MSI Prestige 14

MSI’s wants to get down to business, but it may have needed to do a little more homework.

MSI’s got a new Prestige 14 and it looks as slick as anything we’ve seen in the professional laptop space. Inside this Pure White, Rose Pink or Carbon Gray ultrabook is a 10thgeneration Intel Core i7-10710U CPU, 16GB or RAM and a dedicated Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 GPU – which is plenty of grunt for a day-to-day laptop for most professionals.

While you’d expect this hexa-core chip to be performing alongside the punchier laptops in the roundup, it’s actually much closer to the quad-core CPUs in terms of both raw CPU performance and general work capabilities. This is in part because it uses efficient cores with a base frequency of 1.1GHz, but MSI decided to use this advantage to jettison battery capacity. As a result the installed 52.4Wh battery only manages to chug along for two hours and 37 minutes in PCMark 8’s Battery benchmark and just 3 hours and 5 minutes in 1080p battery lifespan. This makes it the worst performer of the whole roundup in terms of on-the-go productivity. We ran a configuration with a Nvidia GTX 1650 GPU, which is just enough for light 1080p gaming and decent graphical work, but you can configure this unit with a GeForce MX330 (about the same as a GTX 1050 Max-Q) for graphical performance that’s just a bit better than the latest integrated GPUs. This model also came with a 4K HDR screen that offers 100% Adobe RGB colour reproduction and professional-level colour accuracy (Delta E is less than 2) for $2,829, but you can get a 1080p IPS version for less.

A neat looking ultrabook with decent performance and a short battery life.

“While you’d expect this hexa-core chip to be performing alongside the punchier laptops in the roundup, it’s actually much closer to the quad-core CPUs in terms of both raw CPU performance and general work capabilities.”