MSI Prestige 14 Evo Review: Fast but flawed

MSI’s Prestige 14 laptop line is traditionally meant for content creators. But Prestige 14 Evo ranks slightly murkier. It costs less than the Prestige 14, which starts at $ 1,099, and doesn’t have a discrete GPU or high-resolution screen that gives it a compelling content-creation machine. Despite its name, the Prestige 14 Evo is an everyday productivity laptop.

Unfortunately, this makes for a difficult sell. The 14-inch consumer laptop space is absolutely full at this price point; There are many machines at comparable prices that do everything very, very well. Even a laptop with a significant defect is going to have trouble moving to the top of the pack. Unfortunately, Prestige 14 Evo is a number of them.

This does not mean that there is nothing extraordinary about the device. The Prestige is one of the 14-inch laptops you can buy that includes the Core i7-1185G7, Intel’s most powerful chip for ultraport. This review is my first look at the flagship processor (outside of the design I’ve had for a few days last year) – most of the top laptops I’ve reviewed recently include the Core i7-1165G7, a step down. is. .

This undoubtedly makes the Prestige 14 Evo one of the most powerful 14-inch Intel laptops you can buy at its price point. But does the 1185G7 offer better performance than other Intel systems or Apple’s M1 MacBooks to overcome deficiencies in the chassis? For most users, the answer is no.

Read more: MSI Summit B15 Review And MSI Prestige 14 Review

If you have seen or used last year’s Prestige 14, the chassis is not massively different. The Evo has a fold-under hinge, a fingerprint sensor in the upper-left corner of the touchpad, and a decent keyboard that is overall comfortable but overall. My model is “carbon gray”, but the finish also comes in “rose pink” and “pure white”.

One update you will probably notice is that there is a new logo. MSI’s Classic Dragon has been limited to its gaming model; Prestige now has plain old MSI papers similar to the business-chic Summit series. The ports have also been rearranged. The Evo includes two USB-C ports on the left as well as a USB-A, a microSD, and a headphone jack on the right; Last year’s Prestige had a microSD on the left and an additional USB-A on the right. I am sad to lose the extra USB-A (and one that is only USB 2.0, which is an old standard at this point), but it is a fine port selection.

I have several issues with the chassis, though. First, it is quite a fingerprint magnet, and the lid was covered in visible smoothes after a few days of use. It also has a slightly filler feel with some flex on both the screen and deck. Secondly, not only does the 1920 x 1080 display have a 16: 9 aspect ratio cram, but it is also dim, my testing has a 248 nits maximum. This means that it will not be a great option for use in outdoor or other bright settings.

Third, the touchpad had some palm-rejection issues: my right hand naturally rested on the right half of the touchpad while I was typing, and the cursor was constantly jumping across my screen. (MSI says they haven’t heard this complaint before about the Evo’s touchpad.) Ultimately, the audio isn’t great – it’s tinny, the bass is almost nonexistent, and not enough volume to fill a room. is. You can see my review of last year’s Reputation 14 for a more in-depth discussion of all these features.

The biggest upgrade is on the inside – the Evo is powered by Intel’s latest 11th gen processor. The base Prestige 14 includes a Core i5-1135G7, 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. (The RAM is soldered and there are no additional storage slots, but you can swap SSDs.) The $ 1,149 model I’m using up to a Core i7-1185G7. Both processors come with Intel’s Iris Xe integrated graphics.

By stripping the chassis, $ 1,149 is a fine deal for that system. For price comparison, Asus’ Zenbook 14 is 512GB of storage, a Core i7-1165G7, and 8GB of RAM. $ 899.99

. The M1 MacBook Air is $ 1,449 for similar specs. If you want something with a GPU, the regular Prestige 14 with GTX 1650 Max-Q and 1TB storage is $ 1,549.

The Prestige 14 Evo is certified through Intel’s Evo platform, meaning that Intel has verified that it meets several performance benchmarks (including “all-day” battery life and one-second boot time) and includes Thunderbolt Modern amenities like 4 and Wii are included. Fi 6 (gig +).

The 1185G7 did a great job with my standard workload, dozens of Chrome tabs, zoom calls, light photo editing, and the like. I never had to think twice about loading more tasks – not only did the fans not hang out during my regular workday, but I never heard them spin. (I did occasionally hear some coil whine, which was annoying.) The keyboard and bottom of the chassis also remained cool. The experience was quite comparable to using the M1 MacBook Air or any other top ultraportable as a daily driver.

To compare the 1185G7 directly to other chips (mainly Apple’s M1), I ran several synthetic benchmarks. The results were a mixed bag – you can see them in the chart below:

In our testing, the MacBook Air beat the Prestige 14 Evo on every benchmark except Geekbench 5.3 OpenCL / Compute and a 30-minute Cinebench loop (which makes sense, as the MacBook Air has no fan). It is particularly notable that the 1185G7 loses to the M1 on both single-core benchmarks; Single-core performance is usually Intel’s strength, but not here.

I also put the Prestige 14 Evo through two fairly real works: The Tomb shadow Benchmark and five minutes, 33 seconds of 4K video export to Premier Pro. The Evo results here were comparable to the MacBook Air. Evo ran tomb Raider (Minimum settings, original resolution) at 38fps, which is similar to the Air in our test. Asus Zenbook 14 with a Core i7-1165G7 put 29fps on the same title.

Prestige completed the export in eight minutes and nine seconds. This is the fastest time I’ve seen from a mass-produced Iris X machine; Zenbook took 11 minutes and 28 seconds. That said, it is literally only a few seconds faster than the MacBook Air, clocked in at eight minutes and 15 seconds.

Overall, the 1185G7 is an obvious improvement over the lower-clock Tiger Lake chips (but the 1165G7 is good enough that you won’t notice differences outside of the potential functions). With its integrated graphics M1 looks neck and neck. (Intel’s Quick Sync is also potentially a factor in that accelerated export time.) But synthetic benchmarks, which are rough approximations of CPU capacity, indicate that Prestige is in other tasks depending on your workload. Can stay behind.

I noticed some battery drain during export even though the laptop was plugged in. It is revealed that Prestige comes with overcharge protection which prevents it from being charged when plugged above a certain percentage. You can swap between battery-capacity profiles at MSI’s Center for Business and Productivity.

The laptop was struggling to cool the chip, as was last year’s Prestige 14 (though discrete GPUs were a concern in that model). During all my testing, the CPU was consistently in the mid-90s (Celsius) – and it was bang with fans.

Battery life is fine, but not the best. I averaged six hours and 12 minutes of continuous work, about 200 nits of brightness with the screen. This is not a disaster, but it is only slightly ahead of the previous Prestige 14, which had discrete graphics and a smaller battery. (I got about six hours, with the same workload, from that machine.) And that’s much worse than the MacBook Air, which charged my colleague Dieter Bohn for 10 hours. I was out of Zenbook 14. It was more than an hour. Compared to both systems, there is a heck of a lot of battery life to spare for a small gain in real-world performance.

Finally, Prestige comes loaded with some junk, including Norton, which sent me annoying pop-ups until I uninstalled it. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s still a bit annoying to watch on a laptop, which costs more than $ 1,000. I also found it a bit painful to use MSI’s Center for Business and Productivity – my clicks were somewhat slow to register, and the software occasionally freezes or crashes. (It has useful features, however, including the application optimizer, which allows you to manually distribute CPU power between programs.)

The Prestige 14 Evo is a functional, portable device, with a cat inside a processor. It is always impressive to see so much strength in such a thin chassis. That said, the Evo doesn’t seem quite ready to accommodate the chip, or the demanding tasks you want to do if you’re looking for the 1185G7. It is capable of games, and it is capable of exporting, but I can tell that fans are struggling to keep up.

For this reason, I have trouble seeing the case for the Prestige 14 Evo over competitors. The laptop is fine, functional, and impressive from the inside – but there are a lot of compromises ranging from a dim screen and an outdated port to thin audio and coil whine, requiring a thick chip to be built. For most laptop buyers who don’t need slightly better screens or discrete graphics, more affordable 1165G7 systems like the ZenBook 14 come without these kinks, but closer to better battery life and similar performance and portability benefits. If you are prepared to pay a little more, the MacBook Air performs just as it does not perform better in most tasks and is an important step in almost every other area. Prestige 14 is in a strange place in Ivo Beach, and doesn’t quite fit.