There’s lots to like about MSI’s latest flagship gaming laptop, but don't let the marketing fool you. The Stealth 18 AI Studio A1V is so all-in on its artificial intelligence features that MSI put the term in its name. It uses Intel’s 14th-gen Meteor Lake processors with a dedicated neural processing unit (NPU) to handle AI tasks, but this machine excels in more traditional applications.

The NPU is a portion of the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H processor inside the Stealth 18 optimized for tasks that rely on machine learning. This can include image generation or speech-to-text, which are sometimes offloaded to remote servers. Running them locally improves speed, and a dedicated NPU can perform the tasks far more efficiently than a typical CPU.

In practice, however, very few tasks make use of the NPU. If you set that aside, the Meteor Lake Intel processor is still powerful for everyday tasks. Add that to the Nvidia RTX 4090 graphics card, 32 GB of RAM, and a beautiful 4K Mini-LED display, and you’ve got a great gaming laptop and one that'll do a killer job with video editing and visual effects. All without touching the AI stuff.

An Empty Seat for AI

The idea of a dedicated processor for AI tasks has been pretty established in the smartphones world but has only started gaining traction in laptops in recent years. It’s not all that different from how your graphics card works. Graphically intensive tasks like video games require computing power performed in ways that aren't very efficient for CPUs. Graphics processing units (GPUs) are designed to do these tasks better, at the expense of being worse at more generalized tasks like browsing the web. Since your computer has both, it can rely on the GPU when needed but stick with the CPU when it isn’t.

GPUs are also pretty good at doing AI-related tasks, but they’re not ideal for that, either. Hence the need for an NPU. The problem? Unlike graphics-related tasks that can be useful in various scenarioses, NPUs are only good for tasks that rely on machine learning. Despite the generative AI hype, there aren’t lots of features that make use of this power.

In my testing, I'd check the Windows task manager to see how much the NPU was utilized while performing common tasks. Windows’ built-in voice typing function made use of it, but almost nothing else did. This is partly because few applications have added support for NPUs. Even Microsoft’s own Copilot, which the company has announced will run locally at some point in the future, relied on cloud processing when I tried it on the Stealth 18. When I tried running Stable Diffusion locally, it used the GPU rather than the NPU. And while there are ways to get it to use the NPU, you’re going to be diving into some heavy technical modification to make it work. This isn’t a magic bullet that will make every AI task faster.

That might change in the future, but for now, it’s odd to see this little meter in the Task Manager that’s rarely in use. It’s like having a guest room in your home just in case you have a guest one of these years. Even if you find a task that uses the NPU, half the reason it’s beneficial is because it can offload tasks to free up the CPU or GPU. But the available tasks for now are so limited that you’re unlikely to find too many situations where you couldn’t just rely on the already powerful other processors in your laptop. If you do a lot of heavy video editing or visual effects work, you might get more benefits, but it’s still going to take a while before support fully rolls out.

Gaming After Work

The Nvidia RTX 4090 is a powerhouse of a GPU, but the 18-inch Mini-LED panel on this laptop doesn’t quite make use of it to its fullest potential. The local dimming zones mean this screen can get similar black levels to OLED panels, making the vibrant colors pop more against darker backgrounds. However, I noticed slight blooming in areas with bright objects on black backdrops. This was most noticeable when watching YouTube in full screen, with black bars along the top and bottom. These black bars would sometimes take on a slight hue of whatever I was watching. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Some people pay good money for that effect on their TV, and I rarely noticed the issue outside of this, but it's worth noting.

The bigger issue with the screen is that it sports a 4K resolution with a 120-Hz refresh rate. This, in my opinion, is too much of one and not enough of the other. Even at this size and this close to your face, a 4K display is almost overkill. Meanwhile, 120 Hz is great for most games, but when playing fast-paced games like Overwatch 2, there were moments I wished it was a little smoother. It’s not a deal-breaker, but it’s worth thinking about what games you want to play on it.

I was able to max out at 120 frames per second while playing Doom Eternal on Ultra settings, and even got around 70 fps in Starfield on Medium. Starfield dropped down to a still-playable 50 fps on Ultra, though I got it up to 80 fps on Ultra by enabling frame generation. I’m not a fan of this feature as it can sometimes lead to some weird smoothing effects—to my mind, it hits the same nerve as motion smoothing on TVs—but your mileage may vary.

In terms of battery life, your best bet is to keep your charger nearby for gaming sessions. The nearly 100-watt-hour battery is massive, but so is the power draw. It lasted around three hours of heavy gaming, and closer to six to seven hours with more typical use.

These limitations make the MSI Stealth 18 best suited to being a workhorse laptop you can play games on at the end of the day. Running media editing apps like DaVinci Resolve and Blender was smooth, and I rarely noticed performance problems while working on it. Most gaming laptops would run similarly with comparable GPUs, but the new Meteor Lake CPU gives you a bit of future-proofing. Companies like Blackmagic are working on adding support for NPUs generally, so if there's an area where Intel's NPU is likely to be used in the future, it's likely media creation first.

There might be better laptops purely for gaming—the Razer Blade 18, for example, trades a lower-resolution screen for a whopping 300-Hz refresh rate. But if you’d rather have one powerful laptop for work and play, the Stealth 18 is a solid investment.

All the Right Extras

The design of the Stealth 18 feels a little bit more gam3r than I like, but I can live with it for all the extra little touches MSI has put in this thing. For starters, it comes with a NumPad. I don’t care what anyone else says, NumPads are great, and I appreciate that there’s a powerful gaming laptop with one. It’s most handy while doing various video editing tasks, less for gaming, but if you’re like me, you’ll appreciate its presence.

The rest of the keyboard is similarly delightful. The font on the keys looks strikingly similar to the font Sony inexplicably used for both PlayStation and Spider-Man branding back in the aughts. The chiclet-style keys are flat, with no dimples, but they're raised enough to feel easy to distinguish while typing, though my most common mistake was hitting the new and largely unnecessary Copilot key, which takes up room near the space bar. The trackpad is super smooth. It could be a bit bigger, but I only wished this while connected to a second monitor.

There’s an Ethernet port, HDMI port, and the proprietary charging port on the rear of the device, which is an incredibly convenient locations for plugging the laptop into a desk workstation. It’s not quite as convenient as a laptop docking station, but it’s less cluttered than cables sticking out the sides. I’m also a fan of the dedicated fingerprint sensor, which makes it easier to sign in to Windows and unlock password managers.

Overall, the MSI Stealth 18 is a powerhouse, even without the NPU. At $3,300 for the RTX 4080 model, you can save a few hundred dollars compared to comparably-specced (minus the refresh rate) laptops like the Razer Blade 18. Just make sure to keep your wall charger handy.