty power brick in tow, it limits this laptop’s portability credentials.

The port selection on the Stealth A18 AI+ (2025) is solid, too. The rear of the laptop houses its proprietary charging port alongside an HDMI and Ethernet jack, while on the left you’ll find two USB-A ports and a headphone jack. It’s on the right where there are two USB4-capable Type C ports and a full-size SD card reader.  There is also a fingerprint reader built into the keyboard deck.

In-keeping with other laptops of its size, the Stealth A18 AI+ (2025) benefits from a near full-size keyboard layout that comes complete with dedicated number pad, arrow keys and a fully-fledged function row. The keys have a decently positive keypress with reasonable tactility while also being quite quiet. The RGB lighting sticks only to the legend of the keycap itself for a classier look, as opposed to being across the entire thing.

If there’s one area of this laptop’s design and feel I’m less enthusiastic about, it’s the trackpad. The size of it is fine for general navigation, although the tactility of the keypress just leaves something to be desired, feeling quite empty and soulless against other laptops I’ve tested.

Display and Sound

• Lack of an OLED screen is a shame
• Bright, but at the expense of black level
• Reasonable six-speaker array

Where the Stealth A18 AI+ (2025) differs from the smaller 16-inch variant is that it isn’t rocking an OLED screen, as I perhaps expected. This base model sticks with a more standard 18-inch 2560×1600 120Hz resolution IPS screen, which feels like a bit of a downgrade against this laptop’s competition that come with either an OLED or Mini LED panel with a higher refresh rate.

This comes with the usual pitfalls of LCD panels, with okay contrast and black levels at more moderate brightness levels. At 50% brightness, I measured 1030:1 contrast and a middling 0.19 black level, while pushing up to peak brightness doesn’t change the contrast, although it turns the black into more of a grey with a 0.50 black level. The 6800K colour temperature is just okay.

Colour accuracy here is great, with a measured 100% sRGB and 96% DCI-P3 alongside 87% Adobe RGB. That means the Stealth A18 AI+ (2025)’s panel is extremely well-suited to both productivity tasks, such as web browsing, and more colour-sensitive editing tasks.

The 500.4 nits of peak SDR brightness means images can get rather punchy, and means you can use this laptop outside if you’d want to. With this in mind, with what it can do to the black level, it may be best to stick to slightly lower percentages.

The speakers here are okay for a set of immersive laptop options, with a surprisingly wide and spacious sound thanks to six drivers, although not much else. It’s mostly mid-range otherwise, with some depth to the bass and top-end. You are better off using the headphone jack, as usual.

Performance

• Good performance from Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and 5070 Ti
• Potent gaming numbers
• Decent SSD in capacity and speed

As with its slightly smaller 16-inch model, it’s possible to configure the Stealth A18 AI+ (2025) with up to an RTX 5090 if you so choose, although my model comes in the base spec with an RTX 5070 Ti laptop GPU alongside the beefy AMD Ryzen AI HX 370 chip that has previously wowed in slender ultrabooks such as the Asus Zenbook S 16 (2024) and Asus ProArt P16 (2025).

If you need a bit of a refresher, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 is a potent laptop chip with its 12 cores, 24 threads, and a boost clock of up to 5.1GHz. As is demonstrated again here in the Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 tests, it’s a seriously powerful chip that goes toe to toe with Intel’s top-end Panther Lake chips you’ll find.

The single and multi-core tests provide strong results, especially thanks to AMD’s continued use of hyperthreading. Even if last year’s Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX has more cores, it’s neck and neck with the HX 370 in multi-threaded Cinebench when comparing against the MSI Vector 16 HX AI A2XW (2025), for instance.

As for gaming performance, this particular MSI Stealth laptop is a tad brisker than the 16-inch model, meaning we’re seeing performance that’s generally akin to a laptop RTX 4080 and even some lower-power 4090 laptops, such as the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2023) with its more constrained form factor.

The results in Cyberpunk 2077 and Returnal at 1080p with 106.15fps and 115fps, respectively, are strong, while a 207fps result in Rainbow Six Extraction at 1080p demonstrates that this laptop will have no trouble with eSports titles. It’s more of the same at 1440p too, with Cyberpunk 2077 sitting at  64.31fps and Rainbow Six Extraction at 129fps. These numbers are in and around the RTX 5080-powered Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) with its RTX 5080 and Intel Core Ultra 9 285H processor.

Bringing the DLSS Transformer upscaler to the party with Cyberpunk took non-ray-traced results up to 109.49fps at 1080p and to 89.12fps at the laptop’s native 2560×1600 resolution. RT: Ultra Cyberpunk sat at 49.28fps at 1080p and 27.51fps at native res, while with DLSS, results were almost doubled with 71.82fps at 1080p and 55.00fps at native res.

Being a 50-series laptop means the Stealth A18 AI+ (2025) benefits from Nvidia’s clever Multi-Frame-Gen tech that adds in up to three ‘fake frames’ for every traditionally generated one, thanks to AI for a perceivably smoother experience. The addition of these frames is reliant upon a base FPS figure that is high enough to mean the displayed image with Multi Frame Gen isn’t choppy or laggy.

With this, it’s able to mean you can take advantage of high refresh rate displays with smooth and responsive output without much of a penalty in latency. Using the maximum 4x multiplier, it was able to take Cyberpunk 2077 with RT: Ultra at 2560×1600 resolution to 158.59fps, and at 1080p, pushed it to 219.81fps.

The Stealth A18 AI+ (2025) comes with 32GB of fast DDR5 RAM to aid with multitasking and intensive workloads, as well as a larger 2TB SSD, giving you a good capacity for storing apps and games. It is a decently quick drive too, with measured reads and writes of 7057.84MB/s and 4932.09 MB/s, putting it towards the top end of a Gen 4 SSD.

Software

• Clean Windows 11 install
• Minimal MSI apps
• Copilot+ PC functionality is present

The Stealth A18 AI+ (2025) comes with a remarkably clean Windows 11 install, with only one MSI-specific app preinstalled. It’s MSI Center, the brand’s catch-all app that allows you to do everything from checking on your system’s vitals to configuring its RGB lighting, and a lot more besides.

With the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 inside, there is enough horsepower for this laptop to be considered a Copilot+ PC. This provides access to Microsoft’s AI functionality for generative powers and filters in the Photos and Paint apps, as well as the clever Windows Studio webcam effects for background blurring, auto-framing and maintaining eye contact.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 7 hours 27 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for one working day

To deal with a large OLED screen, some beefy components and more besides, MSI has done the sensible thing and packed this huge laptop with a hefty 99.9Whr battery inside. The brand doesn’t make any specific claims on endurance for this model, as with the 16-inch variant.

In dialling the brightness down to the requisite 150 nits and running the PCMark 10 Modern Office battery test, this MSI laptop lasted for seven hours and 27 minutes before conking out. This is below our 10-hour target, meaning you will need to do some hypermiling to get through a full working day. With this in mind, it’s several times longer than other, beefier 18-inch laptops I’ve tested, including the Acer Predator Helios 18 AI and the Alienware 18 Area-51.

The Stealth A18 AI+ (2025) also comes with a hefty 280W power brick that’s as large as it is powerful, although it isn’t as quick as putting charge back into the laptop as you may think. A 50 percent charge took an hour on the nose, while getting this laptop back to 100% took 130 minutes.

Should you buy it?

FAQs