MSI Vector 16 HX AI A2XW (2025) Review

Design and Keyboard

• Thicker, anachronistic feel
• Good port selection
• Comfortable keyboard, but trackpad is a little small

The Vector 16 HX AI A2XW (2025) borrows a similar aesthetic to some of MSI’s other premium gaming laptops, with a blend of a pleasant metal frame for a more substantial feel and a chunkier chassis that’s a reminder that this is a gaming laptop first and foremost.

There is a certain element of style with the space-grey colourway, although, with a chunkier frame, this MSI laptop feels a little older than it perhaps should, given the beefier hardware inside. At 2.7kg, it’s also quite heavy, although on par with similarly powerful laptops in this form factor.

The 22.2mm thickness at its narrowest point isn’t unwieldy, but it has the benefit of housing a good, modern port selection. The left side has a pair of Thunderbolt 5 USB-C ports and a full-size SD card reader, while the right has two USB 3.2 Gen Type-A ports and a headphone jack. On the rear, you get a full-size HDMI and an Ethernet port.

Opening up the Vector 16 HX AI A2XW (2025) reveals a virtually full-size keyboard layout in a smaller 1800-style, complete with function row, arrow keys and number pad. It’s a decent keyboard for extended use with good tactility and feel under finger, while there is also pleasant RGB lighting to aid with after-dark working and aesthetics if you want it.

The trackpad is of a decent size and has a smooth feel to it, although I couldn’t help but feel it could be a little on the bigger side. 

Display and Sound

• Punchy IPS screen with high resolution and refresh rate
• Good colours, although middling blacks and contrast
• Surprisingly good speakers

As opposed to opting for an OLED screen as the ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) does or the Mini LED panel that Medion favours, MSI has opted to give the Vector 16 HX AI A2XW (2025) a larger 16-inch 2560×1600 IPS screen with a good blend of size and detail, plus a smooth 240Hz refresh rate for responsive on-screen action.

In a general sense, the IPS screen on offer is perfectly serviceable, with a punchy peak SDR brightness of 448.9 nits, as well as decent out-of-the-box black level and contrast with results of 0.21 and 1040:1. Going up to peak brightness lends blacks to go a little grey at times. The 6600K colour temperature is right where it should be, though.

The Vector 16 HX AI A2XW (2025)’s screen is also rather colour-accurate, with 100% sRGB, 98% DCI-P3 and 86% Adobe RGB coverage. This signals its great suitability for both productivity and colour-sensitive workloads, such as photo or video-editing, especially as this laptop has enough oomph inside for it.

As for its speakers, they’re surprisingly decent with good clarity and body, and solid low-end for a more immersive touch.

Performance

• Beefy core of Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX and RTX 5080
• Immensely powerful in games
• Solid RAM and SSD capacity, but SSD is on the slower side

The Vector 16 HX AI A2XW (2025) packs in a familiar combination of parts for a powerful gaming laptop in 2025, with the same theoretically potent combo as you’ll find in both Medion and HP’s flagship models. That means an RTX 5080 laptop GPU and a capable Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor.

The Core Ultra 275HX is Intel’s second-in-command Arrow Lake Ultra chip that sits behind the 285HX model, and comes equipped with 24 cores and 24 threads, thanks to Intel’s ditching of hyperthreading with recent generations. The core arrangement is split asymmetrically between eight Performance and 16 Efficiency cores, while the 275HX comes with a boost clock of up to 5.4GHz when needed.

The performance here for the processor is fantastic, with excellent scores in both Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 tests. The single-core performance of the 275HX is great, as are the multi-threaded tasks where you can take advantage of the large quantity of cores available. It is also largely consistent with the 275HX inside other gaming laptops of this calibre.

It’s with the GPU where things can get a little dicey, as even with the same one, they can be tuned with different power levels in different laptop models. For instance, the one inside the ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) I looked at had a TGP of 125W, which inhibited its performance somewhat with results that were more comparable to an RTX 5070 Ti laptop model. With the one inside the Vector 16 HX AI A2XW (2025) though, MSI says it can boost up to 175W of power if needed.

In taking into account the margin of error between tests, the Vector 16 HX AI A2XW (2025) is on par with Medion’s candidate as one of the best gaming laptops of its kind we’ve tested thanks to the beefy components inside with good results across the board that are only a handful of frames worse than Medion’s laptop. 

Native 1080p rasterisation performance is strong, with Cyberpunk 2077 at 129.67fps and Returnal at 135fps respectively, while Rainbow Six Extraction at 233fps virtually maxes out the 240Hz refresh rate, and proves competitive eSports titles are no trouble.

In going up to 1440p with no upscaling or ray-tracing business, it’s still excellent, with Cyberpunk 2077 hitting an 85.09fps average and Returnal at 102fps, giving some wonderfully playable results. Rainbow Six Extraction remained higher at 159fps.

The new DLSS Transformer model upscaler in Cyberpunk 2077 pushed the 1080p result up to 137.70fps, while at the laptop’s native 2560×1600 resolution, it was 108.82fps. It also provides a welcome boost to Cyberpunk on its RT: Ultra preset, taking the 1080p result from 55.82fps natively to 84.88fps with the upscaler; at the laptop’s native res, it went from 34.78fps to 63.73fps.

Being a 50-series laptop also means the Vector 16 HX AI A2XW (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. With the maximum 4x multiplier applied, it took RT: Ultra Cyberpunk 2077 to 192.65fps at 2560×1600 resolution, and 266.13fps at 1080p, going above the 240Hz refresh rate of the screen.

The Vector 16 HX AI A2XW (2025) also has 32GB of fast DDR5 RAM and a solid 1TB SSD in my sample. The speeds it provides are half that of the one inside the Medion unit, with adequate reads and writes of 5060.90MB/s and 3665.88MB/s respectively.

Software

• Clean Windows 11 install
• Minimal MSI-specific apps
• Not enough AI horsepower to be a Copilot+ PC

The Vector 16 HX AI A2XW (2025) also comes with a remarkably clean Windows 11 install, with only 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.

As much as there is a Copilot key on this laptop for waking Microsoft’s AI assistant, this laptop isn’t powerful enough on the AI front to become one of Microsoft’s Copilot+ PCs with its extra AI gubbins.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 6 hours 59 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for one working day

MSI doesn’t provide a battery life estimate for the Vector 16 HX AI A2XW (2025), although the combination of its large 90Whr cell and some hungrier components in theory would result in quite a poor result in our test.

However, for such a beefy laptop, it lasted for a remarkable amount of time. In the PCMark 10 battery test with the screen brightness set to 150 nits, it lasted for a minute shy of 7 hours. That puts it up there with Medion’s RTX 5080-powered Beast 16 X1 Ultimate, and comfortably ahead of both the HP Omen Max 16 (2025) and the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025).

The chunky 330W power brick that the Vector 16 HX AI A2XW (2025) comes with also allows it to charge quite briskly, too. Zero to 50% took 50 minutes, while a full charge took 112. That’s not bad, althoughit isn’t quite as quick as some rivals.

Should you buy it?