Msi Prestige 14 Flip Ai+ Review: An Ultraportable For Arc Raiders, Thanks To Intel's Panther Lake

MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ is simply a amazingly powerful ultraportable held backmost by a clunky trackpad. It's a shame, really, because it's very well-designed and acknowledgment to Intel’s Panther Lake CPU, it tin moreover tally games for illustration Arc Raiders without breaking a sweat. It besides has much ports than astir bladed and ray machines, its OLED surface is awesome for productivity activity and astatine 3 pounds it's easy to transportation astir each day. But curse its mechanical trackpad — why does it moreover beryllium erstwhile Apple, Microsoft and others person been capable to instrumentality fantabulous haptic touchpads for years? Come connected now.

Hardware

With its grey case, subdued creation and somewhat chunky bezels, nan MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ doesn't precisely make a striking impression. From afar, you tin show it's surely thin, and it's besides clear that MSI made nan astir of its slim lawsuit by shoving successful 2 USB-A ports, 2 USB-C connections, a azygous HDMI larboard and a headphone jack. It would person been bully to person immoderate benignant of SD paper slot too, but astatine slightest nan Prestige 14 tin link to older accessories, monitors and TVs without a USB-C hub.

Once you prime it up, though, nan Prestige 14's three-pound framework feels downright remarkable. It's conscionable a tad heavier than nan 2.7-pound MacBook Air, but its surface size straight competes pinch nan 3.4- to 3.6-pound 14-inchMacBook Pro. The "Flip" successful its sanction besides intends it’s versatile, pinch nan expertise to rotate its surface into a tablet mode, aliases a assortment of shelter configurations.

What makes nan MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ genuinely absorbing is its Intel Core Ultra X7 358H processor, which features 16 cores and a maximum velocity of 4.8GHz. Specifically, it features 4 P-cores for speedy performance, 8 businesslike E-cores and 4 low-power E-cores. The Ultra X7 is besides 1 of nan caller Panther Lake chips pinch gobs of graphics powerfulness successful Intel's Arc B390 GPU, giving them acold much gaming chops than erstwhile ultraportable chips. The laptop besides sports 32GB of RAM, which is nan perfect magnitude for superior productivity work, and a roomy 1TB SSD.

The Prestige 14's stylus-friendly 14-inch OLED surface helps to distract from its mundane lawsuit design, pinch nan emblematic heavy achromatic levels and fantabulous opposition I admit from OLED, together pinch bold 100 percent DCI-P3 colour coverage. It makes conscionable astir everything look great, though I wish MSI offered much than a 60Hz refresh complaint — a 90Hz aliases 120Hz surface would make scrolling done web pages look acold smoother.

And speaking of nan stylus, that’s tucked distant astatine nan bottommost of nan Prestige 14. I didn’t find it peculiarly useful for notetaking, but for those who do it’s easy to stow away. It’s conscionable excessively bladed for extended handwriting, and anyone doing superior notetaking aliases integer creation would beryllium amended disconnected pinch a larger stylus aliases dedicated drafting pad.

In-use: A stealth performer

After seeing a comparatively slim Lenovo Panther Lake laptop reaching 190 fps successful Battlefield 6, utilizing only Intel's built-in Arc B390 GPU, I was eager to spot really that caller hardware would execute successful nan existent world. Simply put, nan MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ didn't disappoint. It scored 10,169 points successful PCMark 10, nan highest people we've seen yet connected a Windows PC.

And yes, that includes plentifulness of powerful gaming systems for illustration nan Alienware 16 Area 51 (8,245 points) and nan Razer Blade 18 (7,703), some of which were moving Intel's last-gen Core Ultra 9 275HX chip. Of course, those systems person faster GPUs, for illustration NVIDIA's RTX 5080, but PCMark 10 doesn't thin excessively heavy connected graphics performance. The Prestige 14 edged adjacent to nan M5 MacBook Pro successful Geekbench 6's multi-threaded CPU test, scoring 16,633 points compared to Apple's 18,003. But nan MacBook Pro reigned ultimate successful nan single-threaded test, scoring 4,310 points compared to nan MSI's 2,864.

When it came to games, nan Prestige 14 reached a amazingly precocious 80-95 fps successful Arc Raiders while playing successful 1080p pinch mean graphics settings, arsenic good arsenic AMD's FSR3 upscaling and 2x framework generation. Without those AMD features, Arc Raiders ran astatine 45-50 fps, which is still respectable for an ultraportable. To my surprise, Intel's XeSS upscaling exertion wasn't disposable successful Arc Raiders during my testing, but there's a bully chance that instrumentality would eke retired moreover much performance. (I've asked Intel astir XeSS's omission, and will update erstwhile I perceive back.)

In Cyberpunk 2077, The Prestige 14 deed 35 fps while playing successful 1080p pinch default settings. Flipping connected Intel's XeSS framework procreation bumped that to 45 fps. If you're utilized to nan 30 fps capacity of consoles, those numbers are still vaguely playable, but they surely autumn short of nan 60 fps PC players typically look for. It's champion to deliberation of nan MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ arsenic a laptop wherever you tin play games sometimes, possibly while you're distant from your gaming desktop. It's surely not a replacement for a dedicated gaming laptop.

For much prosaic productivity tasks, for illustration juggling dozens of browser tabs and editing ample images, nan Prestige 14 didn't break a sweat. Its patient 32GB of RAM gave it plentifulness of breathing room for multi-tasking, and dissimilar different ultraportables, I didn't announcement immoderate superior capacity dips while moving connected battery. On that note, nan Prestige 14 besides lasted a whopping 22 hours and 15 minutes successful PCMark 10's artillery benchmark. That's nan highest fig we've ever seen from a laptop, and it's a promising motion of what we tin expect from different Panther Lake systems.

While there's intelligibly plentifulness to emotion astir nan MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+, I was little impressed pinch its mechanical trackpad and keyboard. Perhaps I've been spoiled by nan much responsive haptic trackpads from nan competition, but nan Prestige 14's old-school trackpad kept slowing maine down pinch missed clicks and different annoyances. The laptop's keyboard felt likewise cheap, pinch a deficiency of extent and comfortableness that I've travel to expect from different ultraportables successful nan $1,299 value range. Even aft hours of testing, I had a difficult clip typing connected nan Prestige 14 astatine afloat velocity without errors. It's a shame that MSI gets truthful overmuch right, but is hindered by these anemic components.

Should you bargain nan MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+?

As 1 of nan earliest Panther Lake laptops connected nan market, nan $1,299 Prestige 14 Flip AI+ is simply a coagulated machine, if you're consenting to place its touchpad flaws. More than thing though, nan Prestige 14 makes maine excited to spot what different PC makers connection pinch Intel's caller chips. It's taken a while, but now Intel yet has immoderate decent title against Apple's M-series hardware. The era of gaming pinch ultralight machines is yet here.