MSI Prestige 14 Evo laptop review: Intel is catching up

[Redaktion]

While the normal Prestige 14 is primarily aimed at the multimedia sector, the 14 Evo is designed for business users due to the lack of a dedicated GPU. Find out how the Tiger Lake chip performs against various AMD rivals in our review.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/MSI-Prestige-14-Evo-laptop-review-Intel-is-catching-up.509352.0.html

[Grinnie Jax]

So basically Ryzen 4700U performs slightly better in cheaper ultrabook with worse cooling and consuming less power? So Tiger Lake seems DOA. And we can remind that pricewise top Tiger Lake competes with 4900U/4800U.

[Muhammad Anhar]

Not even any single M1 MacBook in comparison. How sad trying hard to beat AMD only.

[kakaowsky]

Hello!
Great review. I had this laptop for 2 weeks after which i returned it. I was pleasantly suprised with build qquality, input devices and compact charger. But the speakers.... OH MY GOSH. I never expected such a bad sound for such a high price. It was complately unusable, my old smartphone produce far better sound. Stay away, if you care for any sound quality!
I now await my yoga slim 7 to arrive, although evo had some pretty good useer expirence, outside the sound quality.

[asldkf]

Intel is catching up

Zen 2 (CPU) is superior in any sort of multithreading tasks.
Zen 2 (CPU and GPU) is more power efficient and better overall at 15W TDP.
Intel 11th gen (CPU and GPU) shines at 28W TDP and above (NUC M15 based devices).
I'm sure Prestige 14 EVO is a fantastic laptop in his category with enough power for any business task but the official page doesn't mention TDP at all, so I don't see how this device can shift the current balance of power.
tw.msi.com/Business-Productivity/Prestige-14-Evo-A11X/Overview

[vertigo]

This started off looking impressive, but that was a very brief period. Nice keyboard layout, with full-sized arrow keys and dedicated home/end/pgup/pgdn keys, but only one USB-A port, and 2.0 at that (which somehow, of course, isn't considered a con, even though no TB on an AMD system often is), dim display, no webcam shutter (we're at the point now that the lack of this is an automatic pass from me), crappy GPU drivers, very loud and hot, mediocre battery life (I thought EVO was about ensuring this was good). But yeah, Intel's catching up. I mean, you know it's bad when NBC is reaching for pros in the summary. Half of them are essentially the same thing (size/weight/design), battery life is, IMO, not good, certainly not enough to be listed as a pro, and compact power adapter...really? Getting pretty desperate, aren't you NBC?

[icentel]

This laptop is very, very fast in use, However it's loud, especially a high-pitch noise was annoying.
What else.. screen was dim and speakers were VERY quiet (which is especially strange considering loud fans).

To the people who are praising Ryzen 4000U series: amd is really lacking in terms of iGPU power, this was more noticeable to me than any multi-threading perfomance.

[vertigo]

To the people who are praising Ryzen 4000U series: amd is really lacking in terms of iGPU power, this was more noticeable to me than any multi-threading perfomance.

That's a fair point, and it demonstrates the importance of selecting hardware based on intended use, but it's also contrary to the results in this review, which showed abysmal performance of the iGPU in all but a few games. Are you seeing different results?

Currently, yes, Tiger Lake has the potential to beat Ryzen on graphics, but so far most reviews I've seen have shown it to still be slower, either because of RAM or drivers. I've only seen a couple reviews so far where it was better, though in those cases it did seem to be quite a bit so. Meanwhile, in a few months or so, Lucienne and Cezanne will be out, which will be faster, and will likely once again take the crown back from Intel, who at that point would have held it only for a short time.

Either way, personally I'd rather have slightly less graphics performance (it isn't a gaming laptop, after all) in exchange for better overall CPU performance, a cheaper price, and to support AMD. And that's not because I'm an AMD fan--I've used Intel exclusively since the Athlon 64 x2 days--it's because we need the competition. Integrated graphics are clearly important to you, and if AMD hadn't pushed Intel with Renoir, we'd probably still have UHD and Iris iGPUs, because, as Intel has shown for years, they're more than happy to keep shoveling out the same uninspired, barely improved product year after year. So I'll happily take slightly less gaming performance on an ultrabook if that means helping to push innovation so that my next laptop will have substantially more performance, vs taking a little more now and a little more later.

Also, there's the matter of availability. Both are very good, and while I prefer AMD for the above reasons, the main reason I chose a Ryzen version for my new computer is that it's definitely better than Intel's 10th gen, and there wasn't a Tiger Lake version. If there was, I might have gone that route, depending on which was better for battery life, which is more important than CPU or GPU performance (to a point) and for the AV1 support. And I absolutely would have gone with Tiger Lake if it were the only option in a laptop with the form factor I really want, which is a convertible with a Trackpoint.

[Rick]

If you zoom on the inside the case picture, maintenance section. It seems that the NVME SSD is using a Phision E16 controller, that is an 8-channels PCIE4.0 SSD. This is remarkable, and it should have been stressed in the article.