The new ROG Zephyrus laptops are made out of plastic with a light strip

The Titan 18 HX A14V: A Boat Anchor for a Game-Starving Gaming Laptop, or Why Halo Laptops are Not Made for Dead

The name implies that the Titan should be Extra. I’d love to know who actually buys these kinds of halo laptops, which are simply not made for mere mortals and seem to be a bit of a dying breed — the days of laptops like the absurd Acer Predator 21 X are long gone now.

The Titan 18 HX sports an 18-inch Mini LED display with 3840 x 2400 resolution and 120Hz refresh, Intel’s new 14th Gen Core i9 14900HX processor, an RTX 4080 or 4090 GPU with DLSS 3.5 support, up to 128GB of DDR5 RAM in its four slots, three M.2 SSD slots (one of which is PCIe Gen 5), a six-speaker audio setup, a SteelSeries-made mechanical keyboard, and a new vapor chamber cooler with a slick-looking exhaust design on the laptop’s elevated underside.

Being such a beefy laptop, it has room for plenty of ports, with two Thunderbolt 4 / USB-C ports, three USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, HDMI 2.1, and a full-size SD card reader. While all of this costs an eye-watering $5,000, it also weighs a shoulder-tiring 7.94 pounds / 3.6kg. Like other new laptops, it has AI-based performance profiles that can be used to maximize settings based on things such as gaming or video conferencing. Though, I expect almost nobody buying this behemoth is going to do much outside of play games with it and won’t be moving it around. This desktop replacement machine is meant to mostly live in one spot and play games as it lets its colorful peacock feathers of RGB lighting shine.

The Titan 18 HX A14V, a boat anchor of a gaming laptop that costs as much as a beater car and has one of the most garish colors out there, is one of the new laptops that will be on display at the Consumer Electronics Show.

The games do perform well on both the G14 and G16. It feels like you are waking a sleeping beast when you fire up graphics-intense titles. The best trick of laptops has been their demure looks that makes you believe they are close to productivity laptops that are not capable of such gaming performance. And then, they just sing, with both the graphics on-screen and their fans. A lot. Yes, the fans on the new Zephyrus pair can really kick in quite loud, but that’s always been the tradeoff for the thin and light design.

While these are far from final review-ready models, Asus seems to have this one ready for a knock out of the park, pending finalized pricing. (Asus declined to share exact pricing for the new models before publishing time.) The usability and feature set are excellent, and gaming performance seems very good. We’ll have to see how they fare in full reviews (and in the more modest configurations that more people might be likely to buy) when they launch in February.

The G14 is 0.64 inches wide and 1.59 inches high, and the G16 is 0.69 inches wide and 1.64 inches high, both of which are thin laptops. The G14 has one left-mounted USB 4 port (which you can use to charge at slower speeds), one USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 on the right, two USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 (one on each side), HDMI 2.1, a 3.5mm audio jack, and a microSD card slot. The larger G16 is mostly the same, but its left-side USB port is Thunderbolt 4, its right-side USB-C also has Power Delivery, and its card slot is a full-size SD with UHS-II speeds.

While at the Asus press briefing, I overheard some chagrining about these laptops opting for a proprietary charge connector in lieu of a barrel plug, but as someone who dislikes the latter, I’m fine with the slim and reversible power cord here. I have mostly been using USB-C for charging both laptops when just doing work or browsing on them anyway, and that’s been totally fine. The chunky 180W and 240W power bricks can be kept on reserve until it’s time to fire up some graphically demanding games.

Elsewhere in Republic of Gamers land, Asus is giving much more modest updates to the ROG Strix and Strix Scar. The new 2024 Strix and Strix Scar, each with 16-inch and 18-inch models, respectively, are now equipped with 14th Gen Intel processors up to the 14900HX. They’re otherwise much the same as last year’s models, with 16:10 QHD screens that hit 240Hz and Nvidia GPUs configurable up to an RTX 4080 (Strix) or 4090 (Strix Scar). They’re fairly beefy laptops, launching later in January, with the higher-end Strix Scar starting at $2,899.99 for a 16-inch and $2,999.99 for the 18-inch. But of course, it can be specced to the stars and back to prices upward of $4,000. It was not until after publishing time that Asus shared pricing for the ROG Strix.