The Prestige 14 is a thin and light laptop from MSI featuring Intel’s latest 10th gen
CPUs, but there are some important things you need to know before considering it, so
let’s get into it in this detailed review.
Starting with the specs my unit has Intel’s new 10th gen Comet Lake 6 core CPU, the i7-10710U,
lovely name. Before 10th gen, the U series chips only went up to 4 cores, so this now
means we can get 6 cores in thinner and lighter machines. Unlike Ice Lake though, this is
still based on their 14nm architecture.
For the graphics my unit has an Nvidia GTX 1650 Max-Q, so while not a gaming laptop,
I’m expecting it to be capable of playing some lightweight games. I’ve got 16gb of
memory in dual channel, a 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD for storage, and a 14” 4K screen, though
it’s also available with 1080p.
For network connectivity it’s got the latest WiFi 6, so 802.11ax support and Bluetooth
5. It’s too thin for an ethernet port though, so you’ll have to use a dongle if you need
that.
The Prestige 14 is also available with some different spec options, including lower powered
MX250 graphics or Intel integrated graphics, you can find examples and updated prices linked
in the description.
The Prestige 14 comes in 3 colours, rose pink, pure white, and carbon grey which is what
I assume mine must be. The metal lid is grey with a subtle MSI logo in the center, while
the metal interior is similar, with a blue trimmed accent around the touchpad, and there
was a similar blue trim around the edges of the device. Overall the build quality felt
pretty good as it’s all metal, and all edges and corners were rounded and smooth.
The weight is listed at 1.29kg, though mine was a little under this. The total weight
increases by almost 400g with the 90 watt power brick and cables for charging included,
so definitely on the lighter side.
It’s quite a portable 14 inch machine and was less than 1.6cm thick. The slim width
and depth allows it to have 6.5mm thin screen bezels on the sides.
The 14” 4K 60Hz IPS-Level screen has a matte finish and viewing angles were fine. It’s
also available with a 1080p option, however expect different results with that one compared
to what I’m about to show.
MSI calibrate the display for you out of the box to Delta-E less than 2. I’ve measured
the panel with the Spyder 5 and got 100% of sRGB, 93% of NTSC, and 98% of AdobeRGB. At
100% brightness I measured the panel at 578 nits in the center with a 980:1 contrast ratio,
so overall the results are better than most laptop panels that I’ve tested, great colours
and high levels of brightness.
Backlight bleed wasn’t perfect, but when practically looking at darker content with
my own eyes I didn’t notice any issues, but this will vary between laptop and panel.
There was some screen flex despite the lid being metal as it’s on the thinner side,
the hinges are found out towards the corners, and the screen can bend all the way back.
The F12 key is a shortcut to flip the screen, this is meant to allow you to quickly push
the screen back and flip it to show things to someone in front of you so you can both
see.
Despite the lighter weight, it was still possible to open up with one finger, no problems using
it on my lap despite the lift design.
When you open the lid, the back of the screen comes into contact with the surface underneath,
raising the back of the laptop up putting it on a 5 degree angle. This should help improve
airflow for cooling, and also gives the keyboard a slight angle for typing on.
Despite the thin screen bezels, the 720p camera is located above the display in the center,
and it has infrared for Windows Hello support.
The camera looks about average and the audio sounds pretty good. This is what typing on
the keyboard sounds like, and this is what it sounds like when we set the fan to max
speed, so it doesn’t get that loud and you can still hear me over the fan.
The keyboard has white backlighting which illuminates all keys and secondary key functions.
Key brightness can be adjusted between 3 levels or turned off by using the F8 key. I saw someone
complaining about a lack of numpad, but it’s a 14” machine so not sure what you’re
expecting.
I liked typing with the keyboard, the subtle 5 degree tilt was nice. It’s got 1.5mm of
key travel, and here’s how typing sounds to give you an idea of what to expect.
There was some keyboard flex while pushing down hard, likely due to there being fewer
contact points between the device and the table when open, but I never had any issues
with this during normal use.
The touchpad uses precision drivers, clicks down anywhere you press, and like many of
MSI’s other recent laptops it’s stretched out and is quite wide. In general I enjoyed
the extra space, and I never had any problems with it getting in the way while typing, the
times that I did touch it while typing nothing happened so the palm rejection seemed decent.
There’s also a fingerprint scanner in the top left corner of the touchpad, and I found
this to work quite fast for unlocking the laptop.
On the left from the back there are two USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C ports with DisplayPort support,
and both support Thunderbolt 3, followed by status LEDs, and Micro SD card slot.
On the right from the front there’s a 3.5mm audio combo jack and two USB 2.0 Type-A ports.
There’s nothing on the back, other than rubber feet towards the corners which come
into contact with the desk once it’s opened up, while the front just has a subtle indentation
for opening the lid.
The base of the machine is metal like the rest, and the pattern up the back half is
all holes for air intake. The bottom panel can be removed by taking out 7 Phillips head
screws, though it was a little harder to remove it from the front.
Once inside the battery is right down the front, with the single M.2 storage slot next
to that with both SATA or PCIe support, and WiFi card next to that. There’s only one
fan for cooling and memory is soldered to the board and cannot be upgraded.
The two 2 watt speakers are found on the left and right sides towards the front. They sounded
ok, about average but a bit tinny with minimal bass. They get loud enough at maximum volume,
but there was a bit of vibration in the palm rests, and the latencymon results looked alright.
The Prestige 14 is powered by a 3 cell 52 watt hour battery, and I’ve tested it with
the screen brightness at 50%, keyboard lighting off and background apps disabled. Battery
life was fairly average, while just watching YouTube it lasted for 5 hours and 12 minutes.
While playing the Witcher 3 with medium settings and Nvidia’s battery boost set to 30 FPS
the battery only lasted for 48 minutes at 30 FPS, one of the lower results. At this
stage it dipped to 23 FPS, lasting for an hour and 8 minutes in total.
The Prestige 14 supports Type-C charging, this is what the included power brick uses,
and either of the Type-C ports can be used.
It comes with MSI’s Creator Center software installed which is basically the control panel
to manage it. By enabling creator mode we can configure the amount of resources and
priority of specific applications to try and optimize performance for them. We can use
this to swap between three performance modes, which from lowest to highest are ECO, Comfort
and Sport. We’ve also got the option of leaving fans on auto speed or enabling cooler
boost for max speed.
Let’s take a look at thermals next. Just to recap how cooling works, air is pulled
in underneath the machine, which is raised up a little when the lid is open and then
air gets exhausted through the vents below the screen. There’s just a single fan inside
with two shared heatpipes between CPU and GPU.
Thermals were tested with a 21 degree Celsius ambient room temperature. At idle both the
CPU and GPU were on the warmer side, no real issue with this, but as you’ll hear later
the fans were still spinning in this mode and this is warmer than most other laptops.
These worst case stress tests were done with the Aida64 CPU stress test with CPU only checked
and the Heaven GPU benchmark at max settings at the same time. I haven’t tested game
thermals like I normally do for reasons you’ll see soon.
Temperatures increase as we step up through the performance modes, as higher CPU power
limits become possible, and more power equals more heat, but also more performance. Although
the CPU wasn’t thermal throttling in these tests, the GPU was thermal throttling in sport
mode with the fan on auto, but it was possible to lower this a fair bit with coolerboost
enabled. Interestingly the undervolt didn’t lower temperatures, instead it seems to try
to take advantage of the headroom.
We can see this when looking at the clock speeds, where there was a 400MHz boost simply
by applying the undervolt. Despite this change, we’re still around 400MHz below the maximum
3.9GHz all core turbo boost speed of the i7-10710U. It was also interesting that the GPU clock
speed was highest in ECO mode, where the CPU was lowest. Its seems that in comfort mode
and above, the power is instead directed towards the CPU, resulting in lower GPU performance
at all other levels. Just for comparison, in the best case stress test result, the Prestige
15 with same specs gets a bit higher to 3.6GHz on the CPU and 1.5GHz on the GPU. This lower
GPU performance will be important later when we look at the gaming results.
This is also seen when looking at the power levels, the GPU was using the most power in
ECO mode, then lower in the others. In a GPU only stress test, it would run at its 30 watt
limit, but with the CPU active we can see it’s way down. The CPU sees the opposite
of this, where each mode raises the power limit, 5 watts in ECO mode, 15 watts in comfort,
then 20 in sport mode, rising to 25 with coolerboost enabled.
CPU performance is much the same in CPU only workloads, in Cinebench I found it would only
run up to 25 watts in performance mode. The same CPU in the slightly larger Prestige 15
was just under a multicore score of 3000 points in Sport mode with the same undervolt applied,
so just goes to show laptops with the same specs aren’t equal.
Given this is meant to be a content creators laptop I’ve also tested Adobe Premiere by
exporting one of my laptop review videos. The results were on the lower side when compared
to the other machines tested, and the chassis what quite hot to the touch under this load.
Interestingly, the smaller Razer Blade Stealth 13 performed a fair bit better, despite having
a quad core CPU, though the 1650 Max-Q was a little more powerful, but that is also a
smaller 13” machine.
As for the external temperatures where you’ll actually be putting your hands, at idle it
was warm and already at 40 degrees, for comparison most other laptops I test are around 30 at
idle. With the stress tests in eco mode it was only a few degrees warmer, comfort mode
was even warmer, getting into the low 50s now. Sport mode with the fans on auto speed
was pretty similar, then it was perhaps just a touch cooler with coolerboost enabled. The
left wrist rest in particular felt quite warm compared to the right side or touchpad, as
the body is metal it will absorb heat.
Here’s what the fans sound like during these different tests.
At idle in comfort mode the fan was still audible, and this is in spite of it being
about 10 degrees warmer than most other laptops at idle on the keyboard. Running the stress
tests in eco mode was on the quieter side, and comfort and sport modes were the same,
but still quieter when compared to most other laptops under this test. With coolerboost
enabled it’s getting louder and closer to the average I see with most laptops.
Next let’s take a look at gaming performance. Although this is not designed as a gaming
laptop, we should still be able to do some light gaming on the Nvidia 1650 Max-Q graphics
- at least that’s what I thought going into it.
Let’s start out with Dota 2, as it’s not a particularly resource heavy title. Generally
this is a CPU bound test, and low and medium settings were performing fine, but there was
a big hit observed with high and ultra.
Fortnite was tested with the replay feature, and this is a less demanding game that typically
runs well on anything, however that was not the case here, where even low settings failed
to offer a 60 FPS average.
Overwatch was tested in the practice range, and the results were also not great for a
game that would normally have no trouble running on this level of hardware, with low settings
needed for an above 60 FPS experience.
CS:GO was tested with the Ulletical FPS benchmark, and this is another CPU bound test that usually
runs well on pretty much any modern hardware. While it was possible to hit 100 FPS with
all settings at minimum, these results are still far lower than expected. The Prestige
15 for comparison got more than double this.
To put things into perspective, here’s how the Prestige 14 compares with the Prestige
15, both have the same CPU and GPU, but power limits are different, so again just goes to
show that you can’t judge purely on specs alone. This seems to be due to the lower GPU
clock speeds and power levels that were hit with the GPU when under combined CPU and GPU
workloads, such as gaming, it just doesn’t seem to handle both well. Like we saw in the
stress tests, while gaming the 1650 Max-Q sat at 15 watts, half of its 30 watt limit
that it can achieve when the CPU is idle.
Yeah I could have gone down to 720p, but when you consider that the Prestige 15 has the
same specs and it could play much more demanding games without issue, I don’t think I should
have to with these specs.
Next let’s also take a look at how this config of the Prestige 14 compares with other
laptops, use these results as a rough guide only as they were tested at different times
with different drivers.
In Battlefield 5 I’ve got the Prestige 14 highlighted in red, and due to it having one
of the lowest GPUs I’ve tested it’s down the bottom of the graph. The Prestige 15 above
it didn’t do great in this game either, but it’s still coming out more than double
the FPS with same specs.
These are the results from Shadow of the Tomb raider with the built in benchmark at highest
settings. Again the results were extremely poor, and while it may be possible to get
playable frame rates at lower settings, the point here is that it’s essentially got
the same specs as the Prestige 15 which is scoring 3 times higher.
These are the results from Far Cry 5 with ultra settings in the built in benchmark.
This time the Prestige 15 with same specs has more than a 4 times higher average FPS,
so the Prestige 14 really isn’t handling gaming well at all.
Now for the benchmarking tools, I’ve tested Heaven, Valley, and Superposition from Unigine,
as well as Firestrike and Timespy from 3DMark, just pause the video if you want a detailed
look at these results.
I’ve used Crystal Disk Mark to test the 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD and the speeds were pretty
good. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to test the Micro SD slot as I don’t have cards
that size.
For updated pricing check the links in the description, as prices will change over time.
At the time of recording in the US the MSI Prestige 14 with these same specs is going
for $1700 USD, or for $300 less there’s the same thing with half the storage but 1080p
screen, while the i5 model with half the storage is $500 less than the configuration I tested.
Here in Australia we’re looking at $2800 AUD for the config I tested, while the same
specs but with 1080p screen instead of 4K is $500 less, so you’re really paying for
that 4K screen.
With all of that in mind let’s conclude by looking at the good and bad aspects of
the Prestige 14 laptop.
First let’s address the price. There are of course cheaper and more powerful laptops
available, but they’re typically going to be larger and heavier, you’re definitely
paying more for a smaller and lighter machine with fair build quality here. If you’re
willing to go just $100 more you can get the same specs in the slightly larger Prestige
15, which as we’ve seen actually performs well compared to the Prestige 14. There’s
enough of a difference for me to pay a bit more to get the 15, but that’s me, let me
know if you want to see a full detailed comparison between the two.
Performance was the next major issue I had with the Prestige 14, when using the CPU and
GPU together, the GPU in particular seems to be negatively affected, which significantly
lowered gaming performance. Basically it doesn’t really seem to pass 15 watts, I guess in an
attempt to keep it getting too hot. While not a gaming laptop, I think the game tests
are a good way of seeing practical performance, and we did also observe this resulting in
lower Adobe Premiere performance compared to other similarly specced machines. My guess
is to prevent it getting too much hotter they have to cap the power limits of the device.
Thermals weren't an issue per se, but they’re being controlled by limiting performance to
lower levels.
At first I thought this just might be a constraint of the smaller 14 inch footprint, but then
remembered the smaller Razer Blade Stealth 13 beats it in Premiere exporting and gaming,
but to be fair the Stealth was a little over 100g heavier despite being smaller, so it
seems like MSI are prioritizing the more portable footprint at the cost of performance.
Due to the smaller size, there’s also limited upgradeability. Pretty much all you can change
is the WiFi card and the single M.2 storage drive, so make sure you buy it with the amount
of memory you need from the start.
Outside of those issues though, with the 4K screen it does look great, and two Thunderbolt
ports with Type-C charging is nice to have, though a bit strange to see USB 2.0 at this
price point. Battery life was pretty average, the wide touchpad offers plenty of space to
move around, and having both fingerprint and IR camera to unlock was convenient.
If you’re considering the Prestige 14, I’d suggest looking at the slightly larger Prestige
15 instead, as the performance was just so much better despite having the same specs,
the battery is larger, there’s no USB 2, and memory isn’t soldered to the board,
all for just $100 extra and 1 inch larger. I’d only consider the Prestige 14 if you
really need to prioritize smaller and lighter at the expense of performance and some features.
If you’re doing less resource heavy work, then I doubt you’d ever notice any problems.
Let me know what you thought about the MSI Prestige 14 laptop down in the comments, and
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