With the 11th Generation Intel processor taking its stride in the market, manufacturers are quick to update their new lineup of laptops with those processors to bring the good things to the consumers really quick. We have seen some laptops powering the 11th Gen Processor and MSI Prestige Evo is another laptop that arrived at our doorstep to be reviewed. That said, we are going to dive into the performance right away and highlight the little changes over its predecessor which lucky for us, we have reviewed it.

The Changes

The Dawn of a New Logo

Last year, when MSI announced the new Modern and Prestige globally, they unveiled the new MSI logo which has a much angular and a professional look going on – the new face of the company. The Prestige 14 Evo we reviewed comes with that badge slapped on the back of the display – I have to say it does look better than the Dragon emblem, but it seems like that will be reserved for their gaming laptop.

Slightly Altered Keyboard

The keyboard on the new Prestige 14 Evo has minor changes – like the Control Key on the left is much wider and the function key has been moved to the right side, cutting the Right Control key into half. As for the rest it’s pretty much the same, and that applies to the weirdly unnecessary two forward slash keys – one along with the alt gr, and function key.

Performance

One of the key important aspect of the Prestige 14 Evo, is the specification and performance it packs. As I mentioned earlier it did get the new 11th Generation treatment under the hood. What else does the laptop has under the hood? Well, here goes:

  • 11TH Generation Intel Core i7-1185G7 4 Cores 8 Threads @ 3 GHz
  • Intel Iris Xe Graphic (Integrated GPU)
  • 512GB PCIe NVMe SSD

We did the usual benchmark that’s required – to find out how well the device performs. So, we did PCMARK10, 3DMARK, Cinebench R20, Blender, V-RAY and CrystalDiskMark. That said here’s how it performed.

In Blender, the laptop manages to finish the whole BMW render in about 7 minutes 3 seconds which feels like it’s a little slow but comparing with the previous Prestige Laptop we reviewed, turns out there isn’t much change to notice as it scored pretty much the same. This is a rather interesting incident because most of the time new processors tend to perform better but it only shows that Intel needs to improve a little more than usual.

Proceeding with Cinebench R20, we notice a good score – the kind that tells that the processor has improved. As we all know the 1185G7 has 4 cores and 8 threads. In its single core performance, it was able to hit a score of 564 points and a multicore score of 2107 respectively. In comparison to the previous 10th Generation Prestige, the new Evo 14 does a better job in single core but in multi core, it scored in the similar range of 2000+ points.

1/3

Moving on to UL Benchmark suite, that is PCMARK10 and 3DMark – we tested the following: In PCMark 10 we did an extended test with tests the Laptop pretty extensively and we got a score of 4647 beating the 10th Gen Prestige which scored a 4034. In 3DMark, we did TimeSpy and got a good score of 1851 which shows that the Iris Xe showing its magic moment and better score as compared to the 1168 points with the 10th Gen Prestige.

Finally, we have CrystalDiskMark and V-Ray which are benchmarks that you can just check it above. Now, the thing about the Prestige 14 Evo is that it still sets the same precedence to be the laptop it was back then and does exactly that. I love how their Prestige laptop was ahead in certain aspect back then – like the inclusion of Thunderbolt port for better extensive use case, a good display. What comes of as a disappointment is that it lacks a proper SD Card slot but instead has a Micro SD Card slot, knowing the fact that MSI positions this laptop as a creator’s choice of sorts and it still has the same USB 2.0 on the side like why?

In all honestly, other than the performance there isn’t much to say about the laptop but conclude.

Conclusion

The real question: Is the Prestige 14 Evo still a good laptop to buy? It depends. Knowing the fact that it still didn’t lose any crucial ports like the 3.5mm Headphone jack and has the updated performance to go along with it, it’s a good laptop. Just that certain flaws with the laptop from its predecessor is still seen – like the battery life could be better, trackpad does get in the way due to its wider presence, the unacceptable USB 2.0 Port is absurd – but I guess we have to wait for MSI to completely revamp the entire thing to get fixed in the future.

Thanks to MSI Malaysia for gracing us with the Prestige Evo 14 for review.