Lighter than Air! MSI Prestige 13 AI+ Evo with Lunar Lake
October 22, 2024
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MSI Prestige 13 AI+ Evo - The Ultimate Lightweight Laptop
Summary
This is a super lightweight 13-inch laptop with a beautiful display and very long battery life, but we don't recommend it at its sticker price.
Table of contents:
Introduction
We like this laptop a lot, but there are a few "gotcha"s to be aware of. Its keyboard has an odd layout, especially where its arrow keys are far too small and smushed together with the page up and down keys. The Prestige also doesn't deliver on the full benefits of a Lunar Lake processor like other laptops we've tested. Specifically, you will hear fan noise during performance tasks which was not present on the other new ones we've tested so far from Intel's latest release. Lastly, at this price point, we expect to see more creature comforts like a nicer trackpad or high refresh rate display. Taking all of this into consideration, we would like this laptop a lot more if it was closer to the $1,000 price point. But, we still think it's a nice device for the right person, so let's go through the details.
Chassis: Light and Airy
This chassis is nearly identical to the model from earlier this year with the same ports, satin finish, and small size at 13” and 2.2 lbs. In terms of its build quality, its keyboard deck is very sturdy given how thin it is. The laptop can be opened with one hand and then when you open it, the back of the laptop lifts up a bit off the desk angling the keyboard slightly. This leads to better airflow and potentially improved ergonomics. Some people like it like our video editor Colin, and others like Josh don’t.
Rounding out the chassis itself, we like how extremely light it is, it's perfect for throwing in to a larger purse or smaller backpack.
It is a nice feeling laptop but it does not feel nearly as premium as the Dell XPS 13, Microsoft’s Surface Laptop 7, or the MacBook Air.
Ports: Expansive
On the left side we have an HDMI 2.1 port, two USB-C ports that both support Thunderbolt 4 speeds, and a headphone mic combo jack. On the right we have a USB-A 5 gigabit port, a Kensington lock slot, and a micro-SD card reader.
We’d say the ports on this device are a bit more expansive than we usually see for a laptop this size, which is good. However, it’s a little annoying that all the display and USB-C ports are on the left side, so you can only charge or dock it from one side of the laptop. Cables could get in your way depending on where you need to plug in.
Keyboard: Unusual, but Enjoyable
This is one of the things I actually enjoy quite a bit on this laptop, but it does take some time getting used to with its nonstandard layout and smaller keycaps. It has an ample 1.7mm of key travel and it also has a satisfying click to it. This could get annoying if you prefer a more quiet keyboard, but I like it a lot. We found it very comfortable to type on most of the time, but there are some drawbacks.
Its arrow keys are very small where they are smushed together with the page up and down keys on the left and right side. This often caused us to accidentally press the Page Up and Down keys when using the arrow keys to navigate like on an excel sheet. Also on the nonstandard layout, they’ve added an extra backslash and pipe key next to the copilot key. This is especially odd considering they already had one in its normal place below the backspace button and they could have added back in the right-ctrl key there.
Trackpad: Pretty Average
The new trackpad seems mostly identical other than its surface being a little grippier and that could be due to it being new. Overall, it still feels accurate and responsive, and the click isn’t overly loud for a mechanical one. It’s small of course, but that’s to be expected on this size of laptop. Ethan gave it a 7/10 for a mechanical trackpad, but a 5/10 if you’re comparing it to the more accurate haptic trackpads on a lot of comparable devices at this price point.
Those nicer haptic trackpads can be found in the MacBook Air, the Dell XPS, and the Surface Laptop.
Speakers: Too Quiet
The speakers, with or without their included audio tuning, felt very quiet at max volume. They lacked bass or a dynamic sound stage.
The MacBook Air 13 continues to have the best speakers in a 13 inch laptop. They get much louder, sound much fuller, and have more clarity.
Display: Nearly Perfect
The display is one of the places this laptop earns its name “Prestige”. It comes with a 2.8k OLED panel with a wide color gamut. It has a crisp 255 pixels per inch which means small text will look very clear. It also gets over 400nits brightness and avoids the oh-so-common screen door effect on comparable OLEDs we’ve seen from other manufacturers. Screen door effect is when you can see colored pixels peeking through on bright content, which again, is not present here. It is not a touchscreen, but it has a nice matte finish, so with its brightness you’re less likely to see distracting reflections or glare in a brighter room. Its main negative is its 60Hz refresh rate which is very disappointing to see at this price point.
Upgradeability: Almost None
This new lunar lake Core Ultra 7 258V CPU comes with Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and 32GB memory all integrated on the chip. This is great for faster memory speeds, but it does mean you can only upgrade the SSD. This limited upgradeability is the same as the prior model which had soldered RAM. Our model we have here has a 2TB SSD, but the $1,400 online listing only comes with 1TB.
Performance: Some Good and Some Bad
As we’ve gone over in our Lunar Lake deep dive, these chips don’t perform great in multi-core, but they do well in single-core and integrated graphics. The chip in this Prestige is the same one we received in our other two Lunar Lake laptops, the 258V, so we know it pretty well at this point. It has 8 cores, 4 performance and 4 efficient, and does not support multi-threading. One of the things we noticed on this chip in both this laptop and our Slim 7i Aura is that it performed better in its default/balanced mode for some things, and better in performance for others. So throughout this section we are showing you its best scores.
Starting with Geekbench, which tests a variety of common performance tasks, we see the new Prestige do the worst in multi-core out of competing 13-inch devices other than the HP Aero. That laptop beats this one significantly in the price factor, though. The prestige does well in single-core here, which means many applications will feel snappy and responsive. However, it’s not as strong as the higher end X-Elite chip in the XPS or the M3 in the MacBook Air.
Onto Cinebench, which tests the processor when it’s maxed out, we see that this chip does a little better here, but it’s still behind most of the competition in multi-core. In single-core it keeps a solid hold on third place behind the X-Elite and the M3.
In general, its CPU performance is good enough for light tasks, but this is not a performance focused laptop by any means.
Graphics: Wonderful
On the other hand, the graphics performance that Lunar Lake brings to the table is still solidly in the lead here among Windows competitors. In Wildlife Extreme, which runs natively on all hardware including Snapdragon and Apple, it does 15% better than the X-Elite chip and only 5% worse than the M3’s 10-core GPU.
In Timespy, which does not run natively on all hardware because it is a Direct X 12 gaming benchmark, we see the Prestige take the lead, which isn’t surprising. This means this laptop is definitely capable of some light gaming or basic creative tasks.
Heat & Fan Noise: It Depends
Now, when it comes to heat and fan noise, we want to emphasize how quiet it is in both its balanced and quiet modes during light tasks. It barely makes any noise or gets warm to the touch. This is a significant improvement on the prior model, which had noticeable fan noise on its default balanced mode- even for light tasks. We had to run that laptop on Silent mode, which further nuked its performance.
For those who want to run performance tasks on this laptop, let’s now get into how it feels and sounds for you. Its keyboard temps in our 10-minute Cinebench torture test were around the same as many of the competing laptops, but its fan noise is bad. It ties with the Framework for being the loudest laptop on our list. This is especially disappointing considering one of the sacrifices of Lunar Lake that we’ve seen in other laptops, is that you get less multi-core performance, but you get significantly better heat and fan noise.
This all being said, compared to the older Prestige 13 with Meteor Lake, it is still an improvement. It doesn’t get as hot to the touch, and it doesn’t throttle its performance in this 10-minute torture test like the prior model did. This new version is able to maintain its performance and consistently draws more power.
When it comes to heat and fan noise during graphical tasks, it didn’t get as loud or hot as it did in CPU intensive tasks like we mentioned earlier. Instead, we see it as one of the coolest of the bunch on the keyboard deck and about 5 dBs quieter than it was in Cinebench testing. Basically, light gaming is going to be comfortable even on the laptop’s performance mode.
In summary, keep it on its default or silent mode for non-graphical tasks and you’re likely to have a much more comfortable experience with this laptop than the prior generation. Just be aware that it does lower its multi-core performance even further.
Battery Life: Best in Class
Now, believe me when I say we’ve saved the best for last. This little Prestige lasted just over 20 hours on battery on our video playback rundown! This means you may even be able to get 2 days of light use on it.
To test battery drain with the lid closed, we tested its overnight between shifts and it only saw a 2% drain over 16 hours with Chrome and Word open. This means this MSI Prestige 13 dethrones the Zenbook S 14 with Lunar Lake and becomes our new battery life king, at least for light use.
When it comes to performance tasks, it does not throttle its performance while on battery, in fact it did a bit better here. During our 30 minute Cinebench loop, it drained about a 3rd of it’s battery. It does about as well as comparable devices in our list. Yet, it still drains faster than laptops like the MacBook Air 13 or its previous iteration with Core Ultra series 1 aka Meteor Lake. As we showed you earlier, this one can sustain drawing more power for longer than the prior model.
One thing we did want to note is that MSI advertises this laptop as having a 75wH battery on their site, but we saw its design capacity was only 72 watt hours when we did its battery report. That’s why you’ll see this in our graphs. However, its full charge capacity on this same report was 76, so it isn’t actually far off from advertised. We just thought we'd give you a heads up.
Conclusion: A Bit Overpriced
This brings us finally to pricing, which is where we feel this laptop does not do very well. It has an MSRP of $1,400 which seems to be the norm for these new Lunar Lake devices at launch. For that money you are getting a laptop that performs well for light users, has a vibrant display, very long battery life and is extremely lightweight. But its CPU performance is not great and when doing performance tasks it gets loud. The laptop also feels cheap at this price point, its keyboard layout may cause you to mispress keys, and the laptop in general misses out on premium creature comforts such as a fast refresh rate display. We feel this laptop should really only be bought at around $1,000 price tag. Check out our website’s new price tracking feature to make sure you’re getting the best deal on it.
Alternatives
If you’re not sure about the Prestige now that we’ve given you all this info, here are a few other ones you may like better:
If you want something portable for checking emails and writing up documents, you might be just as happy with the HP Pavilion Aero 13 which goes on sale frequently for under $700. You will be sacrificing some battery life, and the display isn’t quite as nice though.
On the flipside if you do want a premium portable 13inch laptop, the MacBook Air or Surface Laptop 7 is the way to go. They would both be a better buy so long as your applications will work on MacOS or the ARM version of Windows, which most basic applications do.
But, when Josh asked me personally which 13 inch I’d buy if he randomly handed me $1.4k to spend on laptop? I told him I’d buy the ProArt PX13 in a heartbeat because that’s the one I’ve had my eye on ever since we reviewed it. It’s far more powerful than this laptop with its AMD Zen 5 processor. It also has dedicated graphics, its screen is just as nice, it feels more premium, it doesn’t have annoying fan noise, and it’s a 2-in-1.
Wrap-Up
We hope we helped you make a decision on which 13 inch laptop is right for you! Please make sure to use our links here on the site to support the work we do here. Thanks for reading and we hope you have an awesome rest of your day!