Ive loved Sid Meiers Civilization games for decades, so Im really excited about the upcoming Civilization VII. What Im not excited about is how my current laptop probably wont be able to handle one turn, let alone just one more turn. But this wouldnt be an issue if I had the latest MSI Titan 18 HX gaming laptop.Ive spent the last few days in Las Vegas at the annual Consumer Electronics Show, where Ive been eye-to-eye with the latest tech (more of which Ill share in the coming days). Few things, however, have been quite as eye-catching as the Titan 18 HX Dragon Edition Norse Myth and I might have caught its acid-etched eye, too.If youre wondering where the laptop gets its name, well, there it is, right there, carved into the magnesium-aluminum alloy lid. Its an incandescent dragons eye peering out from its textured motif, complete with Norse runes that mean Dragon. (The same mythical beast can be found on the medallion embedded in the laptops palm rest.) As for whats inside the Dragon Edition, well, thats fire, too.First theres the 18-inch Mini-LED 4K 120Hz 16:10 screen with VESA DisplayHDR 1000 certification, which is run by an NVIDIA RTX 5090 GPU with 24GB of GDDR7 VRAM (another CES 2025 big reveal). Theres an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor and up to 96GB of DDR5 RAM, plus four M.2 NVMe slots in a Super RAID 5 configuration capable of read speeds of up to 18,000MB/s. And OverBoost Ultra gives up to 270W of headroom for pushing intense campaigns and applications. As for the I/O giving all that somewhere to go, there are two Thunderbolt 5 USB-C ports, three USB-A 3.2 Gen. 2 ports, HDMI 2.1 with up to 8K60 output, and a full-sized SD card reader.If all that sounds like it might run as hot as an angry dragon, it might if it wasnt for an exclusive Vapor Chamber Cooler and a dedicated heat pipe for the one PCIe Gen. 5 SSD (the rest are Gen. 4) to avoid thermal throttling. Powering this desktop-level nearly 8-pound transportable is a 99.9WHr battery, plus a 400-watt power supply. Rounding out the features are Intel Killer Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4, a Dynaudio-designed six-speaker system (featuring two subwoofers), a SteelSeries keyboard with Cherry MX switches and per-key RBG illumination, and a Mystic Light seamless haptic RBG touchpad.OK, so you might need some of Smaugs treasure to afford the Dragon Edition, but you can always opt for the standard, more subdued Titan 18 HX and get the same specs without the styling (or choose step-down components if the budgets tighter). Or theres the rest of the 18-inch laptop family, including the new Raider, Stealth, Vector, and Crosshair Series. These offer many of the same core features, like the GeForce RTX 50 Series, but dont stack quite as many slots or push quite the same output. You can opt for AMD processors and different SoC chips. Plus, theyve got differing aestheticssome more gamer and others more office-friendly. The one thing they would all have in common if I had them is me angrily muttering about grain and gameplay mechanics.