November 10, 2024

Sapiensdigital

Sapiens Digital

MSI Prestige 15 – Review 2020

One of the most intriguing laptop categories, exploding in variety over the past year, falls between business desktop replacements and mighty mobile workstations—powerful portables for creative professionals, lacking workstations’ independent software vendor (ISV) certifications for specialized apps but built for designers and content creators. The Dell XPS 15 and Apple MacBook Pro 16 are classic examples, and we’ve seen MSI join in with the P65 Creator. Now, the company has played another card with the Prestige 15 ($1,799), with attractions including a 10th Generation Intel Core i7 processor and the 4K display the Creator lacked. It won’t satisfy speed freaks who want the hottest graphics or an eight- rather than six-core CPU, but it’s a fast, classy, affordable platform for productivity and creativity alike.

Lighter on Your Wallet, Lighter in Weight

It’s worth repeating that price: $1,799 for a Prestige 15 (model A10SC-010) with the aforementioned Core i7-10710U chip and 3,840-by-2,160-pixel display; 32GB of memory; a 1TB NVMe solid-state drive; Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Max-Q graphics; and Windows 10 Pro. The MSI can’t match the eight-core Core i9 processor available in the Dell or Apple or the ultra-high-contrast OLED screens offered by the XPS 15, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme, or the Razer Blade 15 Studio Edition, but it costs a lot less. Our XPS 15 test unit was $2,649; our Acer ConceptD 7 was $2,999; and our Razer Studio Edition was $3,999.

MSI Prestige 15-01

At 3.6 pounds, the Prestige is also easier to carry than the Dell (4 pounds), Acer (4.6 pounds), or Razer (4.9 pounds). Clad in dark-blue/charcoal matte aluminum with MSI’s dragon logo on the lid and blue chrome trim, it measures a tidy 0.63 by 14.1 by 9.2 inches. Like most Lenovo ThinkPads and HP EliteBooks, the system has passed MIL-STD 810G tests against road hazards such as shock, vibration, and temperature extremes. There’s almost no flex if you grasp the screen corners or press the keyboard deck.

The webcam centered above the display is not an IR face-recognition camera, but you can still use Windows Hello to bypass typing passwords thanks to a fingerprint reader in a corner of the large touchpad. The thin-bezeled screen opens a full 180 degrees, whereupon pressing F12 flips the screen image upside down for viewing by someone seated across from you at a desk.

MSI Prestige 15-10

On the laptop’s left edge are two Thunderbolt 3 ports (you’ll want to reserve one for the AC adapter), an HDMI video output, and an audio jack. You’ll find two USB 3.2 Type-A ports and a microSD card slot on the right. Oddly, MSI forgot to provide a Kensington or other security lock slot. While it comes in a cardboard instead of the P65 Creator’s fancy wooden box, the Prestige 15 comes with a carrying sleeve and a USB-C mini dock with Ethernet and USB-A ports and an SD card slot.

MSI Prestige 15-09

Spread Out and Relax

The keyboard features bright white backlighting. (F8 cycles through three brightness levels, or four if you count “off.”) The keyboard is actually larger than full-sized—it felt a little spacey as I typed, so I fetched a ruler and discovered that the A through apostrophe keys span a quarter-inch more than the regulation 8 inches.

Typing feel is shallow but snappy, and the layout is almost faultless, with the Ctrl key in its proper bottom left corner though Delete is a notch below the top right (occupied by the power button). The Delete and Insert keys are in the rightmost column where you’d expect to find Home and End, which are combos with the Fn key and Page Up and Page Down respectively. The buttonless, oversized (5.5-by-2.5-inch) touchpad glides and taps smoothly and clicks with just a slight pressure.

MSI Prestige 15-03

The F6 key enables and disables the 720p webcam, which captures reasonably well-lit and focused but rather noisy or grainy images. Bottom-mounted speakers produce slightly flat or muted sound; there’s no bass, though you can distinguish overlapping tracks. A Nahimic software utility lets you toggle surround sound and a volume stabilizer as you tinker with music, movie, communication, and gaming presets.

The 15.6-inch, non-touch screen is as sharp as 4K resolution can make it. Fine details look, well, fine; there’s adequate if not blinding brightness, and contrast is quite good. Colors don’t exactly pop but are rich and well saturated. Right-clicking the display (or launching it from the Start menu) brings a True Color menu with Adobe RGB, sRGB, movie, office, gamer, and anti-blue-light palettes you can adjust as you like.

MSI Prestige 15-05

Another software utility, Creator Center, lets you keep an eye on CPU, GPU, memory, and drive usage and fan speeds; switch among High Performance, Balanced, Silent, and Super Battery power modes (also available via the F7 key); check battery health; and fine-tune performance for selected apps.

Some Creative Performance Figures

For our objective performance benchmarks, I skipped the MacBook Pro 16 in favor of Windows content creation machines that could complete our full suite of tests (though I’ll mention a couple of Apple results in context). The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 2 and Dell XPS 15 have similar GeForce GTX GPUs to the Prestige 15, though the Dell’s eight-core Core i9 is a lock to win our processing benchmarks. The Acer ConceptD 7 and Razer Blade 15 Studio Edition are guaranteed to lead our graphics tests due to their top-of-the-line Nvidia graphics (the GeForce RTX 2080 and Quadro RTX 5000, respectively).

MSI Prestige 15 system configurations

The six-core, 12-thread Intel Core i7-10710U processor has a humble 1.1GHz clock speed but a more impressive max turbo speed of 4.7GHz; the MSI never broke a sweat as I multitasked and opened many browser tabs. The GeForce GTX 1650 Max-Q is suitable for some after-hours gaming, but nothing too strenuous. Speaking of strenuous, the Prestige 15’s cooling fans made themselves known with a loud whoosh as I ran our demanding benchmarks, but stayed silent during everyday operations.

Productivity and Media Tests

PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, Web browsing, and videoconferencing. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system’s boot drive. Both yield a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better.

MSI Prestige 15 (PCMark)

All these laptops hurdled the 5,000-point barrier in PCMark 10, let alone the 4,000-point mark we think indicates excellent performance. Routine Microsoft Office or Google Docs work is a piece of cake for them, and their swift SSDs aced PCMark 8’s storage exercise.

Next is Maxon’s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads.

MSI Prestige 15 (Cinebench)

The eight-core Dell smoked its six-core competition, but even the latter systems easily cleared the 1,000-point barrier that marks a capable video editing or 3D rendering system. The eight-core MacBook Pro 16 would have placed second with 1,392 points.

In our Handbrake video editing benchmark, we put a stopwatch on systems as they transcode a brief movie from 4K resolution down to 1080p. It, too, is a tough test for multi-core, multi-threaded CPUs; lower times are better.

MSI Prestige 15 (Handbrake)

The six-core systems tied for second place behind the XPS 15.

We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and add up the total (lower times are better). The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters.

MSI Prestige 15 (Photoshop)

The Prestige 15 tied for the silver medal again (outstripping the MacBook Pro 16, which needed 153 seconds for the job). Between its speed and its top-quality screen, it’s a terrific platform for photo collectors.

Graphics Tests

3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and lets high-end PCs and gaming rigs strut their stuff.

MSI Prestige 15 (3DMark)

Here the MSI trailed the field, with a respectable but not remarkable score. Casual gamers will be more than satisfied; hardcore gamers probably won’t be.

Next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene, this one rendered in the eponymous Unigine engine for a second opinion on the machine’s graphical prowess.

MSI Prestige 15 (Superposition)

Again, the Prestige 15 can play games, but it won’t be mistaken for one of MSI’s gaming laptops. I tried the DirectX 12 game Rise of the Tomb Raider at 1080p resolution and its best (Very High) image quality preset, and the machine managed a decent if not dazzling 42.6 frames per second (fps). That’s on point, though, for a GeForce GTX 1650-equipped laptop.

Battery Rundown Test

After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test. (We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop into airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the Blender Foundation short film Tears of Steel—with screen brightness set at 50 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system quits.

MSI Prestige 15 (Battery Life)

The Dell won handily (though the Apple would have proved handier with a time approaching 19 hours), but the Prestige showed excellent stamina. It’ll get you through a workday plus a little evening entertainment.

A First-Rate Full-Sized Laptop

If you’re looking for something both a little sleeker and a little stronger than your run-of-the-mill desktop replacement, the MSI is a fine choice. It’s a good-looking notebook that’s lighter than many competitors, with winning performance and a winning screen; it took me a few hours to get used to the keyboard but that’s almost my only gripe.

MSI Prestige 15-06

I like the current crop of not-quite-workstation creative laptops, and I like the purpose-built Prestige 15 more than I liked the company’s P65 Creator (which was basically a white rather than black GS65 Stealth gaming rig). Considering its reasonable price, it earns an earnest thumbs up.

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