MSI is most popular for its gaming gear, yet the organization has made rehashed endeavors to go past its forte. As brands like Razer have done, MSI needs to use its great standing in gaming to stretch out into more standard PCs. The Prestige 14 Evo is its most recent — and maybe generally goal-oriented — endeavor to do as such yet. MSI has worked intimately with Intel on its 11th-gen Tiger Lake processors, just as its new Evo confirmation (thus the name).
My survey unit has an eleventh gen Intel Core i7-1185G7, which is the quickest Tiger Lake CPU, just as 16GB of RAM and a 1TB strong state drive (SSD). The 14-inch PC is valued seriously at $1,199, a low cost for a particularly top of the line design. It’s in any event, being sold as low as $950 at certain retailers. However, is it enough to persuade me that MSI has a future past gaming?
Design
We should get any inquiries of “inexpensiveness” far removed. The Prestige 14 Evo is developed of aluminum and feels strong in general. That is, aside from the presentation, which has some flex when you apply pressure. Both the console deck and case base feel tough, having a general impression of assemble quality that is strong. It’s as yet a half-venture behind any semblance of Lenovo and Asus in the 14-inch class, and Dell and HP in case you’re seeing 13-inch options. The Prestige 14 Evo doesn’t feel “modest,” however it could positively profit by a firmer top.
It’s additionally an alluring gadget with three shading choices: Carbon Gray, Rose Pink, and Pure White. I got the Carbon Gray adaptation, and it keeps a hazier outline. Regardless of the chamfered edges, it’s a moderately planned PC with no bling at all. Indeed, even the MSI logo is in a dim shade on the top and barely noticeable except if you take a gander at the perfect point. The lines are perfect and exquisite, with a solid shape on the base from the back to the front. The presentation pivot lifts the rear of the body well off the work area, giving a lot of room under for air to move and sound to get away from the double base speakers. The Asus ZenBook UX425EA is comparative, despite the fact that Asus includes some pizazz with concentric rings scratched into the cover.
The Prestige 14 Evo is flimsy and light for a 14-inch PC at 0.63 inches and 2.85 pounds, despite the fact that it’s not the most slender nor the lightest that you can get in this class of machine. The ZenBook 14 is 0.54 inches and 2.58 pounds, while the Acer Swift 5 is another Tiger Lake 14-inch PC that is considerably lighter still at 2.31 pounds. It’s 0.59 inches thickness sits in the middle of the MSI and the Asus. Every one of these machines appreciates little bezels, with generally 90% screen-to-body proportions, thus each has a cutting edge appearance with the top open. Talking about the top, the Prestige 14 Evo’s pivot is pleasantly designed, requiring only one hand to open, all while opposing wobble.
Execution
The MSI Prestige 14 Evo is perhaps the quickest PC in its group that I’ve looked into. That sounds noteworthy on a superficial level, but at the same time it’s the principal PC with the Core i7-1185G7 I’ve tried. I’m actually realizing exactly what can be normal from Intel’s most recent age of processors, yet one thing is without a doubt: The MSI Prestige 14 Evo has me intrigued. The principal test I ran was PCMark 10, which I have run on a modest bunch of late workstations that included 1oth-and eleventh gen Intel CPUs. The Prestige 14 Evo scored second-most noteworthy among that bunch at 4866, missing out just to the Lenovo Yoga 9i with the six-center, 45-watt Core i7-10750H CPU at 5173.
A similar held for Cinebench R23, where the Prestige 14 Evo scored a solid 1,513 in the single-center score (second just to the Apple Mac Mini with the new Apple M1 chipset) and a class-driving 5,789 in the multi-center test. I’ll feel free to rehash myself here: The Prestige 14 Evo is the quickest U-arrangement CPU we’ve tried, and it’s not actually close. MSI has worked effectively of tuning the CPU and dealing with the thermals so the Prestige 14 Evo is the best model we have of Tiger Lake’s latent capacity.
Notwithstanding, I additionally ran Fortnite to test a genuine game that fits inside the Intel Iris Xe designs execution envelope. It handles it shockingly well. The Prestige 14 Evo oversaw 42 edges for each second (fps) at 1080p and high designs, which again demolishes each other Tiger Lake PC. The past quickest, the Intel reference PC, ran at 34 fps. The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 with a Nvidia GeForce MX350 hit 37 fps. At Epic illustrations, the Prestige 14 Evo was at 28 fps, the reference PC at 29 fps, and the Lenovo at 24 fps.
Performance
MSI was sufficiently keen to prepare the Prestige 14 Evo with a 1-watt, low-power 1080p IPS show. This decision should help counterbalance the quick CPU with regards to battery life, as we’ll talk about later in the survey. It comes in the 16:9 angle proportion, which is starting to feel somewhat old school now. Dell, HP, and Lenovo have all started to advance toward taller presentations in their excellent PCs, offering either 16:10 or 3:2. In correlation, 16:9 feels squat, particularly with the sizable base bezel.
As indicated by my colorimeter, this is a normal presentation for a top notch PC with only one glaring shortcoming. In reality, “glaring” is some unacceptable word on the grounds that while the showcase does well in different measurements, its brilliance came in at only 228 nits. That is well underneath the 300-nit limit we like to find in premium showcases, and it very well might be excessively faint for some splendidly lit workplaces.
The presentation’s shading array comes in at 97% of sRGB and 73% of AdobeRGB, which is the place where you’ll discover most other premium workstations. A few brands, for example, Dell and Lenovo, offer 4K showcases with a lot more extensive ranges (up to 100% of both sRGB and AdobeRGB), and those are the place where imaginative clients who request loads of shadings will need to look. The Prestige 14 Evo’s showcase did very well regarding shading exactness, coming in at 1.3, where 1.0 and less is indistinct to the natural eye and the norm for amazing presentations. At last, the differentiation proportion was 940:1, simply under the 1000:1 we like to find in premium workstations.
Console and touchpad
The Prestige 14 Evo’s console is the run of the mill island style, with extensive keycaps, agreeable key separating, and a lot of movement. My lone protest is that the switches were somewhat delicate, which made them light to the touch however without an exact lining activity. This decreased my exactness and speed since I wasn’t exactly as sure that I’d enrolled the appropriate keypress.
I found the console simply a stage behind my top picks, the consoles on HP’s Specter line, Dell’s most recent XPS 13, and the best among them, Apple’s Magic Keyboard on the most recent MacBooks. However, it’s not all that glaring that the normal individual would shy away from the composing experience. The touchpad’s issues are somewhat more observable. It’s very wide, however it’s not as tall as I’d like. I likewise discovered it too somewhere down as far as catch travel. You truly need to delve in to enlist a tick. Albeit that snap will be among the calmer you’ll encounter, as far as I might be concerned, the touchpad could be straightened out.
Battery life
MSI prepared the Prestige 14 Evo with only 52 watt-long stretches of battery life, which is somewhat sparse for a 14-inch PC with a particularly incredible CPU. Part of Intel’s Evo certificate is the capacity to accomplish at least nine hours of battery life running commonplace errands. As per my testing, the Prestige 14 Evo is probably going to do as such — scarcely. To begin with, I ran our web-perusing test that circles through a progression of mainstream sites. It gives a reasonable gauge of light profitability use, and the Prestige 14 Evo oversaw generally 7.25 hours. That is a less than ideal length for the class, with the ZenBook 14 UX425EA going on for 10 hours and the Acer Swift 5 dealing with a less amazing eight hours.
At long last, I utilized our video test that circles a Full HD Avengers trailer, and the Prestige 14 Evo went on for a little more than 16 hours. That is a solid score that beat out the XPS 13 9310, the Acer Swift 5, and the ZenBook 14 UX425EA — on account of the low-power show MSI decided for the machine. Eventually, you’ll get an entire day’s worth of effort out of the Prestige 14 Evo except if you’re pushing the CPU and GPU. What’s more, it’s probably going to satisfy its Evo confirmation prerequisite of nine hours of commonplace use.