MSI Summit E13 Flip Evo Convertible Review: A Timeless Design

[Dorby]

There seems to be either some seriously messed up Panel Lottery, or Cherry-Picking for reviews going on here with this particular laptop's display.

Now multiple Youtube reviews have measured closer to 300 nit brightness on the FHD display configuration, not even close to 550 nits provided in this review unit. A cause for concern for potential buyers.

A little skeptical too that this review does not include a section dedicated to the Stylus Pen and Touchscreen inputs. I would think that's the most important information to any person trying to research a 2-in-1 laptop.

The laptop itself is waaaay overpriced, considering HP Spectre x360 13.5 with better all-around hardware or Asus Flow X13 with better all-around performance. As a first-gen product out of their comfort zone, I honesty do not trust MSI to engineer a $1,900 quality of build, keyboard, audio, touchpad, and good tablet experience on a $1,900 ultrabook.

The MSI Summit should've been priced closer to starting at $900 for what it delivers, maybe up to $1,300 for the i7/32GB/2TB SKU, but not more than due to its Mid-range hardware.

[Mothertrucker19]

Unfortunately cooling on such slim convertibles/laptops is always going to be a problem. I'm not aware of any convertible with Thunderbolt 4 that doesn't have a cheap cooling solution. At least the MSI offers decent performance levels and sustained. Other, perhaps better devices at this price category like the Dell XPS 2-in-1, HP Spectre x360 and the Lenovo Yoga 6th Gen don't behave like this.

I've had luck experiencing the X13 Yoga and the Acer Spin 5 2020, and the Acer had a way better cooling than the Lenovo. It was fast sustained, after the first bios update, and was quiet too. So it's possible to do it, and the 2021 modell also has TB4.

There are interesting devices in the 2-in-1 space. Unfortunatelly they don't work for me, so I ended up again with a Surface Pro. But the Spin 5 was great, and on paper the X13 Flow is not bad either. I also like this MSI, as I don't really like HP laptops, with their strange keyboard layouts.

[Emanuel Barbosa]

I've had luck experiencing the X13 Yoga and the Acer Spin 5 2020, and the Acer had a way better cooling than the Lenovo. It was fast sustained, after the first bios update, and was quiet too. So it's possible to do it, and the 2021 modell also has TB4.

There are interesting devices in the 2-in-1 space. Unfortunatelly they don't work for me, so I ended up again with a Surface Pro. But the Spin 5 was great, and on paper the X13 Flow is not bad either. I also like this MSI, as I don't really like HP laptops, with their strange keyboard layouts.

That Acer Spin 5 seems to be a nice device, even though it doesn't directly compare to the models I posted above. Are there any reviews from the 2021 model?

I used to be a PC gamer but when I had to start buying the expensive surface pro for work I switched over to ps4. I still game on older titles on the PC that my iris plus card can handle with the resolution cranked way down (or play less intensive games like cuphead).

I was excited to buy an ultraportable that I can out an egpu on so I can play some good PC games on it.

I wasn't aware that the x13 doesn't have a tb4 connection. I didn't get that far in researching it because they're impossible to find anyway. That's an excellent point.

I game with the kids I see at my clinic and the egpu wouldn't leave the office, so for me it is a write off. But if it's not upgradeable you're right, even then it's not worth it at $1500.

Agree on the pen. I used to be  a die hard linux guy and I reluctantly made the switch to the surface just because I needed the pen functionality. I lucked out and avoided quality issues on both of the surface pros I've owned and they've done a good job. But I'm done with that platform because of those quality issues, and because they won't support thunderbolt. I get the security concerns, but it's not something I am worried about as a self employed shrink.

The milspec rating and the toggle that completely cuts power to the camera really interests me too on the MSI. Wish I could cut off the mic too.

I'll for sure write something up on here though after I've had some time to spend with it.

Please test it thoroughly and let us know, especially the pen input. This device seems to pack a lot of performance but it's a convertible. If it fails on that aspect (like many Lenovos do...) then it's not worth it at all (for my use case).

[PsychDoc]

Please test it thoroughly and let us know, especially the pen input. This device seems to pack a lot of performance but it's a convertible. If it fails on that aspect (like many Lenovos do...) then it's not worth it at all (for my use case).

Just picked it up yesterday. Bestbuy got it in early.

My initial impressions are pretty good with a major caveat.

The device scored very well on cinebench benchmarks.

The pen input is better than my surface pro 2017. I don't draw, but the handwriting is smooth and responsive, with no lag.

I prefer my surface pen to the MSI pen. It's weightier, and I like the nub better because it has a little more resistance. I also prefer having the eraser on the back. These are, however, largely personal preferences. My handwriting is pretty sloppy naturally, so the weight and resistance helps slow me down a little and makes it easier to write neatly.

Luckily my surface pen work fine with the Summit.

I haven't had a chance to test the battery life yet.

Thermal temps are on the hotter side when under load, but overall what you'd expect from an ultraportable. The CPUs perferm very well under load.

No ability to undervolt because Intel has disabled that in all their 11th gen chips.

I've only had the chance to play Mass Effect 3 multiplayer for a couple hours. The device handled it great though except for one thing which I'll get to in a sec.

It had no problem the game at 2560x1080 @ 60 hz on my ultrawide monitor and maintained 60 fps well in multiplayer. Occasionally it would dip down when I was swarmed with enemies and particle effects (damn collectors) but never dipped below 45 fps.

Here's the big caveat though.

Twice it happened where my game became utterly unplayable and dropped down to 4-5 fps and I had to quit.

The laptop remained slow until I rebooted it.

I ran throttlestop the second time after it happened. The CPU was undervolted to 200hz, just like in that other review, and it stayed there until a reboot despite CPU temps dropping to 56 degrees.

The fan, weirdly, also shut off during that time.

I had the laptop on performance mode both times.

I've changed the fan settings to ramp them up higher and the problem hasn't repeated itself. Logged CPU performance in throttlestop during another game session for 35 minutes and there was nothing out of the ordinary.

MSI customer service was pretty responsive. The tech and I talked and both decided it sounds like some problem with the hardware not governing voltage properly when it gets too hot. I will try with some newer games and see what happens. If it keeps doing it, it's going back to BestBuy for a replacement, and possibly a different computer. This is pretty unacceptable at this pricepoint, but it seem like it might be fixable with an update.

I'll write more when I've had more time to test.

[MrCat]

Thanks for the informative post, I was really looking forward for it :)

It's nice to see that the pen input is perfectly fine and that the performance levels are quite high compared to other convertibles in this price range. Unfortunately it seems all of them have the same throttling issues when stressing the CPU and GPU at the same time, which is somewhat a deal breaker especially considering the price! It is indeed strange that after a while the performance doesn't return to stock levels though.. I hope MSI acknowledges the problem and develop a fix which doesn't involve throttling the device so that it no longer reaches such temperatures. Did this also happen when stressing only the CPU?

Did you do any gaming using the internal screen? In case you did, did you notice any ghosting issues like the ones NBC had on their test device?
We're the SD-Card and WLAN speeds "as low" as the ones their measured?

Thanks  :)

[PsychDoc]

Thanks for the informative post, I was really looking forward for it :)

It's nice to see that the pen input is perfectly fine and that the performance levels are quite high compared to other convertibles in this price range. Unfortunately it seems all of them have the same throttling issues when stressing the CPU and GPU at the same time, which is somewhat a deal breaker especially considering the price! It is indeed strange that after a while the performance doesn't return to stock levels though.. I hope MSI acknowledges the problem and develop a fix which doesn't involve throttling the device so that it no longer reaches such temperatures. Did this also happen when stressing only the CPU?

Did you do any gaming using the internal screen? In case you did, did you notice any ghosting issues like the ones NBC had on their test device?
We're the SD-Card and WLAN speeds "as low" as the ones their measured?

Thanks  :)

You're welcome!!

I didn't notice any ghosting on the internal screen but I only played one 30 minute game on the internal one. Every other game has been on the external monitor.

I haven't yet tested sd card or wireless card speeds. I just noticed how much faster mass effect 3 downloaded from origin on the MSI vs my surface pro.

The build quality is good. The keyboard is fine for a 2 in 1. the trackpad is wide, if a bit on the short side (it's fine for daily use). The hinges seem firm to me. They loosen up very slightly when fully extended and tighten back up, but it's barely noticeable. It doesn't seem like it will be an issue for longevity.

Bloatware was pretty minimal too. I just had to uninstall Norton and Spotify. I don't feel the need for a full reinstall.

The display seems pretty bright, too. I can't measure nits on it but it's plenty bright indoors at 50% power. I'll try it outside in the sun whenever the sun decides it wants to make a showing, that is.

I will be testing the battery out tomorrow during normal use to see how it does.

Honestly, I really like this laptop other than the throttle issue. It hasn't done it at all today even though I've played a few games.

No it doesn't appear to throttle under CPU only conditions. Cinebench had no issues running for the full 30 minute test. I've run work applications and installed programs on it just fine with no issue.

The fan gets loud and there's some coil whine when it's really trying hard in performance mode, but that's to be expected. MSI has a silent mode that I use when meeting with clients and it seems to handle our electronic medical records (via browser on the cloud) and word documents just fine with no real heat issues.

It was really weird that it didn't return to normal power levels after it dropped to 200 mhz. It's weirder still that I haven't had that issue at all today despite gaming for the same amount of time I did yesterday when it got screwy.

I'm wondering if there's a firmware issue that can be patched out or something. MSI has 14 days to figure that out. ;)

When I get around to downloading a more current game, or doing a 3d benchmark I guess I'll see what happens.

[MrCat]

Thanks! Please report back once you've done some more testing. Unfortunately there aren't so many reviews online hence why your findings are very useful. I'm hoping this throttle issue gets fixed with a future BIOS update (hopefully during your return period).

As an eGPU user this wouldn't matter that much but this still far from ideal. I'm wondering how many PCIe Lines were assigned to the SD-Card reader. The Dell Latitude 5290 2-in-1 that I have achieves higher speeds than the X1 Gen 3 Tablet because it has more lanes assigned to it. On the other hand, NVMe is capped at 2x on the 5290 Tablet while on the X1 Tablet it's 4x.

I'm wondering if this could be the reason why the speeds were so low. This can be checked with HWInfo. I'm not sure if the same relates to WLAN - I wouldn't be impressed if MSI cheaped out on the antennas because other convertibles in this price range do more than 1000 Mbit/s.

Coil whine is always annoying. Would you be willing on doing a video about it? Perhaps you could post your impressions on reddit too  :)

Thanks! ;)

[PsychDoc]

Thanks! Please report back once you've done some more testing. Unfortunately there aren't so many reviews online hence why your findings are very useful. I'm hoping this throttle issue gets fixed with a future BIOS update (hopefully during your return period).

As an eGPU user this wouldn't matter that much but this still far from ideal. I'm wondering how many PCIe Lines were assigned to the SD-Card reader. The Dell Latitude 5290 2-in-1 that I have achieves higher speeds than the X1 Gen 3 Tablet because it has more lanes assigned to it. On the other hand, NVMe is capped at 2x on the 5290 Tablet while on the X1 Tablet it's 4x.

I'm wondering if this could be the reason why the speeds were so low. This can be checked with HWInfo. I'm not sure if the same relates to WLAN - I wouldn't be impressed if MSI cheaped out on the antennas because other convertibles in this price range do more than 1000 Mbit/s.

Coil whine is always annoying. Would you be willing on doing a video about it? Perhaps you could post your impressions on reddit too  :)

Thanks! ;)

For sure! I am going away for the weekend on family trip, but i'll do some more testing next week including wifi speeds, battery life, SD card and ssd transfer speeds and post up the results. I wouldn't mind posting them to Reddit either. I have been a long time lurker on there so maybe it's time I actually contribute something. 😜

I'll check hwinfo and let you know maybe today.

Also, fan noise and coil whine aren't egregious. Just present. But sure I'll shoot a video.

Fyi - There were no weird throttle issues yesterday despite a two hour gaming session. I was on me3 multiplayer again, running 2560x1080 @ 60 hz on platinum with three other players while playing an n7 fury (tons of particle effects, plus the geth scanner overlay) as host. (The game uses the host computer as the server).

I got 60fps ( game capped) the whole time with some occassional drops to 45 fps when swarmed.

Sure, it's an old game but considering I'm doing 1440p (through an ultrawide mod) and have dynamic shadows and antialiasing switched on, I think hitting the max limited frame rate is pretty good for an Ultrabook.

I did have the laptop on a stand so that may have helped. I wasn't logging, but temps seemed perfectly fine.

I will run other games next week and will also see if I can get the cpu and gpu to overheat.

I'll also do some more gaming on the internal screen then. It's just that I am 44 years old and hate gaming on tiny screens.

It also doesn't help that the me3 stock reticle is light blue and blends right into the background. My gaming monitor has an onboard bright red reticle. It's so much easier to pop off headshots with it, and it's immensely satisfying topping the scoreboard consistently as a 44 year old geezer (by gamer standards) on platinum runs... even on a 10 year old game.  I love science, but I have my limits.

Most of my current gen games are on PS4. I do own the Witcher and skyrim for PC,  but any suggestions for current gen games? I'm a huge souls fan, so I am thinking of trying out dark souls 1 remastered.

[MrCat]

Thanks PsychDoc!

Perhaps you could test Call of Duty Warzone. It might not run well on Iris XE Graphics but there's a video on YouTube from a Dell Inspiron 7506 2-in-1 with an Intel 1165G7 and Iris XE 96 EU running it with decent FPS. Yes, that Dell is a 15" convertible but perhaps the E13 Flip might be able to have similar performance given it's benchmark/stresstest results.

However I'm not happy at all with MSI's policy: after exchanging a couple of E-Mails with an MSI rep., somehow they decided to put 60 Hz panels in the european variants instead of 120 Hz. While this might be good for battery life, it changes the user experience drastically. I found a spanish review which "strangely" reported that the panel ran at 60 Hz. At first I thought it was a mistake, mostly because the panels have the same reference (LQ134N1JW53) but indeed it seems that there might be different revisions and europeans get the lesser one. I don't believe this can be changed with an updated firmware. This is just like what Samsung does every year with the Snapdragon and Exynos variants on it's high end smartphones.

Tbh I find this very disappointing and a major deal breaker, especially considering the version with 32GB and 1TB costs around 2000€ here (which would be something like 2430 $). I was willing to accept the ghosting and the sub-par SD-Card and WLAN speeds but with this they've gone a bit too far.  >:(

I'm still looking forward for your feedback though  ;)

[MrCat]

Still waiting for your feedback Psychdoc  ;)

[PsychDoc]

Still waiting for your feedback Psychdoc  ;)

I've been working a lot of hours.

I'll give you a short rundown.

After using it for the last 14 days, I'm ready to comment on some additional things.

The pen input is amazing. Much better than both of the surface pros that I've owned.

The battery life is quite good when you set the MSI command center power option to either "quiet" or "save battery". I didn't have the chance to do a full test, but I would use it for 6 hours off a charge writing notes most of the time, and I'd still have 60% left.

I've since played a few other titles and it's performed incredibly well for an ultra-portable.

I've had no issues with throttling either.

But there's 4 minor issues, and 1 big one.

1. The keyboard sometimes doesn't know when it is flipped and in tablet mode. (especially after waking from sleep). So I have to open and close to fix this, which is a little irritating to have to do sitting with a client when I need to just be taking notes.

2. The battery had some weirdness that more or less went away after a few charge/discharge cycles (though the battery controller is apparently reporting to windows 10 that it's a 67k mah battery that overcharges to 69K, but whatever).

3. It's happened a few times where bluetooth just wasn't there. No option to turn it on. Probably some weird driver issue.

4. WiFi sometimes was weirdly spotty and I was getting wifi wake from sleep initialization errors in the logfiles.

And the big issue is...

The thiing has crashed on me 9 times in 15 days. 5 times while gaming, and 4 times while doing video calls with clients.

Windows event error log reports this was due to a fatal hardware issue each time.

Unfortunately I haven't had time to do further benchmarking due to work being crazy busy.

But I think it's simply unacceptable for a $1600 laptop.

If it weren't for the crashes and wifi, I'd keep it. It's probably a driver issue. But I'm worried about a hardware issue somewhere, and i'm not willing to risk it.

It's going back to bestbuy tomorrow.

I am not sure what their exchange policy is. If they extend me another 15 day trial period, I'd be happy to try another one out for 15 days to see if I just got a bad unit. I liked it that much.

If that isn't the case I'll just return it. I'm just not willing to gamble that kind of money on a system that won't last me at least 4 years.

I am not sure what I'd buy instead  HP customer service scares me (I used to do a side hustle of building systems and fixing computers back when I was in college and they were atrocious back then. I've read they haven't gotten much better), and with the crap going on recently with Dell I'm not sure I want an XPS either.

Such a bummer. I really wanted it to work out.

[Dorby]

@PsychDoc:
HP, Lenovo and Dell have 5 Support options when you configure and buy their laptops through their business portal:

- Upgrade all warranties up to 5 years Extended
- Accidental Damage Protection
- Next day On-Site Technician Support
- Global Warranty
- Premium Online / Mail-in / Return Support.

Something people overlook a lot, but they're nice to have. Especially the ADP which covers all types of damage, repair and component replacement.

As MSI's first-gen attempt at something like this, this product is absolutely bound to have some basic usability issues, although it looks like you might've been more unlucky.

[Mothertrucker19]

However I'm not happy at all with MSI's policy: after exchanging a couple of E-Mails with an MSI rep., somehow they decided to put 60 Hz panels in the european variants instead of 120 Hz. While this might be good for battery life, it changes the user experience drastically. I found a spanish review which "strangely" reported that the panel ran at 60 Hz. At first I thought it was a mistake, mostly because the panels have the same reference (LQ134N1JW53) but indeed it seems that there might be different revisions and europeans get the lesser one. I don't believe this can be changed with an updated firmware. This is just like what Samsung does every year with the Snapdragon and Exynos variants on it's high end smartphones.

Tbh I find this very disappointing and a major deal breaker, especially considering the version with 32GB and 1TB costs around 2000€ here (which would be something like 2430 $). I was willing to accept the ghosting and the sub-par SD-Card and WLAN speeds but with this they've gone a bit too far.  >:(

I'm still looking forward for your feedback though  ;)

I hope this gets coverage. Europe already gets worse deals usually, but now worse hardware too.

[MrCat]

I've been working a lot of hours.

I'll give you a short rundown.

After using it for the last 14 days, I'm ready to comment on some additional things.

The pen input is amazing. Much better than both of the surface pros that I've owned.

The battery life is quite good when you set the MSI command center power option to either "quiet" or "save battery". I didn't have the chance to do a full test, but I would use it for 6 hours off a charge writing notes most of the time, and I'd still have 60% left.

I've since played a few other titles and it's performed incredibly well for an ultra-portable.

I've had no issues with throttling either.

But there's 4 minor issues, and 1 big one.

1. The keyboard sometimes doesn't know when it is flipped and in tablet mode. (especially after waking from sleep). So I have to open and close to fix this, which is a little irritating to have to do sitting with a client when I need to just be taking notes.

2. The battery had some weirdness that more or less went away after a few charge/discharge cycles (though the battery controller is apparently reporting to windows 10 that it's a 67k mah battery that overcharges to 69K, but whatever).

3. It's happened a few times where bluetooth just wasn't there. No option to turn it on. Probably some weird driver issue.

4. WiFi sometimes was weirdly spotty and I was getting wifi wake from sleep initialization errors in the logfiles.

And the big issue is...

The thiing has crashed on me 9 times in 15 days. 5 times while gaming, and 4 times while doing video calls with clients.

Windows event error log reports this was due to a fatal hardware issue each time.

Unfortunately I haven't had time to do further benchmarking due to work being crazy busy.

But I think it's simply unacceptable for a $1600 laptop.

If it weren't for the crashes and wifi, I'd keep it. It's probably a driver issue. But I'm worried about a hardware issue somewhere, and i'm not willing to risk it.

It's going back to bestbuy tomorrow.

I am not sure what their exchange policy is. If they extend me another 15 day trial period, I'd be happy to try another one out for 15 days to see if I just got a bad unit. I liked it that much.

If that isn't the case I'll just return it. I'm just not willing to gamble that kind of money on a system that won't last me at least 4 years.

I am not sure what I'd buy instead  HP customer service scares me (I used to do a side hustle of building systems and fixing computers back when I was in college and they were atrocious back then. I've read they haven't gotten much better), and with the crap going on recently with Dell I'm not sure I want an XPS either.

Such a bummer. I really wanted it to work out.

Thanks for your feedback. With all those issues, returning it was/is the right thing to do. MSI has done a lot of things right on their first attempt but at this price point it's indeed unacceptable to have random crashes while doing normal tasks like the zoom calls or having bad Wifi. There was another mention about bad wifi on Amazon which makes me start believing that this might be a design/hardware issue.

I was really looking forward to this convertible but at it's launch price it's just not worth it.

I hope this gets coverage. Europe already gets worse deals usually, but now worse hardware too.

Me too. MSI didn't advertise this convertible with 120 Hz though... anyway NBC should update it's review or at least mention that the 120 Hz panel is not available everywhere. In it's current form the article is very misleading. 120 Hz variants seem to be available in Asia or in the US only, definitely not in Europe, which is very unfortunate because this would've been a good selling point..

[smargo]

I have this laptop for a couple of weeks. Usually, I have severe eye strain from OLED and PWM displays, the  panel in Summit is great and very easy on the eyes. I also love SD card slot.
But the battery life seems to be horrible: I am getting around 3 hours under lite load in "Balanced" mode. In other modes, e.g. "Silent" it is way too slow, lagging on the simplest tasks.
Is the unit defective or is this normal? Reviews were indicating great battery life.