The MSI Prestige 14 Evo Review: Testing The Waters Of Tiger Lake
by Brett Howse on December 17, 2020 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
- Intel
- MSI
- Tiger Lake
- Notebook
Battery Life
Always an important aspect to any thin and light laptop is battery life, and we’ve seen a trend over the last several years slightly reverse, as Ultrabooks started to pack in larger and larger batteries to increase battery life. 50 Wh batteries were pretty typical, but manufacturers managed to cram in more, with some devices offering 60 Wh or more. But more battery is more cost and more weight, so with more efficient displays, processors, and other components, manufacturers have been moving back down and it seems like around 50 Wh is again the average for this current generation. MSI fits in here with a 52 Wh capacity battery in their 14-inch laptop.
To measure battery life, we test all laptops at the same screen brightness of 200 nits, and then run them through three tests. Our most demanding test is our web one. We’ve recently added the PCMark 10 battery life test as well for Modern Office. This one also adds in a performance element though as it completes a fixed amount of work in a ten-minute interval. Any device that can complete the work quicker is able to idle for a higher percentage of the time. Finally, we have movie playback from the hard drive, which is the easiest test for any modern system.
Web Battery
MSI delivers excellent battery life in our most demanding test. The device is not quite at the top, but over ten hours is a solid result in this quite demanding workload. Intel’s Evo platform makes a good first impression.
Looking at the normalized results, where battery size is removed from the equation, the efficiency is very solid especially considering the display size. It is not class leading, but it is still a good result.
PCMark 10 Modern Office
The PCMark 10 result at 200 nits is over 80 minutes longer than the web workload, and the runtime of over 700 minutes is the second highest we’ve seen since we added this test to the suite. Tiger Lake appears to be able to get its work done quickly and then drop down to a very efficient idle.
Movie Playback
Modern processors are able to offload video decode to fixed-function hardware in the GPU, and Intel’s media block has proven to be very efficient in the past, so it should not be a surprise to see that the new Intel Xe media block continues to deliver exceptional efficiency.
Looking at the movie playback in terms of how many long movies can I watch on this laptop shows that the MSI Prestige should be able to easily get through almost any long flight or road trip without recharging needed. You can almost watch The Avengers seven times straight before the device powers off.
Charge Time
Part of the Intel Evo specifications is not just battery life and performance, but also charge time, with devices needing to be able to deliver four hours of runtime on just 30 minutes of charging. MSI includes a multi-voltage adapter which peaks at 65 watts delivery at 20 volts, which charges over the Type-C ports on the notebook. Let’s see how it fares.
The total charge time is not very special, with the laptop needing about three hours to completely charge, but that includes the notebook sitting at 98% charge for an entire hour. It is not surprising to see the charge rate slow dramatically as the device gets close to being full, but an entire hour to finish the last two percent is a very long wait. Those that do need a quick top up though will find that the lower half of the battery does charge very quickly, with the laptop hitting 50% in just 34 minutes. Depending on your workload, that means the device definitely meets its Intel Evo ratings.
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zodiacfml - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
Can't read this. Why would one consider this unless one doesn't know of ASUS' Zephyrus G14 lineup?JfromImaginstuff - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
Short answer: businessRookierookie - Monday, December 21, 2020 - link
1. The G14 is considerably heavier and thicker2. The G14 doesn't have a webcam or card reader
3. The G14 doesn't have Thunderbolt
4. The G14 doesn't have dedicated navigation keys
If you don't need a gaming laptop, the better question is, why would one consider the Zephyrus G14?
mikk - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
Handbrake Transcoding (Hardware): the tester has zero clue about what he is doing. Is he testing the FF/low power or the much slower Hybrid of Quicksync and what target usage did he use: quality, balanced or speed. The fully fixed function encode is really fast on Tigerlake. Pretty sure he did use the slow Hybrid+quality/balanced encode.lmcd - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
The quality levels on fully fixed function encode are NOT uniform across vendors and is useless as a benchmark.mikk - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
The main problem is that he most likely didn't use the fully fixed function encode mode from Tigerlake, the performance gap would be much bigger to the software version and most likely he is comparing the fixed function of Renoir against Hybrid from Tigerlake. Without any infos about the encode settings this is an useless benchmark. And even for the software version, no info what x264/x265 preset he did use. This is not a good test.Spunjji - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
"most likely he is comparing the fixed function of Renoir against Hybrid from Tigerlake"What's your basis for making that claim?
watzupken - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
I feel this is where testing of laptop is very tricky because of the many variables that will affect performance. This MSI laptop is probably one of the best Tiger Lake implementation out there for sure just by virtue of the performance. But the performance of laptops with Tiger Lake CPUs vary widely (I guess it is not just a problem with Tiger Lake, but across any CPU used) depending on how aggressive is the power setting, and how well they implement cooling. Also, comparing it with the Acer Swift 3 with a Ryzen 7 4700U may not be the best idea considering its almost an entry level laptop, just a notch above the even more budget Aspire series. So I expect the parts/ components and cooling to be inferior to the Prestige 14 Evo which will affect performance results across the board.Spunjji - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
This is a fair point. The Swift 3 has been shown a few times to be a fairly poor showing for the Ryzen 7 4700U, whereas this implementation is one of the best for Tiger Lake. Most devices with TGL do not hit these performance levels, let alone sustain them.Of course, that's a problem for platform comparison - for comparing the actual devices available to consumers, it's fair to show how close the cheaper devices can get to the performance of a premium device.
hubick - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
I knew I wanted Tiger Lake w two Thunderbolt 4 ports and Xe graphics (not discrete, for Linux compat), and was seriously looking at this, but ended up ordering a Razer Book 13 instead. The Razer looks a little more well made plus has vapour chamber cooling.When I was researching, I tried using MSI's online chat to ask if this had eGPU support over Thunderbolt, and the rep connected, but never responded after 30 minutes, and then "hung up" on me. I figured if that was what I should expect from MSI support, best to stay away. Not that I have any faith in *any* company to provide decent support anymore *sigh*.