// PC GAMER — GAMING
MSI Crosshair 16 Max HX E2W review
This laptop leans all-in on maxing out as much performance as it can from its RTX 5070 and Intel processor, and it does so with great success. But this comes with a thermal and battery life cost that, when combined with its audio latency problems and its somewhat confused aesthetic, makes it not particularly appealing for the price.
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The MSI Crosshair 16 Max HX E2W is in many ways the polar opposite of the other MSI laptop I recently tested, the Stealth 16 AI+ B3W. The latter is an ultra-expensive, sleek and subtle machine that limits its power for the sake of thermals, efficiency, and form factor. Not so with the Crosshair: it's a gaming laptop, and it knows it.
I could tell as much as soon as I unboxed it, thanks to its glossy—and I would later discover, RGB-lit—embossed MSI logo on the lid, plus the general thickness, key styling and so on. It's not particularly obnoxious and still has some subtlety to it, but it's not hiding the fact that it's a gaming laptop.
Nor does it hide this fact when it comes to performance, eking as much as it can out of the RTX 5070 GPU and Core Ultra 7 251HX processor, saying to hell with thermals and battery life. I can certainly respect that, but it has to deliver in other respects, too, including price. And in other respects this laptop is not quite so pretty.
✅ You want great all-round performance: MSI really has designed this thing to eke out as much performance as possible from the mid-range components.✅ Punchy visuals are important to you: This laptop has a gorgeous OLED panel that does indeed make visuals pop.
❌ You want snappy audio: The audio from this laptop suffers from latency issues, and I couldn't seem to resolve them even after quite a bit of tinkering.❌ You want to take this out and about: Not only does this laptop have poor battery life, it also doesn't look particularly appealing aesthetically for use in public.
This laptop leans all-in on maxing out as much performance as it can from its RTX 5070 and Intel processor, and it does so with great success. But this comes with a thermal and battery life cost that, when combined with its audio latency problems and its somewhat confused aesthetic, makes it not particularly appealing for the price.
1x RJ45, 1x Thunderbolt 4, 1x USB Type-C, 3x USB Type-A 3.2 Gen2, 1x HDMI 2.1
The particular Crosshair 16 Max HX E2W that I tested came with an Intel Core Ultra 7 251HX, RTX 5070, and 16 GB of DDR5 RAM, but there are different versions. The ones I can currently spot online have a more powerful Core Ultra 9 290HX with 32 GB of DDR5, or the same 251HX CPU but an RTX 5060 and 32 GB of DDR5. All of those come with 1 TB of storage.