MSI Summit E13 Flip Evo
A powerful ultraportableultrapo with a superb screenscre andd even better battery life – and it flips for good measuremea
SCORE ★★★★★
PRICE £1,041 (£1,249 inc VAT) VA from scan.co.uk
Think of premium la laptops and it’s American brands that spring to mind: the Apple MacBook, Dell XPS and HP Spectre series for instance. With the Summit E13 Flip Evo, Taiwanese manufacturer MSI aims to break up that all-American dominance with a laptop that could have come right out of a Californian design lab. This is a gorgeous laptop to hold and behold, finished in an all-metal chassis and measuring only 15mm thick.
Nor is it just a laptop, as the
Flip in its name indicates. The hinge not only lifts the rear of the chassis by a couple of millimetres to aid typing, but swivels 360° to turn the Summit E13 into a tablet. MSI includes a stylus in the box, but as ever with such designs I would warn against getting too excited: 1.4kg is a fine weight for a lapto laptop but it’s way too heavy to hold in one hand like a tablet. There’s nowhere to stow the pen, either.
I suspect most people will find the flexible desig design most useful when watching films, w with the tent mode particularly effective for this. One curiosity is that MSI opts for 16:10 aspect ratio rather than the more common 16:9, and although this leads to a black border on Netflix shows, it won’t diminish your enjoyment: Russian
Doll’s rich colours looked superb, and the speakers have enough gravity and detail to pump out soundtracks and dialogue with quality.
One reason that films look so good is the high contrast of the IPS panel, which edged towards 1,500:1 in our tests. A figure of 1,000:1 is more typical. Tuned for the sRGB colour space and with a 6400K colour temperature that helps whites look pure white, its colour accuracy is immaculate: an average Delta E of 0.35 and maximum of 1.07 are right up there with the best panels. It only covers 74% of the DCI-P3 colour space, but I defy anyone to look at this screen and call it dull.
MSI opts pts for a wide touchpad, h ad, measuring 120 x 60mm, 0mm, and this has pluses uses and minuses. uses. One plus is
that h you can place multiple ultiple fingers side de by side for gestures; estures; one negative egative that you need eed to swipe twice to move the cursor from m bottom to the top of the screen unless you whack up sensitivity. Still, you should adapt to it quickly. Head to the right and you will stumble across an almost hidden fingerprint sensor, only 12 x 12mm. It works, but you’ll need to be precise, and note there is no IR camera for facial logins.
The keyboard is good rather than great. I prefer more resistance and definition to keys than MSI’s design provides, and I’m never a fan of squeezing PgUp and PgDn keys into the cursor key y cluster – especially ll when hen they’re h half-height. lf h h Still, the main k keys are l large e and well separated, so touch typists will hit decent nt speeds, and you have a choice hoice of three b backlight kl h settings. tings. Plus, there’s no rattle. tle. Considering ng all the power that’s tucked within, it’s worth acknowledging wledging how quiet the Summit mmit E13 Flip Evo is d during general eral use too. You would never know that it’s packed with h a top-end Core i7 processor, ssor, and MSI ensures es this chip has all ll the necessary support upport with 32GB of RAM and a speedy
1TB NVMe SSD. Despite the thermal limitations that such a slim chassis brings, the E13 Flip Evo thundered to 157 in our benchmarks and returned a commendable 5,324 in Geekbench 5’s multicore test.
There is even gaming potential, with 40fps in F1 2020, 49fps in Metro: Last Light and 80fps in Dirt:
Showdown. All those results were at the panel’s native 1,920 x 1,200 resolution at High settings. But the best inclusion is the 70Wh battery, which kept this machine going for 12hrs 19mins in our video-rundown tests. That’s up there with the best Windows laptops, with only Apple’s ARMtoting MacBooks lasting significantly longer.
With all the connectivity that most people need – including two Thunderbolt 4 ports, Wi-Fi 6 and an always-useful USB-A port – this is a brilliant ultraportable debut for
MSI. Especially when you consider its price and the flexibility provided by the 360° hinge. Look out Apple, Dell and HP, there’s a new name in town.
SPECIFICATIONS
4-core 1.8GHz (4.8GHz burst) Core i7-1185G7 processor 32GB LPDDR4 4,266MHz RAM Intel Iris Xe graphics 13.4in touchscreen IPS display, 1,920 x 1,200 resolution 1TB M.2 PCIe SSD microSD card slot 720p webcam 2x2 Wi-Fi 6 Bluetooth 5 2 x USB-C 4 with Thunderbolt 4 USB-C 3.2 USB-A 3.2 3.5mm jack 70Wh battery Windows 10 Home MSI Pen 300 x 222 x 15mm (WDH) 1.4kg 1yr limited warranty
“Despite the thermal limitations that such a slim chassis brings, the E13 Flip Evo thundered to 157 in PC Pro’s benchmarks”