MSI Prestige 15 A10SC Laptop Review: One of the Best Dell XPS 15 Alternatives

[jay Patil]

The biggest issue i faced was that when under heavy combined CPU and GPU load the 90 watt power brick didn't seem to be adequate.

This does at least mean the power brick is on the smaller size for travel.

[jay Patil]

While using this laptop full performance wasn't too far off and this was only when fully loading up both processor and graphics together, though undervolting did help out a bit.

[Qlien]

This is almost the perfect notebook for me, nice specs, regular sized arrow keys, decent design. I will wait to the next year for better build quality and better heat management (nothing wrong with laptop being thicker!). I would pay 300$ more for these features.

[Cemal]

Biggest handicap of an ultra cpu is that, it has very limited PCI express lines of only 16. 8 of this line used for graphics. Other 8, divided into 4 + 4. One of 4 is USB and wireless (camera, sound etc.) Left only 4. This is for M.2's. But, if there are two M.2 slots, they share this, so only 2 PCI lines left for each. So, the read & write performance drops to 2GB maximum. If there is only one M.2, that maybe much better. It can run at full speed. Finally, Intel must increase this line to 20 for better double slot M.2 performance.  ???

[anotheruser]

Not as great as I would have hoped.

The bad:
The screen's response time is bad. Extremely bad. Like something from the passive matrix era, every moving thing is super blurry.
The HDMI2.0 output (yes it has one despite the article saying it only has an 1.4) is not working with all devices. Internally its an active displayport to HDMI2.0 converter, thus HDR is not working, DDC/CI is not working (you cant control the monitor's brightness from the notebook for example if the monitor supports it), some devices simply refuses to go 4k 60hz, others drop the connection after a while, others work flawlessly (but still no HDR and DDC/CI).
The fans are LOUD. Shouting LOUD. At idle its good, you can hardly notice it, but once you load the system they spin up quick. And as loud as they are they do not move a lot of air. My old asus g551 moves a lot more air barely audible compared to this msi.
The accessories the article mentioned were not included with my unit.
The system is not stable at the default clocks, I had to down clock the nVidia GPU by 70MHz to not have random crashes.
There is no dedicated sleep button (not even an FN combo)... Apparently a screen flip button was more important (which btw could be easily done with a keycombo via the intel driver without the need for a dedicated button...).
The utility software is slow. Like the "creator app" (where you can control some of the functionality like fan curves, system modes, etc) takes up to half a minute to start up and 3-10 seconds to just appear if it was minimized. Sometimes it shows almost instantly, but this is not the majority.
The sound card is bad. Really bad. I know this is not mostly msi's fault but realtek's. It can only go up to 48khz/24 bit while even my oldest system (10+ years old) can do 96khz/24 bit, and my 5+ year old asus gaming machine can do 192khz/24 bit. Even my monitor's output is 96khz/24bit.
In general the realtek soundcard driver is bad. Why does it take a fullHD monitor to show two drop down boxes with 2 items? Why cant it recognize what type of device I plug into the jack? Why cant I set it permanently? Why does it need 2 "drivers" just for the combo jack to work? Why are the sound effects/enhancements enabled by default? I was wondering why my music sounds like s***, and turned out to be some default settings enabled "enhancements".
The microphone gets hit with the outgoing airflow from the fans resulting making a ton of noise.
The headphone and internal speakers are not a separate device/output. If you forgot to unplug your headphones before standing up from the machine good luck noticing incoming calls. All my other devices has these as separate audio devices so even if I forgot to unplug my headphones skype will ring on the internal speakers too.
Could have easily put a full size SD card slot on the side... Converters from micro to full exists but not the other way around, so its not possible to use full size sd cards without an external reader.
It heats up under load. Badly. Like the whole machine becomes painful to touch.
It heats up even under slight load. More than I would find acceptable.

The meh:
Keyboard: It's nor good nor bad. Definitely not bad, but it feels like its 10% larger than others and I constantly make mistakes on it. But its actual size is the same as any other of mine.
Keyboard layout is interesting. They tried to combine multiple physical layout to reduce the number of different upper case types they have to manufacture.
nVidia GPU is only connected by a x4 interface, this can be a bottleneck in some applications.
If you plug anything in the HDMI port it enables the dedicated GPU resulting in a much shorter battery life.
The power button is not on the side, but could have as its possible to dock the notebook via a thunderbolt cable, you have to open it up to turn it on if your dock does not have a power button.
Webcam is meh. Its only 720p and even at that it feels like upscaled 480p.
Coilwhine. Obviously they will send one for review which does not do it, but mine does. Not loud, but definitely audible.

The good:
Screen colors are good! Viewing angles are good.
The two ram slots and two m.2 are great! I put 32gb of ram in it and another SSD.
The performance is great, it does not throttles significantly under full load.
The general build quality is excellent, all metal chassis even on the bottom.
I feared that the WiFi antennas are in a bad place (bottom side, on the front of the device), but they work great, speeds are great.
Its thin and light.
Linux works on it. Only the fingerprint reader which does not work. Everything else does as far as I tested!
Battery life is great on light load.
The charge limiter is great! Its possible to limit to 60% which is awesome!
You can charge with either of the thunderbolt ports.
You can customize the fan curves, but it just shows "cold to hot" instead of actual temperature values.

Conclusion: its a good machine, but far from perfect. It would have not taken long/much to fix said issues.

[Marky Markus]

"MSI claims full AdobeRGB coverage which we can confirm with our own independent measurements."

On the other hand, from measurements :  "84.8% AdobeRGB"

Apparently 85% is the new "full".

[Denis]

This seems to be an interesting product, I mean the size and weight is impressive, thunderbolt 3 x2, i7-10710U cpu, GTX 1650 MaxQ gpu, dual M.2 slots, 32GB of dual channel ram, sufficient up to date ports, nice wide trackpad, dual fans and so is the 82w battery. I prefer the 15.6" format, in my case, just too many sacrifices when you go below this size. I am a little confused with so many manufacturers installing poor performing 4K screens on so many laptops these days, I wouldn't even consider casual gaming with this one. I would maybe go with this laptop if it had a different screen, I'm sure the battery autonomy would also benefit from this.

[NewIslander]

So I'm seeing a mixed bag of comments here, I really want to know what to ppl that have actually purchased this feel...

I'm looking around for a lightweight video editing creator package

So far I'm looking at at this and a Dell G7 15 - 7500

I'm torn between extra power of the NVIDIA(R) GeForce RTX(TM) 2070 8GB GDDR6 on the Dell and the portability of the MSI. Honestly, I don't really want a Dell, time for a change.

If anyone cares to comment between these two options (yeah I know it's like chalk-n-cheese) but it'd be too lengthy to explain my rationale.

[Oscar Pinal]

For those wanting a top laptop, if you can afford a 2.000€ laptop, buy another one instead of this. And i explain why...
I´ve been using it for months now (4k display, 32gb, 2TB, GFX 1650ti version) and after working on photography and video with it, with premiere and mostly on camera raw (almost no photoshop), even when plugged the laptop gets really hot and to stop this you have to start tunning the fans at top speed, playing with a lot of msi apps already installed that, i think, they are fighting to control what windows does once installed (drivers mostly) so you have two apps controlling your battery, two things controlling the screen resolution and color management, and so on.
The battery drains surprinsinly fast after couple of stops to send pictures in the middle of my daily work, using raw files from a Nikon D850. So with full power, roughly 2-3 hours or less. And i tell you this downscaling the display to FHD, if you work with the native 4k display, expect half the time.
The color "thing" of this laptop (100% AdobeRGB is doubtfully true) is really confusing, even for a person who has been working with calibrated screens for years. With the laptop unplugged there is no secure way to know if what you see is really contrasty or not, there is some changing on the colors, hue and brightness that gets me mad. The same happened to me before with one laptop (Acer swift 5) and that´s why i did send it back. Working with couple of friends besides me (they use MBP) and i really envy their laptop screens, the clarity, the colors, the incredible display those laptops show... Nothing close to them with this laptop. I still cant say that i feel cheated for paying so much and getting this compared to apple, but i can tell you that what i expected from this ammount of money is not what i finally did get. It has more than enough power to work with big projects on Premiere (faster than those apple MBP i mentioned) but at the end i bought this laptop to enjoy the screen resolution and color accuracy and i definitely didnt yet. So, as much as i hate to say this, if you work with photo-video thing, get the apple MBP. This laptop is a beast in power and maybe is perfect for gamers also (who knows, i dont play pcgames) but to a professional level you cant rely on something that fragile and unsecure as this. Good try for MSI but not this time. Maybe next year.
Sorry for the bad news but think about me, i´m stuck with it, still paying it and dreaming about a newer version with better/easier interface to control color and a screen that finally has true contrast/brightness no matter if it´s plugged or not.
Cheers!

[Peter Peter]

Not as great as I would have hoped.

The bad:
The screen's response time is bad. Extremely bad. Like something from the passive matrix era, every moving thing is super blurry.
The HDMI2.0 output (yes it has one despite the article saying it only has an 1.4) is not working with all devices. Internally its an active displayport to HDMI2.0 converter, thus HDR is not working, DDC/CI is not working (you cant control the monitor's brightness from the notebook for example if the monitor supports it), some devices simply refuses to go 4k 60hz, others drop the connection after a while, others work flawlessly (but still no HDR and DDC/CI).
The fans are LOUD. Shouting LOUD. At idle its good, you can hardly notice it, but once you load the system they spin up quick. And as loud as they are they do not move a lot of air. My old asus g551 moves a lot more air barely audible compared to this msi.
The accessories the article mentioned were not included with my unit.
The system is not stable at the default clocks, I had to down clock the nVidia GPU by 70MHz to not have random crashes.
There is no dedicated sleep button (not even an FN combo)... Apparently a screen flip button was more important (which btw could be easily done with a keycombo via the intel driver without the need for a dedicated button...).
The utility software is slow. Like the "creator app" (where you can control some of the functionality like fan curves, system modes, etc) takes up to half a minute to start up and 3-10 seconds to just appear if it was minimized. Sometimes it shows almost instantly, but this is not the majority.
The sound card is bad. Really bad. I know this is not mostly msi's fault but realtek's. It can only go up to 48khz/24 bit while even my oldest system (10+ years old) can do 96khz/24 bit, and my 5+ year old asus gaming machine can do 192khz/24 bit. Even my monitor's output is 96khz/24bit.
In general the realtek soundcard driver is bad. Why does it take a fullHD monitor to show two drop down boxes with 2 items? Why cant it recognize what type of device I plug into the jack? Why cant I set it permanently? Why does it need 2 "drivers" just for the combo jack to work? Why are the sound effects/enhancements enabled by default? I was wondering why my music sounds like s***, and turned out to be some default settings enabled "enhancements".
The microphone gets hit with the outgoing airflow from the fans resulting making a ton of noise.
The headphone and internal speakers are not a separate device/output. If you forgot to unplug your headphones before standing up from the machine good luck noticing incoming calls. All my other devices has these as separate audio devices so even if I forgot to unplug my headphones skype will ring on the internal speakers too.
Could have easily put a full size SD card slot on the side... Converters from micro to full exists but not the other way around, so its not possible to use full size sd cards without an external reader.
It heats up under load. Badly. Like the whole machine becomes painful to touch.
It heats up even under slight load. More than I would find acceptable.

The meh:
Keyboard: It's nor good nor bad. Definitely not bad, but it feels like its 10% larger than others and I constantly make mistakes on it. But its actual size is the same as any other of mine.
Keyboard layout is interesting. They tried to combine multiple physical layout to reduce the number of different upper case types they have to manufacture.
nVidia GPU is only connected by a x4 interface, this can be a bottleneck in some applications.
If you plug anything in the HDMI port it enables the dedicated GPU resulting in a much shorter battery life.
The power button is not on the side, but could have as its possible to dock the notebook via a thunderbolt cable, you have to open it up to turn it on if your dock does not have a power button.
Webcam is meh. Its only 720p and even at that it feels like upscaled 480p.
Coilwhine. Obviously they will send one for review which does not do it, but mine does. Not loud, but definitely audible.

The good:
Screen colors are good! Viewing angles are good.
The two ram slots and two m.2 are great! I put 32gb of ram in it and another SSD.
The performance is great, it does not throttles significantly under full load.
The general build quality is excellent, all metal chassis even on the bottom.
I feared that the WiFi antennas are in a bad place (bottom side, on the front of the device), but they work great, speeds are great.
Its thin and light.
Linux works on it. Only the fingerprint reader which does not work. Everything else does as far as I tested!
Battery life is great on light load.
The charge limiter is great! Its possible to limit to 60% which is awesome!
You can charge with either of the thunderbolt ports.
You can customize the fan curves, but it just shows "cold to hot" instead of actual temperature values.

Conclusion: its a good machine, but far from perfect. It would have not taken long/much to fix said issues.

Hi why u didn't try thunderbolt video instead of poor HDMi... Thunderbold is 3 or 4 it should run 4k@120Hz

[Peter Peter]

For those wanting a top laptop, if you can afford a 2.000€ laptop, buy another one instead of this. And i explain why...
I´ve been using it for months now (4k display, 32gb, 2TB, GFX 1650ti version) and after working on photography and video with it, with premiere and mostly on camera raw (almost no photoshop), even when plugged the laptop gets really hot and to stop this you have to start tunning the fans at top speed, playing with a lot of msi apps already installed that, i think, they are fighting to control what windows does once installed (drivers mostly) so you have two apps controlling your battery, two things controlling the screen resolution and color management, and so on.
The battery drains surprinsinly fast after couple of stops to send pictures in the middle of my daily work, using raw files from a Nikon D850. So with full power, roughly 2-3 hours or less. And i tell you this downscaling the display to FHD, if you work with the native 4k display, expect half the time.
The color "thing" of this laptop (100% AdobeRGB is doubtfully true) is really confusing, even for a person who has been working with calibrated screens for years. With the laptop unplugged there is no secure way to know if what you see is really contrasty or not, there is some changing on the colors, hue and brightness that gets me mad. The same happened to me before with one laptop (Acer swift 5) and that´s why i did send it back. Working with couple of friends besides me (they use MBP) and i really envy their laptop screens, the clarity, the colors, the incredible display those laptops show... Nothing close to them with this laptop. I still cant say that i feel cheated for paying so much and getting this compared to apple, but i can tell you that what i expected from this ammount of money is not what i finally did get. It has more than enough power to work with big projects on Premiere (faster than those apple MBP i mentioned) but at the end i bought this laptop to enjoy the screen resolution and color accuracy and i definitely didnt yet. So, as much as i hate to say this, if you work with photo-video thing, get the apple MBP. This laptop is a beast in power and maybe is perfect for gamers also (who knows, i dont play pcgames) but to a professional level you cant rely on something that fragile and unsecure as this. Good try for MSI but not this time. Maybe next year.
Sorry for the bad news but think about me, i´m stuck with it, still paying it and dreaming about a newer version with better/easier interface to control color and a screen that finally has true contrast/brightness no matter if it´s plugged or not.
Cheers!

You supposed to get 1080p one completely enough for little 15'' screen
4k is pointless even on 20''

[anotheruser]

DONT BUY THIS NOTEBOOK

After buying 5 more of these notebooks, I definitely DO NOT RECOMMEND IT.
Machine #1: nVidia GPU is bad, only works if you under clock it by ~70mhz. No other problem.
Machine #2: Random system freeze, even when idle.
Machine #3: Random system freeze when the nVidia GPU is enabled (even without load), thermal throttling under load (other machines don't do it), onboard audio failed, no output on speakers, nor the headphones..
Machine #4: Battery completely drained, refuses to charge it, does not start up at all.
Machine #5,6: So far these are working as far as I know.

So 66% failure rate.