- MSI is trying to get into the premium Ultrabook category
and today we're going to take a look at their PS42.
It's a 14 inch laptop
and I'll tell you whether it's good or not.
Stay tuned.
(heavy bass music)
Okay, let's take a closer look
at the build quality of the PS42.
As you can see, I really like this design on the outside.
It's kind of like a brushed metal
but it doesn't really have any texture to it.
But it doesn't really pick up fingerprints,
which I really enjoy and they have their logo here
but it's very subtle, so you can barely see it
unless you get a nice reflection on it.
I think this is just a really cool design and look.
I like it a lot.
All right, turn to the left side,
we've got a bunch of ports here.
So, you do have a barrel charger, which is really old school
but this is what happens when you kinda go with
some other brands like MSI, who are still fans of it.
You do get an HDMI port
Type-C 3.1,
but this gets weird now.
This is going to be the whole theme of this review.
MSI makes some weird decisions.
Yeah, Type-C port, awesome.
3.1, good for data transfer.
However, it can not charge the device,
so there's no power delivery there,
which is a little bit strange.
So there's definitely also no Thunderbolt 3 support.
You do, however, get a headphone jack,
which is pretty normal,
and you get nice little LEDs here,
which show when the power is on and charging.
Not even sure what that one's for.
But what's cool about these LEDs
is they wrap around to the top deck.
I actually really like that,
so you don't need to peek over to the side to see them.
Really neat design there.
Now, on the right hand side,
you do get two USB 3.1 Type-A ports, which is really nice.
Another Type-C again: doesn't do power
so you can't charge with this,
which is really kind of frustrating.
But you do get a full SD card reader,
which is pretty strange on a 14 inch laptop.
And, again, MSI is gearing this towards
creative professionals and that's a nice choice to have,
and you also get a Kensington lock.
Looking at the back here, you do have some
nice symmetrical grills for the venting system.
And what's really neat about this laptop
is it does have two fans on the inside,
so this actually matches it.
Each fan is dedicated: one for the GPU, which is the MX150,
we'll talk about that later,
and the other one is dedicated for a processor.
So, they don't share the same heat pipes.
That's a really good thermal design here.
Okay, turning to the bottom,
things aren't very pretty on the bottom of this laptop
but, still, let's talk about those vents.
Again, two fans on each side here,
nice symmetrical design, you get your feet.
They do have weird things here in the middle,
it's a little fin that sticks up.
This laptop does have some flex to it
and that's to prevent that,
so when you are pressing down on the keyboard area
and I think that this little ridge
and this one in the center here
will help prevent the laptop from basically pressing down.
Little weird but at least it's functional.
You have a bunch of screws too and a bunch of stickers.
Not a big deal.
You do also get some speakers at the bottom edge here.
Normally, I'd frown upon that,
but because of the chassis design of this,
you'll see when I open it up,
the sound actually plays out of the bottom
and through the top, too.
It's actually very good audio.
So don't let these fool you,
they're actually better than they look.
Okay, opening up the Prestige,
and we can see all sorts of cool designs up here.
Very thin bezels for you guys
who are big on bezel design here.
They put very thin ones on this.
Now, you still get the chin here at the bottom,
which is unfortunate, but three out of four ain't bad.
The display itself: 14 inch, Full HD, anti-glare, non-touch.
The touch is going to be a bit of a downside.
But MSI surprise me.
They always use actually very good panels.
This one too, this is 100% SRGB for color accuracy,
and 79% Adobe RGB.
That's actually a very good display for this.
Now, like I said, it's Full HD and it's mad,
but I actually really enjoy working on this
and that's super important.
Brightness is good, too.
It's a little over 300 nits at some points.
Not the brightest display out there
but it's definitely, I would say, good enough.
The trade-off with having those super thin bezels, though,
is going to be the webcam at the bottom.
And, boy, is it at the bottom.
They didn't even put it up here.
But if you're a big webcam user,
probably not the best placement.
I wish MSI would've done something different.
We did see at IFA 2018, I believe it was,
ACER had it in their display here and it was very thin,
and so they're obviously shrinking the stuff down.
MSI missed the boat there.
You also get some microphone holes.
It's an alright webcam.
Nothing outstanding but it works.
All right, now looking at the top tech,
and we get this now familiar design that MSI is using,
including their gaming laptops,
where have this sort of venting grill at the top.
Also allows the sound to come out to the top, too,
which is really nice.
And they put the power button in the center.
Little strange of a design but, whatever, it works.
Looking at the keyboard itself,
we've got silver keys, very large keys, too.
MSI does some strange keyboards.
I have to give them credit.
They have their own design language here
and it actually works.
I actually really enjoy typing on this keyboard.
It's similar to the GS65 gaming laptop.
Wide keys, they are silver, though.
They are backlit but that also means the backlight
is only going to be useful when it's really dark.
You turn it on now,
it's just going to actually make the keys harder to see.
Trade-off with the silver keys.
But the traveling is good on there, the click is good.
I really enjoy typing on this.
Now, let's get to some of that design stuff
that's a little bit weird for MSI.
You have the space-bar here,
which is off-center from the entire device,
but the benefit there is you get
a nice home row key there that's full size.
You also get full size arrow keys
and, for some people, that's a huge deal, right?
A lot of companies sacrifice those arrow keys
to move everything over.
They didn't.
You get full ones here.
You also get a function key, only on the right side,
which you can then use for the power and volume.
You don't have one on the left.
Again, a little bit of a weirdness
but I had no issue typing on this or getting used to it.
Again, coming back to odd designs,
let's look at this trackpad.
It has these beveled corners on the top.
It's a decent sized one, it's a little bit short,
but overall it works pretty well.
It is a precision trackpad, which is really nice.
It clicks well enough
and you do get a fingerprint reader built in there.
And, I'm actually surprised,
this is actually a pretty good fingerprint reader.
Really no issue with it.
But, again, weird design.
You have the whole keyboard here,
then you have the space-bar off-center,
and now you have the trackpad off-center from the space-bar,
and the trackpad is still off-center
from the center line of the device.
So everything is off-center,
and that's just, to me, a little bit weird.
Had they moved this over, though,
it would've probably been too far.
So, weird designs choices,
not the most aesthetically pleasing
but, functionally, it all works together.
Okay, let's get to the specifications,
so this is running a Core i7-8550U.
Now, that's not the brand new Whiskey Lake
that's coming out in a few months
but, still, it's a really good processor.
It gets very good performance.
It's on par with the MateBook X Pro
in terms of single-core and even multi-core,
but I will say the Dell XPS 13
does outperform with the same processor
and that's just because Dell
has a very good thermal solution,
and they jack up the TDP on that processor.
So, if you still want the best Core i7,
the XPS 13 is still going to be the champ there.
But, still, no complaints.
It performs well.
Now, when it does come to graphics,
you get an MX150 GPU and that's partly
because there's just no Iris Pro Graphics
for the eighth generation.
It's a good processor.
It gets around the same scores as the MateBook X Pro,
and it will give you that extra productivity boost
when you need it for graphics and even gaming.
Pretty solid choice.
Next up is storage, so you can get up
to 512 gigabytes of SSD and it looks to be a SATA drive.
Not quite as fast as the NVMe type,
so you're looking at a 500 read and 500 writes,
which is not the fastest out there.
It feels okay when you're running it
but, clearly, there's going to be a compromise here,
so a little disappointed there
with the SSD but it works overall.
You also do get 16 gigabytes of RAM.
Overall, this results in a pretty fast package,
I really had no complaints.
Don't forget this is just running a Full HD display,
so the graphics get to push pretty hard.
I also didn't really have too much with thermal throttling.
The processor and everything works very well,
and the fans weren't too loud, either.
You barely hear them.
When the system is just running normally,
they don't even really come on.
It's only when you're pushing it for, say, gaming
or doing a Windows update you'll actually hear them.
Now, let's talk a little bit about battery life.
It's a 50 Watt-hour battery,
which is a pretty solid size for a 14 inch laptop.
It's rated at around 10 hours.
I was getting around seven or eight.
I was actually pretty happy with the performance here.
For battery life, I don't see as much of a problem,
mostly because you're just pushing a Full HD display,
which helps a lot to preserve that battery life.
Now we're going into software.
MSI still packs a lot on there,
including some Norton AntiVirus,
which, thankfully, you can of course remove.
They also have their Dragon Center
and a bunch of sound stuff,
and it's a little bit more than I prefer in an Ultrabook
but at least you can uninstall a lot of it,
and the experience has actually been okay.
The sound is a lot better than I expected.
It's not the most bassy system out there
but because they're top-firing
and it kind of comes out of the top of the body there,
it actually sounds pretty good for audio.
You combine that with that really good display
and it's a pretty good experience for those
who like productivity and multimedia.
Okay, let's bring it all in.
The PS42, yay or nay?
Actually, kind of yay.
I really enjoy using this laptop.
That is, I like typing on it, I like looking at the display,
I like the trackpad and the audio, to me, was very good.
At 2.6 pounds or 1.2 kilograms,
it's also a very light and nimble 14 inch laptop.
To me, the overall experience, it's just kind of fun to use.
Now, there are some issues I have.
The Type-C port is just weird; I wish it would charge.
At the very most, I wish it was Thunderbolt 3,
which I really would expect at this sort of price point.
That, to me, seems to be like a major oversight.
And the aesthetics of it is a little bit weird
but does it interfere functionally?
To me, that's an important distinction.
But it's also the price tag here.
This is 1,299, whereas something like the MateBook X Pro
with a similar configuration is 1,499.
For that $200, though, you're going to get
a 3,000-by-2,000 display on the MateBook.
It's also a touchscreen.
It's also a very good touchscreen.
You get a giant trackpad,
you're going to get much better Dolby Atmos audio,
you're going to get a way faster SSD on that thing,
we're talking like 3,200 read speed.
So that extra $200 goes way further
with the MateBook X Pro
and, to me, that's sort of the bar here.
That's one of my favorite laptops.
You also have something like the XPS 13,
which is also a really amazing laptop,
which has a maximum performance,
in my opinion, for a Core i7.
But if you want to spec it out, similar to this,
you're going to go up into the $1,800 price tag.
But, still, I consider it to be a solid option.
Nonetheless, I really like this laptop.
I enjoy using it: the typing is good,
the screen is good, the trackpad is good,
it's very light to carry.
So I think MSI is on the right path here
and I want to give them a little bit of encouragement.
I think you're doing some good stuff
with this premium Ultrabook category that they're going for,
but they do need to make some improvements here.
None of this stuff is deal-killers
but they're important distinctions
that I think you should know about.
Overall, though, pretty good attempt from MSI.
I can't wait to see what they do next.
All right, so that wraps it up for this review.
Now, if you have any questions about the PS42,
leave them in the comments below, I'll try to answer them.
If you want more information about this laptop,
we'll have buy links in the description
so you can go and check it out yourself.
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Thanks for watching, take care, everyone.