MSI Prestige 14 Review: A portable powerhouse that's too hot to handle

Are you a creative professional who cannot leave your gaming past behind? If you are, then you’ll be interested to know that MSI recently updated its Prestige lineup with 10th Gen Intel processors and up to Nvidia GTX 16 series graphics. The new MSI Prestige 14 recently dropped by our office for a review.

While MSI might not be India’s most popular brand; it does offer high-performance laptops at some pretty competitive prices. The new MSI Prestige 14 starts at Rs 99,990, which puts it in the league of laptops like the Dell XPS 15 and HP Spectre x360. But before we dig deeper into pricing, let’s see this one fare when put through its paces.

Design

In terms of design, it doesn’t really get any better than this. The new Prestige 14 is light, portable with a premium build. The aluminium lid has the MSI’s dragon shield logo but doesn’t screen gaming, which is a good thing when you consider the primary purpose this machine isn’t gaming. The laptop has a grey finish with blue accents on the edges. To put it simply, the new Prestige 14 is light, looks good and feels premium.

Getting a good assortment of I/O on a thin and light laptop is not easy, but the new Prestige does a pretty decent job. In terms of ports, the Prestige 14 gets two USB 2.0 Type-A ports and a headphone jack on the right as well as two Thunderbolt 3 USB-C ports on the left, one for power delivery.

Keyboard and trackpad

The Prestige 14 gets a tenkeyless keyboard with the deck and the keys in the same Carbon Grey shade as the lid. The keys on the laptop are quite large as compared to its competitors, and that’s something I really liked.

Additionally, the key travel is pleasing, while the spacing between the keys is also good. The keyboard deck offers some flex while typing or gaming and features white backlighting.

The notebook boasts an oversized tracked with a biometric fingerprint reader on the corner and Windows Precision drivers. The touchpad is smooth, and there are absolutely no issues with palm rejection, which is a big plus point given the size of this trackpad. The surface of the trackpad is glass, which enables effortless navigation. Overall, I was delighted with the keyboard and trackpad on the Prestige 14.

Display

The MSI Prestige 14 is outfitted with a 14-inch FHD (1080p) display with an IPS panel. However, the panel is not the best around, both in terms of brightness and colour accuracy. At around 280 nits, the screen on the Prestige 14 is good for gaming and consuming entertainment, but below the benchmark for content creation.

Additionally, the Prestige 14 covers 100-percent of the sRGB and 75-percent of the Adobe RGB colour gamut. The screen also has some pretty slim bezels on either side. While this isn’t a screen I would recommend for serious content creators; the Prestige 14 does come with Ultra HD IPS panel option that should be capable of delivering above-average results.

Performance

When I first got this laptop, I was really excited; six-core CPU, Nvidia GTX 16 series graphics, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB NVMe SSD, all in a compact 14-inch laptop. The Prestige 14 had all the requirements for an excellent laptop for content creation, daily multitasking and even casual gaming, all but one; more on that later.

On Geekbench 4.3, the Prestige earned a commendable score of 17,296, which is higher than most laptops at this price range. We also ran a couple of Cinebench R20 benchmarks, which leverages the CPU to render a complex image, resulting in around a 1350-plus average with the CPU clocking at an average speed of 2.4 GHz and temperature measuring little over 70 degrees Celsius. On 3DMark Fire Strike, the Prestige 14 was able to hit 6,591 points, which is higher than the class average, thanks to its dedicated GTX 1650 Max-Q graphics card.

When it comes to casual gaming, the Prestige 14 is configured to handle almost most titles at 60fps, or so we thought. The single fan and two heat pipes under the hood are nowhere near capable of cooling both a six-core CPU and dedicated GPU. The result is a fair bit of thermal throttling.

And that lack of cooling and thermal throttling is going to impact render time on apps like Adobe Premier. The Prestige 14 will perform well when using the CPU or GPU under heavy load. However, video editing aggressively uses both the CPU and GPU and the cooling system on the Prestige would not be able to keep pace. Moreover, we talked about “undervolting” earlier, which isn’t something an average consumer who buys a laptop should have to worry about.

Battery

The Prestige 14 packs a reasonably sized 52-watt-hour battery, which lasted about six and nine hours in our tests. The first test involved watching movies on Netflix, streaming videos and browsing the web while opting for headphones over laptop speakers, while the second test involved routine multitasking between MS Office and Chrome (With as many as seven tabs opened at a stretch). The Prestige ran for 8 hours and 25 minutes in the first test and five hours and 47 minutes in the second test. The screen brightness was reduced to 50-percent during testing.

Audio and webcam

The MSI Prestige 14 features a pair of bottom-firing speakers that are capable of doing a pretty good job when watching a movie or streaming a video in a quiet room. Additionally, the audio software offers slight enhancements, but it doesn’t really make much of a difference.

The Prestige fits a 720p webcam on the thin bezel on the top. For professional use, we’d recommend an external video camera, but this one gets the job done for regular video calls. You can also use the infrared camera to log in with facial recognition using Windows Hello. The laptop can also be unlocked using the fingerprint sensor with Windows Hello.

Verdict

When it comes to pricing, the MSI Prestige 14 is almost one of the best value buys; “almost”. Before rendering a 4K video and playing Overwatch in multiplayer; this notebook earned an easy recommendation in my book. It has powerful hardware, a lightweight design that looked every bit as premium as the competition, decent I/O, a good screen and a good battery. But after pushing the Prestige 14 to its limits; it was safe to say that it doesn’t do too well under pressure.

However, the MSI Prestige 14 is still a powerful thin and light laptop, and since it isn’t really advertised as a gaming laptop, it would be difficult to judge it based on gaming benchmarks. In the time that I used it, I really enjoyed it as a daily driver. In fact, this is the best 14-inch laptop I have used. So if you have the budget and you aren’t going to be partaking in heavy video editing or competitive gaming, then you should definitely consider the Prestige 14.

After a bit of research, I found that the similarly-configured MSI Prestige 15 has better cooling and offers double the gaming performance, and handles video editing much better as well, but those come at a marginally higher price and lesser portability.