MSI Prestige P100

MSI’s new designer-desktop packs a punch, but is it also gentle enough to nurture creativity?

Many creative professionals require PCs that perform at a much higher level than what generally sits on the store shelf, but while enthusiast gamers are generally invested enough to build their own computers, this can be a level of technical knowledge that isn’t overly prevalent in the creative professional space. MSI’s Prestige range hopes to cater to this growing subset of customers by creating powerful pre-built PCs that offer top shelf performance straight out of the box.

The Prestige P100 is designed to compliment the Prestige PS341WU 34-inch display that we cover on page 32, by ensuring that there’s enough grunt to run demanding applications in 5K HDR. The P100 shouldn’t have any issues with this since it has a top-of-the-line unlocked Intel Core i9-9900K CPU running the show. This CPU offers a lot of power, with the capacity to encode 4K media at a rate of 15fps it’ll chew through computationally heavy tasks and cut down the time taken for heavy creative workflows. The MSI P100 ended up between 15% and 40% faster than the Alienware Aurora R9 running an overclocked 9th Gen Intel Core i7, so you’ll be rendering things in a fraction of the time on this system.

That CPU is supported by an enormous 64GB allocation of RAM and the fabled power of a Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080Ti for one of the most powerful overall configurations we’ve tested.

While you’ll get similar gaming performance from a newer RTX 2080 Super, for GPU heavy workloads the 2080 Ti is the most powerful GPU you can get for workloads, without moving into the dedicated workstation GPU offerings. Even the heaviest 3D rendering and CAD usage will seem easy on this overpowered system. That said, MSI has gone a step further offering custom software that will tailor system energy usage to suit the particular workflow you’re using. MSI Creator Centre includes system profiles that have been designed specifically for demanding software like Adobe’s Creative Suite and AutoCAD and allow you to easily push the computer to peak performance depending on what you are doing.

The range has since been updated to the P100X and features equivalent 10th generation Intel CPUs which will offer slight computational performance gains over the model reviewed here, but it’s worth noting that we took half a point off for MSI’s decision to swap from a 2080 Ti to a 2080 Super on the newer highestspecced model. The most similar current model to what we tested is the P100X which costs $6,499, or for those with a slightly tighter budget there are P100X units with a Core i7, 32GB of RAM and an RTX 2070 Super going for $3,999. Either way the P100X is still an impressive creation.

A premium creative workstation that offers top-shelf power without demanding an exorbitant price. Joel Burgess

MSI has managed to pack all of this extremely powerful tech into such a streamlined and appealing desktop tower.