MSI Prestige 14 Evo Review – The fastest Tiger Lake-U has to offer

Cons

• Casing finish
• Touchpad placement
• Maximum screen brightness
• Flashing webcam LED

Intel has a problem. For years, the company built the fastest laptop processors and didn’t have to worry about the one competitor the company had: AMD. That slowly started to change with the first two generations of Ryzen processors for laptops, and with the Ryzen 4000 generation, it became really problematic for Intel. AMD has since been selling laptop processors with four, six and eight cores, with a TDP of 15W, while Intel remains within 15W at a maximum of four cores.

So what do you do to outsmart your competitor? The clock speeds up of course! The result of that choice is the Core i7-1195G7 processor. It is a Tiger Lake quad-core, which should be able to reach 4.6 GHz when all cores are loaded and even 5 GHz when one core is loaded. To test the new CPU, we received the MSI Prestige 14 Evo from Intel and in this review, we take a look at that laptop, with special attention to the processor.

Small warning beforehand: Intel sent us a version that will be delivered in the United States and that differs from the models that are for sale in the Netherlands and Belgium.

Casing, appearance, and connections

MSI’s Prestige 14 Evo is, as the name suggests, a 14″ laptop, and the Prestige line is aimed at business users. That target group will have been the designers in mind when they sketched the clean lines of the case. The casing is almost completely made of metal and only the B-cover, around the screen is made of plastic. The color of our test model is ‘carbon grey’, or dark gray. The edges of the outside of the screen and around the touchpad are shiny dark blue sharpened and that gives a nice accent to the gray casing.

Although that casing looks nice at first glance, the finish could have been better. Here and there, especially at the hinge, you see visible seams, for example, where parts of the casing merge into each other. Competitors do that a lot better with this kind of laptop of a euro or a thousand. Also striking: if you close the screen, that ‘sphere’ is on the keyboard part. This in turn means that you can press the back of the screen a little, with the panel against the keyboard. In short, MSI should have paid more attention to the construction of the casing.

If you open the screen again, you will notice that the Prestige 14 has a large keyboard. It runs almost edge to edge and it taps nicely, with a clear attack. Not only the keyboard but also the touchpad is large. It is placed in the center of the casing, but not aligned with the space bar. As a result, you lean your wrist on the right part of the pad while typing, while the left wrist simply rests on the casing. The touchpad recognizes this without any problems and will therefore not play with your mouse arrow, but you should not accidentally put pressure on it, because that does result in a mouse click, which happened occasionally during our review.

A fingerprint scanner is also incorporated into the touchpad. That’s not convenient, because you’re sacrificing part of your touchpad. In practice, however, it didn’t bother us much, because the path is very wide and we barely got to the top left corner. If you don’t feel like logging in using a fingertip, you can also enable facial recognition and log in that way using Windows Hello. We are not really impressed with the image quality of the camera, resolution 1280×720 pixels. What is impressive is how much irritation the flashing light next to the webcam causes. That blinks to indicate that the camera is active, but we tended to mask the LED, also because the light in the software did not turn off.

Connectivity options have been limited on the Prestige 14; only two USB-C or one USB-A (5Gbit/s) is available. Fortunately, the USB-C connections have support for Thunderbolt 4, so you can also use them to connect displays, as long as you use the right dock or cable. A microSD card reader is also present, next to the jack connection.

Benchmarks

Of course, this laptop is about the processor. The 1195G7 is the fastest Intel has to offer in the 15W processor category. Actually, we should put ’15W’ in very thick quotes, because there is no longer a manufacturer that tries to keep its Intel processor neatly below that limit. That is actually not the intention. The ‘turbo speed’ of a processor has grown from ‘a few hundred MHz extra under the right conditions’ to the most important specification advertised with a processor. With the 1195G7, that turbo clock is 5GHz, as mentioned, which is significantly more than the 2.9GHz that Intel advertises as a ‘normal’ clock speed.

Incidentally, that 2.9GHz is the clock frequency that the processor can sustain under Intel’s test scenario with a consumption of 28W; at 12W it is 1.3GHz and Intel does not give a value at 15W. However, it may be obvious; you can’t sustain that 5GHz for a long time with low consumption and MSI has configured the laptop in such a way that the cpu is given free rein to consume as much as it wants. To do this, you have to put the laptop in ‘performance’ mode in the software supplied by MSI and that produces the results below.

What becomes clear in these benchmarks is that the 1195G7 is the fastest Tiger Lake U processor, but it also remains Tiger Lake U. To put it less cryptically: everything Tiger Lake U was already good at, this laptop does even better. Take Cinebench Single, for example, in which the laptop is still faster than the ASUS Zenbook Duo, which already did very well in that benchmark. In 3DMark Night Raid Graphics, the 1195G7 is also at the top, because the gpu can be clocked up to 1400MHz, while the igp of the 1165G7 only goes up to 1350MHz. Everything Tiger Lake U wasn’t good at, the 1195G7 does a little better, but not good enough. If you need a lot of cores, it’s still better to look at a laptop with an AMD processor. You see that in Cinebench Multi and in 3DMark Night Raid CPU.

That does not mean that the high clock speeds of the Intel CPU have no effect, because the 1195G7 with its four cores in Cinebench Multi is almost as fast as the Ryzen 5 5500U with six cores. However, there is also a 5800U processor. It can be found in laptops that cost the same or less than the MSI and is much faster in a multicore scenario. The latter will remain the Achilles heel of the Tiger Lake U generation because for more cores we will have to wait until the next processor generation.

he reason the 1195G7 is doing so well in the benchmarks is the way MSI has configured the CPU. The chip is allowed to use a lot of energy, which results in high clock speeds and the CPU can also sustain it for a long time. In addition, the cpu may briefly tap 64W and while running Cinebench 23 we saw the consumption rise to almost 60W. In the graphs above, we recorded 223 seconds of the 30 minutes we ran Cinebench. After the first peak, the clock speed drops to about 3.5GHz and the power consumption remains at about 33 watts. That is the case after about three minutes, but it remains the same during the half hour that we have played Cinebench. The cooling is able to dissipate that heat and that, together with the high consumption, ensures that the Prestige 14 is the fastest Tiger Lake laptop we’ve tested so far. We also see this in DaVinci’s render benchmark, in which the MSI does an excellent job for an Intel quad core.

Screen, battery life and upgrades

The Prestige 14 is available with a 4k screen, but the version we received was equipped with a full-HD panel. That panel came from the factory of AU Optronics and turns out to be very good in almost all areas. In the Prestige 14 it is a matte panel, which we prefer anyway, because it produces fewer reflections than a glossy screen.

When we measure it with our SpectraCal C6 colorimeter and Calman software, the screen also appears to be very well calibrated. The deviation is 1.1ΔE in our grayscale test and even less than 1ΔE when measuring the primary and secondary colors. The contrast is also high at 1840:1 and it is therefore a pity that the maximum brightness lags a bit behind. For indoor use, 285cd/m² is fine, but competitors in this price range are around 400cd/m² and it’s nice to have the option to turn the screen brighter.

Finally, we look at the battery life and we see that the laptop manages to squeeze a good working time from its 52Wh battery while browsing.

Finally, when we open the laptop, the large fan catches the eye. It is also immediately clear that there is little to upgrade. The memory chips are soldered in and there is no second slot available for an extra SSD. The supplied Samsung PM9A1-ssd is placed on the right next to the battery. Next to it is the Killer AX1675x network card. That is still worth mentioning, because that wireless network card has support for WiFi networks on the 6GHz band.

Conclusion

There’s a reason Intel specifically sent us the MSI Prestige 14 to showcase the new i7-1195G7 processor. The laptop knows how to get the bottom of the cpu out of the can, making the MSI the fastest Tiger Lake U laptop we’ve tested so far. Was there so much extra to squeeze out of the Tiger Lake silicon? That’s not too bad. If you look at an ASUS Zenbook Duo, which, like the MSI, has good cooling and allows the CPU to use a lot of energy, the difference is not that big. You can see the really big differences between the Tiger Lakes with four cores and the AMD laptops with six or eight cores. AMD doesn’t always get the hang of it. In situations where single-core speed or the GPU counts, Intel is the fastest and the Prestige 14 is the fastest Intel, with the caveat that the difference is not huge.

So if you’re looking for a fast laptop with a Tiger Lake processor, you don’t necessarily have to save up for the 1195G7 processor, but what about the laptop that comes with it? The Prestige 14 is a very good laptop on the most important points. We would have liked to see a somewhat higher brightness, but the panel scores excellently in terms of calibration and contrast. The battery life is also not disappointing and we have already talked about the processor speed. What we do run into with this laptop are the small things, such as the finish of the csing, the annoying flashing LED when the webcam is active and the placement of the touchpad under your right wrist.

If those things don’t stop you from buying an MSI Prestige 14, we’ve got some bad news for you; the version we tested is the A11MO model from the United States. You can get the A11M model, which is equipped with a Core i7 1185G7 processor. That CPU is clocked slightly differently than the 1195G7, but we don’t expect you to notice the difference. What is different is the wireless network card, because it does not support 6GHz networks in the A11M model and the USB-A connection works at USB 2.0 speed.