MSI Prestige 14 with cooling mods+undervolt

[GhostRoadieBL]

MSI Prestige 14 A10SC

I know there’s been a bunch of reviews out there but this is my first ever review and I won’t be following the curve with this one. I’ll be coming at this with a techie/tinkerer point of view, not settling for what it is but what I have made it at the end of a few simple and cheap mods. Mostly cooling, some software but we’ll get into that later. 

 

**Update** Sep 20 2020

Had to add an anecdotal note to this review about my RMA experience with MSI. It sucks. So less than a month of ownership with this laptop and I'm having to RMA it for presumably a motherboard issue. Press the laptop power button, light comes on, screen stays dark, fans don't spin up, 5 sec later light goes out. Plugged in, unplugged, cleared CMOS etc etc etc tried all the normal user things and no joy. This is the moment when the suck showed up, started the RMA process with tech support. They were very quick to reply with the RMA form address. Same day filled out and submitted the form, instructed to wait up to 2 days for an email response with the number and shipping info. Waited 3 business days, nothing. Resubmitted the the form, waited 3 more business days, still nothing. Contacted customer support and currently have an email directly to the RMA handler, 3 more days... nothing. 

I am very fortunate to have a desktop and my work is good with me getting things done remotely but currently I would be looking at 9 days of lost work and the laptop hasn't even left my house for repairs yet. It's getting very close to the go out buy another laptop to cover the lost time I should be progressing. 

This is obviously just a one off experience but it felt like I should be open about this lack of contact from MSI. I expect when you buy a $2000+ niche market laptop you should receive customer service to match. 

 

Basic Specs

I7-10710U 6-cores, 12-Threads @ 1.10GHz base & 4.70GHz boost

16GB LPDDR4-2133 Soldered

NVIDIA GTX 1650 Max-Q 4GB

512GB SATA M.2 drive

Wifi 6 and Blutooth v5.1

14.0” UHD 3840x2160 “IPS-Level” display 

52Whr Battery 3-Cell Lithium-Polymer

 

Jumping right into the specs they are pretty overkill for your standard ultrabook form factor. The i7 is fantastic for bursty loads and single or multithreaded applications just fly along. Yes, it’s not an i9 or Ryzen 7 with a dozen cores but it’s an ultrabook not an inch thick desktop replacement and MSI has balanced this part extremely well with my needs. The integrated graphics are more than enough for 4k streaming and keeping the more power hungry gpu dormant.

 

Speaking of the gpu, usually you would find integrated graphics on any laptop this size, and only if you are lucky would you find a low power MX series chip. Having the GTX1650, even the lower wattage Max-Q edition, was a welcome change in this form factor and led me to believe this machine has some gaming chops if I can keep thermals in check. 

 

Apart from the graphics chip every other spec is cookie cutter to just about every other ultrabook in this price range. XPS13, HP X360, even all previous gen Razer Blade Stealths are/were lacking a gpu for mid level gaming but have i7s in 4 and 6 cores, 16GB of RAM, M.2 SSDs, wifi, bluetooth all the same. 

 

 

Ports and Looks

Now that the specs are out of the way the outside walkaround of the laptop is a welcome surprise compared to the competition in this form factor. On the right, 2x USB2.0 type-A, and a combo Headphone Mic jack. On the left a pair of USB-C Thunderbolt3 ports, battery indicator LEDs and a microSD card slot. I am so disappointed with the inclusion of USB2.0 on a 10th Gen Intel laptop. Looking into the CPU it is possible MSI ran out of PCIe lanes with 8 for the GPUs, 4 for the M.2 and 4 for the thunderbolt3 ports which were clearly the focus during development. I haven’t completely embraced dongle and bluetooth life yet but mice and game controllers don’t need super fast USB so I will forgive MSI for these ports. Some people will tell you the MicroSD card slot should be a full size one, I disagree. With dongle life being forced upon thin and light laptop users anyway, you normally find a much better full sized SDcard reader on the dongles you are using so just use that instead of doubling up ports.

 

Build quality is subjectively excellent with some flex in the monitor and base but I have never found myself in a situation where I twist my laptop, screen wobble is well controlled and the machining looks great with the polished accents and clean lines. On top of the laptop you’ll find a, in my opinion, very large MSI dragon. Not the best look for those going into an office with people who only see a “gaming” logo in a sea of Dell and Lenovos. I fixed this with some carbon fibre pattern vinyl I found on Amazon. The metal milled trim made cutting the vinyl to size super easy, just press out all the bubbles and work your way around the edge before carefully running an exacto blade around the outside. It’s half the price of D-Brand and I have meters of the stuff left for other projects. 

 

Bottom of the laptop is mostly vents and very nice thick feet to keep the laptop off the desk even while closed. The monitor hinge lifts the base of the laptop slightly allowing more airflow and I will have to wait to see how long those silicon pads last while opening and closing the laptop. 

 

 

Inside

Couple of Phillip head screws, including a "factory sealed" one and we’re inside the laptop to see the layout and immediately start to see some of the extremely tight design work needed to shrink the hardware to this form factor. 

 

Starting at the top you have the excellent display hinge, the fin stack and nice long heatpipes integrated to both the cpu and gpu heat-plates, a good sized fan for how thin this laptop is, GPU power delivery and memory in the middle, soldered RAM in the mid right, right speaker, 52 Whr battery, SATA SSD in an NVME slot, replaceable Wifi card and left speaker. Immediately I noticed some odd choices with down firing speakers which could easily have been turned around to face the user. 

 

Most annoying was definitely the top spec model with a SATA M.2 SSD in an NVME capable slot?! MSI shame on you! This laptop is being advertised as a “prestige laptop” and they decided to put slower storage into a fast interface, I don’t know if this was Canadian market specific as most reviews I found were with NVME in that slot so buyer beware if you were planning on utilizing the higher throughput of NVME. 

 

The soldered RAM is unfortunate and only 2133MHz as well but based on how tightly packed this board is already I can understand the choice, still would have liked to see 3600MHz chips to compensate for the fact you can’t replace it. Not that it makes much of a performance difference but higher binned chips give me more peace of mind than whatever low spec bin these would have been pulled from. 

 

 

Performance

My priorities for laptops are based on what I use the most, so a great screen is a must, a decent keyboard/trackpad, decent gpu to do some light gaming. The rest of the laptop is not as important as the performance in the other parts are so small it’s not practical to prioritize a ~5% performance difference. 

 

MSI has found a gem of a screen in the UHD model. Very bright, as bright as my Samsung S9 at full blast. Contrast is not AMOLED good but it’s very close, inky black scenes look great and the extra contrast you get from the higher brightness makes the perceived darkness that much better. Colours are accurate and the laptop comes with a calibration page for this specific monitor. 60Hz is great for what I tend to need out of a laptop and sacrificing the brightness, resolution and colour accuracy for higher frame rates would only make sense if I was making money from or extremely focussed on competitive gaming. The resolution is insane for this screen size, there really is no reason for this many pixels for this small a screen. I would have been happy with less resolution if it didn’t mean sacrificing colour accuracy, contrast and brightness but so far Dell is the only manufacturer I’ve seen making a laptop with equally good low and high resolution options. 

 

The keyboard takes a bit of getting used to with the extra space between the short travel keys. Responsiveness is great coming from my other keyboards like the Logitech K380,400 and 830 models. I prefer slim keys with medium travel and the Prestige keyboard is just right for quick messages and even some longer more purposeful documents and emails. I don’t think I would sit down and write a 500 page novel on it but typing this review proves to me I can still touch type long documents without pecking at the keys like I do on most laptops. This is most likely due to the lack of key wobble and my preference for small keyboards. 

 

Speakers on this laptop are pitiful and weak, there is very little reasoning to why these sound so cheap and lifeless while the screen begs you to watch movies on it other than savage cost cutting. Overall the speakers do the job for youtube and podcasts but movies with any bass just don't live up to even the cheapest laptops I’ve used. Don’t even try to enjoy music on them. I was lucky to have a decent set of headphones which brings up a strange software quirk I haven’t run into before, when you plug in your headphones the Realtek driver doesn’t allow you to have a separate volume for the headphone jack, whatever volume your speakers were on becomes the volume for the headphones. With speakers this bad needing to be pushed to 40%+ for decent volume, if you don’t remember to turn the speakers down first, you plug in your headphones and blast your face off as the headphone amp is excellent and powerful. 

 

In its stock form this laptop’s single fan and microscopic fin stack can keep up with the processor and integrated graphics chip on its own during light use and media consumption, and is not horribly loud at full speed when you load up the CPU heavily. It will be audible at times but it’s a pleasant woosh rather than the whine you find on some ultrabooks. This story changes when you load up the GPU and CPU where temperatures climb quickly and the cooling just can’t keep up without throttling the processor down. I challenge anyone to show me a situation where this is the “in use” case for programs. Everything I have tried across games, photo editing, video editing, CAD, nothing fully loads and holds the CPU and GPU at 100% unless I am rendering/exporting. Typically if I am rendering I won’t be sitting watching the progress bar so output timing being 60sec faster than the competition isn’t as important to me as the other aspects of the laptop.

 

 

Modding

I started modding with cooling upgrades, most important was repasting the CPU and GPU with some Noctua thermal paste I had from a previous system build. At the time of writing I have started to find more articles about Conductonaught losing performance after a year or two in some laptops so I didn’t want to go that route for the few extra degrees of cooling I would get. Next on the list was new thermal pads for every RAM chip and power delivery component on the board. This also included removing the label from the SSD and adding a thermal pad to it instead. I don’t expect to really need it on the drive but more thermal mass is never a bad thing. While the heatsink was off, adding thermal pads to the bottom of the fan housing also allows extra cooling from the topside of the laptop, foam isolation pads were removed from the fin stack and replaced with more thermal pads creating a very laminar flow of air which should reduce air noise from the cooling. 

 

My last hardware upgrade had nothing to do with cooling but general improvements in sound quality from the mediocre speakers. Next up was removing the speakers on both sides and adding thermal pads underneath for better bracing and isolation from the chassis. This actually increased the volume output and a bit of the sound quality at higher volumes. 

 

Software tweaks were unnecessary but welcome for temps and general snappiness of the system. Undervolted the CPU by 100mV, I can probably get a bit more to 150mV but this works for right now until I tinker with it some more. Windows DeBloater script from GitHub is also very welcome to remove all the junk microsoft thinks you want but will never use.

 

Next up was limiting the MaxFPS in NVIDIA Control Panel to 65fps to save on GPU load and give back some cooling headroom to the CPU while gaming. Also in the control panel is texture filtering, ambient occlusion to Performance, and power management to maximum performance. All these settings don’t seem to change image quality at all to my eyes, and even more true on such a small display that anti aliasing doesn’t need to be over 2-4x to have super smooth lines. 

 

The usual power settings in windows were also done; “turn off HDD” to 0min, “Wireless adapter power saving” to max performance and “PCIe link state power management” to off. These settings don’t make much difference other than a very slight snappier feeling when waking the laptop from sleep. 

 

Performance after the mods is night and day to what it was before, temps are now in the mid high 60s under max load even while gaming. Fan is super quiet and I have yet to hear it max out anymore. Speakers sound a bit better, still not good enough to be impressed enough to recommend them for movies but a step in the right direction.

 

 

Gaming

I’m betting this to be a divisive section for some readers. To preface my opinions, these are all after the cooling and software mods. I play games first and foremost for entertainment, not online competition to win so I don’t often end up playing things like Fortnight, CSGo, Dota etc. My games of choice are mostly the Borderlands series, Monster Hunter World, Horizon Zero Dawn, Forza Horizon series, Detroit Become Human style games etc with some Rocket League and local multiplayer indie games. The vast majority are very pretty games which are more than good enough at 50-60fps and rely on great looking screens for cinematic gameplay. 

 

That being said, everything I have thrown at this laptop has been achingly gorgeous and runs at Medium to High 1080p 60fps without any problems. No stuttering frames, loading levels is quick, literally everything I could want from such a portable laptop. With such a great display even having to turn down the graphics or resolution doesn’t make games any less impressive. I have had more compliments on how games look on this screen than I have ever heard from friends with high refresh rate gaming laptops with comparably low brightness and contrast. This is definitely one of the most eye catching gaming capable laptops on the market. 

 

Conclusion

Pros:

Screen is absolutely stunning, accurate and bright

After modding temps are well controlled 

Fan is quiet even at load

Great gaming performance for a thin and light

 

Cons:

Speakers are junk, drivers need some quality of life improvements

Have to mod to get back performance which should be there from the factory

SATA M.2 SSD in a premium laptop is shameful

Price if you don’t use the dedicated GPU

 

Edited September 20, 2020 by GhostRoadieBL
updated with RMA info.