MSI Prestige 14 Evo (2023) Laptop Review

The MSI Prestige 14 Evo has a simple design that doesn't stand out in any way. It has an aluminum wedge-shaped chassis, relatively thin bezels, an island-style backlit keyboard with black keycaps, and a centered plastic touchpad. On the bottom, you can find a pair of speakers near the front and air vents near the back. There are also air vents at the back of the keyboard deck. The bottom of the display lifts the laptop slightly when open to allow for better airflow.

The MSI Prestige 14 Evo feels well-built. Its aluminum chassis feels sturdy, with no obvious gaps in the construction. The display and lid flex a fair amount, more than expected for a full-aluminum device in its class; however, the keyboard deck feels much more solid and exhibits very little flex. The finish doesn't easily scratch or pick up many fingerprints, and the feet are stable and stick firmly to the bottom.

The hinge is outstanding. It feels smooth when opening and closing the lid, and it has a wide range, so you can easily share content with someone opposite you. It's easy to adjust the angle and doesn't wobble when moving the laptop or typing aggressively.

The MSI Prestige and its power adapter are compact and lightweight.

Accessing the internals is relatively easy; you need to remove nine Philips screws and undo the clips with a prying tool. You just have to be careful when doing so, as the clips are a bit fragile and might break if you use a lot of force. Unfortunately, the RAM isn't user-replaceable. The storage slot supports M.2 2280 PCIe Gen 4 SSDs.

You can download the user manual here.

• MSI Prestige 14 laptop
• 100W USB-C power adapter and cord
• Documentation

The MSI Prestige 14's FHD+ display looks sharp and provides just enough space for split-screen multitasking. Its 16:10 aspect ratio is becoming the norm for productivity laptops. It gives you slightly more vertical space than a standard 16:9 screen, so you can see more information when reading a document or website, reducing the need to scroll. If you want a similar productivity laptop with a sharper display, check out the ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED (2024).

This laptop is only available with a 60Hz display. It has a slow response time, resulting in visible ghosting behind fast-moving objects. If you want an ultraportable with a high-refresh display, check out the LG gram Pro 16 (2024).

The display has a great contrast ratio. It's at the higher end for an IPS panel but still relatively low compared to other display technologies like VA and OLED. This contrast level makes blacks look gray in dim settings.

The display gets bright enough for use in most indoor environments. You can use it outdoors in broad daylight, but you'll likely have trouble seeing dark-color content. It gets very dim at the lowest brightness setting, which helps reduce eye strain when viewing content in dim lighting.

The display's reflection handling is okay. It mostly struggles with direct, mirror-like reflections, so avoiding having bright lights directly behind you is best.

The display's black uniformity is decent. There's visible backlight bleed at the corners; otherwise, the rest of the screen is relatively uniform.

The display has a great horizontal viewing angle. The image remains accurate until you reach a moderately steep angle to the left or right.

The display's vertical viewing angle is decent. The image dims and washes relatively quickly from above and below, so you need to look at the screen more or less straight on to see an accurate image, which can be challenging in tight places where you don't have much room to tilt the screen, like on a bus or airplane.

The display's out-of-the-box accuracy is outstanding. Most color and white balance inaccuracies are minor and hard to spot with the naked eye. The color temperature is slightly cooler than the standard 6500K target, though not enough to make much difference visually. The gamma doesn't follow the sRGB curve; dark scenes are too dark, while bright scenes are too bright.

The display's color gamut is excellent. It's essentially an sRGB panel, meaning it only has full coverage of the commonly used sRGB color space. It doesn't have enough coverage of the wider Adobe RGB and DCI P3 color spaces for color-critical work like print photography and HDR video production.

The MSI Prestige 14 Evo laptop has a good keyboard. It has a spacious layout that's fairly easy to get used to. The keycaps feel high-quality, and stability is excellent across the whole keyboard. The keys don't require much force to actuate and provide satisfying tactile and audio feedback. They have a fair amount of travel, not as much as something like the Dell Alienware m18 (2023), but noticeably more than most Apple MacBooks. You can adjust between three backlight brightness levels or turn it off completely.

The MSI Prestige has a good touchpad. It's decently large, though it could be bigger considering the amount of space available. It tracks all movements and gestures well; however, the right edge of the touchpad feels slightly less responsive than the left. Palm rejection works as intended, and there are no issues with dragging and dropping or zooming in and out of images. You can only click in the bottom half of the touchpad; the clicking feels a little cheap and isn't quite even, as the left click seems to have more travel than the right.

The speakers get pretty loud with minimal compression artifacts at high volume levels. They sound natural and have good instrument separation but lack bass.

The webcam's video quality is okay. The image has a good amount of fine detail; however, the colors and tint are slightly off, and there's noise in a few areas. Voices sound relatively clear, but some background noise is audible. While there isn't a physical privacy cover, you can turn off the camera at the software level using the switch on the right side of the laptop (between the MicroSD card reader and USB-A port). If you want a model with a better webcam, check out the Apple MacBook Air 13 (2024).

The MSI Prestige laptop has a good port selection. The USB-A port supports USB 3.2 Gen 2 data transfer speed of up to 10Gbps. Both USB-Cs support Thunderbolt 4 (up to 40Gbps data transfer speed and two 4k displays at 60Hz), USB4, DisplayPort, and Power Delivery. The latter allows for fast charging of the laptop and other PD-enabled devices connected to the port.

The wireless adapter is an Intel Killer Wi-Fi 6E AX1675. Wi-Fi 6E has faster speeds, lower latency, and less signal interference than previous Wi-Fi standards. However, you need a router that supports Wi-Fi 6E to benefit from these features.

The MSI Prestige 14 Evo laptop is available with the following CPUs:

• Intel Core i5-13500H (12 cores/16 threads, up to 4.7GHz, 18MB cache)
• Intel Core i7-13700H (14 cores/20 threads, up to 5.0GHz, 24MB cache)
• Intel Core i9-13900H (14 cores/20 threads, up to 5.4GHz, 24MB cache)

All three are high-performance CPUs typically found in gaming laptops and mobile workstations. They can handle light productivity tasks as well as demanding workloads like programming, data analysis, and scientific simulations. They have a hybrid design with a mix of performance and efficiency cores. The Core i5 has four performance and eight efficiency cores, while the Core i7 has six performance and eight efficiency cores. The Core i9 has the same core count and distribution as the Core i7; it just runs at slightly faster clock speeds, resulting in a small performance boost.

The MSI Prestige is only available with Intel Iris Xe graphics. This integrated GPU is designed to handle light tasks like web browsing and video playback, not demanding workloads like video editing or 3D graphics. You can play some older or puzzle-like games, but you'll likely have to play at a lower resolution or with low graphical settings to get smooth gameplay.

You can configure this laptop with 8GB, 16GB, or 32GB of RAM. The memory isn't user-replaceable. Some models have slower LP-DDR4x 4266MHz RAM, so if RAM speed is essential for your workload, check the specifications.

You can configure this laptop with 512GB or 1TB of storage. The SSD is user-replaceable; the slot supports M.2 2280 PCIe Gen 4 SSDs.

The MSI Prestige 14 Evo's score in Geekbench 5 is middling. Its single-thread performance is where we expect it to be for a 45W Intel 13th Gen H-series CPU; however, its multi-thread performance is far too low, even if we account for thermal throttling, which is unlikely because the Geekbench test doesn't run long enough to cause throttling. We expect a multi-thread score of at least 11,000 in the default Balanced mode and closer to 13,000 in the Extreme Performance mode. It's unclear what is causing this issue. Looking deeper into the CPU's behavior, we notice that the CPU never hits 100% utilization or its maximum clock speed, even in the Extreme Performance mode, and the performance is inconsistent. Uninstalling the MSI Center application has no effect. This behavior persists in other benchmarks, like Cinebench R23, Blender, and Civilization VI, which you can see below. We'll update the review if MSI releases a software fix.

It's worth noting that other reviewers and users haven't encountered this issue, so your experience may vary. On a properly functioning unit, the Intel Core i7-13700H is fast and can handle demanding workloads like programming and data analysis. The Core i5-13500H is slower since it has fewer cores, while the Core i9-13900H is only slightly faster. As for the GPU, the integrated Intel Iris Xe performs poorly and isn't suitable for heavy computing tasks.

The Intel Core i7-13700H has strong single-thread performance; however, as mentioned above, its multi-thread performance is far below what we'd expect of a Core i7-13700H. Again, you might get a unit that performs at the expected level for an H-series CPU, but as far as our unit goes (in its current state), this level of performance is only suitable for light productivity tasks.

The MSI Prestige laptop performs poorly in Blender. If you need to render images in Blender, getting a laptop with a dedicated GPU is best. Even an entry-level GPU like an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 can complete renders faster than almost any CPU.

The MSI Prestige performs poorly in the Basemark GPU benchmark. Intel's Iris Xe can only handle light, puzzle-like games or older titles at 1080p, and even then, you'll have to play at a lower resolution or with low graphics settings to get playable frame rates.

The 1TB SSD's performance is outstanding. Its fast read speeds allow the system to boot up and launch apps quickly. Its sequential write speed is a little slow for a PCIe Gen 4 drive but not too bad for a general productivity, business-oriented laptop.

The MSI Prestige 14's battery life is okay. You'll only have to plug it in for a short time to get through a typical workday of light productivity.

Borderlands 3 isn't playable. The gameplay is extremely choppy, even with low graphical settings. The Intel Iris Xe integrated GPU can't handle such a graphically demanding game, and the CPU's poor multi-thread performance issue doesn't help, either. You can expect the same performance in other similar titles.

Civilization VI runs poorly on the MSI Prestige 14 laptop. It's playable with low graphical settings since this strategy game doesn't require fast reaction times or precise aiming, but you'll get very long turn times.

Counter-Strike 2 runs poorly at 1080p, even with low settings. The gameplay is choppy due to the low average frame rate and frequent frame drops.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider runs poorly at 1080p, even with low settings. The Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics can't maintain playable frame rates in this and other similarly demanding games.

The keyboard is only mildly warm when idle; however, it gets very hot under load near the top of the keyboard and around the letters R and F. The fan is barely audible under load in the default Balanced power profile, and it doesn't get any quieter or louder in the Silent and Extreme Performance modes.

The MSI Prestige 14's performance over time is decent. The CPU and GPU both throttle, even though their temperatures are relatively low. However, the average amount of performance loss isn't significant.

The MSI Prestige has many pre-installed applications, including:

• Intel Unison: Lets you connect your smartphone to the laptop, allowing you to send and receive messages, view photos on your smartphone, and transfer files, similar to Windows' MyPhone app.
• Killer Intelligence Center: Lets you monitor Wi-Fi traffic and optimize network performance.
• Minecraft Education: Special edition of Minecraft designed for classroom use.
• MSI Center: Lets you see system information and monitor system statuses like CPU and memory usage, fan speed, and CPU temperature. You can also change the performance/fan profile, scan for updates, access support forums, and contact online support.
• Norton 360: Antivirus and internet security software. Requires subscription.
• Solitaire & Casual Games: Solitaire, FreeCell, Spider, Mahjong, Sudoku, and other casual games.
• Spotify: App for the music streaming service.
• Tobii Experience: Eye and head tracking software. It lets you control the camera in some games, blurs the screen when you aren't looking directly at it, and lowers the screen brightness when you aren't in front of the laptop.

The MSI Prestige has a fingerprint sensor on the keyboard deck below the arrow keys. You can use it to log into Windows, authorize Windows Store purchases, and auto-fill saved passwords on supported websites.