A mobile workstation of superlatives, the equivalent of a hypercar of professional laptops. Meet the fully loaded X17HX: with 24 cores, 192GB of RAM, 24TB of SSD and a few more tricks up its sleeve, this is MSI’s most powerful laptop ever, capable of rivalling desktop workstations. It’s expensive, true, but worth it.
Earlier this year, we had a glimpse of the world’s fastest laptop, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D which uses the speediest mobile processor on the market, the AMD Ryzen 9 7945 HX3D. For all its glory though, it only comes with 32GB of RAM and for some heavyweight applications, that’s not good enough. If you need plenty of memory and plenty of storage and do not want to lug six monitors and 40Kg around (yeah, that’s the 6-screen, 192-core processor mobile workstation from April), then check out the bespoke version of the MSI CreatorPro X17HX from HIDevolution.
Now that portable workstation usually comes with 128GB of RAM and a puny 2TB SSD by default; DIYers can easily upgrade the memory and SSD if they want to but for those who do not want to go through the trouble, then HIDevolution offers a simpler way to finetune the laptop to your will. And when I say tuning, I meant modding (yes, like for performance cars).
What it means in practice: the company offers a few dozen ways of configuring your laptop down to some extreme details (e.g. physically disabling your webcam) beyond the usual (e.g. adding RAID-1). The base unit offers a Core i9-13980HX, Intel’s most powerful mobile processor, a 17-inch 4K display, Windows 11 Pro and Nvidia’s top of the range professional mobile GPU, the RTX 5000 Ada generation with 16GB GDDR6 memory.
Engineers at HIDEvolution will swap the 128GB for 192GB and add three 8GB PCIe Gen 4 SSD for an extra $4000. A trio of 8TB SSD cost about $2,200 in bulk and 192GB RAM can be had for around $500. So you’re paying a steep premium for the luxury of getting someone to upgrade the laptop.
On the flipside, HIDevolution upgrades the warranty to three years (US only) with one year accidental damage and one year global warranty with lifetime support. Customers outside of continental US can buy HIDevolution international prepaid shipping service for $200 per year for up to three years. You can also protect your laptop’s lid with an automotive grade paint protection film from 3M and there’s even vinyl wrap custom upgrades and ahem, laser engraving on offer.
But then again, when you’re thinking of spending almost $10,000, a few hundred dollars extra to get your mobile workstation your way isn’t actually a lot in the grander scheme of things.
