MSI CreatorPro X17 Review | PCMag

When it comes to laptops, the two always fighting for the title “most powerful” are gaming laptops and workstation laptops. With high-octane processors and graphics chips, the two categories are similar, but one focuses on gaming and the other on demanding work tasks, like engineering, design, and complex 3D work. Now, gaming hardware maker MSI's CreatorPro X17 (starts at $3,449.99; $4,899.99 as tested) aims to apply its pixel-pushing chops to a laptop for professionals.

This laptop is the fruit of a crossover attempt, toning down the looks of the MSI GT77 Titan gaming machine and retooling it for serious professional work. The result is an absolute monster, delivering an enormous 17-inch laptop with some of the most powerful components ever assembled. This laptop isn't very portable, and it's anything but cheap. But, if you want the most powerful mobile workstation we've tested this year, this is it. For that we give the MSI CreatorPro X17 an “outstanding” 4.5-star rating and our Editors' Choice award.

MSI CreatorPro X17: Configured for Power

The MSI CreatorPro X17 is armed with some of the most powerful components on the market. The beating heart of the machine is an Intel Core i9-12900HX, a boundary-pushing mobile chip that's designed to bring desktop-class performance to laptops with 16 cores (eight Performance cores, eight Efficient cores) and up to 5GHz of speed.

That beastly CPU is paired with an Nvidia RTX A5500 graphics card, a professional GPU that delivers the power of the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti gaming hardware and adds independent software vendor (ISV) certifications for everything from media editing to automotive design and structural engineering. Tools that have been certified include ANSYS, Autodesk, Dassault SolidWorks, Graphicsoft ArchiCAD, Siemens PLM, and more. From industrial design to chemical engineering, from animation to healthcare, this is one workstation that's built to handle it all.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Our review unit (model A12UMS-057) is the top-of-the-line version of the CreatorPro X17, boasting Intel Core i9 processing and Nvidia RTX A5500 graphics, along with 64GB of memory, 2TB of SSD storage, and an impressive 17.3-inch 4K display. At $4,899.99, it's far from cheap, but it is mighty powerful.

The $3,449.99 base configuration touts a more modest Intel Core i7-12800HX processor, Nvidia RTX A3000 graphics, 32GB of RAM, and just a 1TB SSD. A middle configuration ($3,649.99) adds the Intel Core i9-12900HX processor, but keeps the lower-tier GPU and smaller memory and storage options.

Workstation Power Meets Gaming Design

From the outside, you'd be forgiven for mistaking the MSI CreatorPro X17 for its gaming-oriented sibling, the MSI GT77 Titan. Both use the same 0.91-by-15.63-by-12.99-inch chassis, with plastic and aluminum construction, marked by a chunky design that prioritizes airflow, complete with massive ventilation grilles along the back edge of the chassis and powerful cooling fans inside. And it's not lightweight, either, tipping the scales at 6.82 pounds. But that's just the laptop; the accompanying 330-watt power brick adds several pounds to the total carry weight.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Though it's not a gaming laptop, MSI's gaming roots show through with a SteelSeries keyboard, complete with per-key RGB lighting. With a full-size keyboard and half-width numeric pad, it's a decent set of keys, paired with a glass-surfaced touchpad that measures 5.12 by 3.23 inches.

But that quality is tempered by the fact that the dimensions of the laptop make for a raised keyboard deck that's not all that comfortable to use. MSI also includes a separate Bluetooth mouse with the unit, so you can get precision cursor control without even using the touchpad.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

The display is one of the largest and best we've seen on a workstation, with 4K resolution and fantastic color and brightness. The thin-bezel design looks sharp, and wide viewing angles make it easy to share the screen with a colleague. But the real surprise is the panel's 120Hz refresh rate.

Though usually a gaming feature, that high refresh rate can absolutely come in handy when dealing with high-frame-rate media. MSI calls its best screens “True Pixel” displays, a label that also denotes factory-calibrated color accuracy, so this one is ready for color-critical work right out of the box.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

A helpful fingerprint reader is just below the keyboard for biometric security, along with a 1080p FHD Webcam that looks great for video meetings. We wish it had a privacy shutter, but that's a very minor quibble.

The Connectivity: No Lack of Ports

The MSI's chunky design means that there's plenty of room for ports big and small. On the left is a power jack, a pair of USB 3.2 Type-A ports, an SD card reader, and an audio combo jack.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

On the right is a third USB port, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, a mini DisplayPort, a full-size HDMI output, and an RJ-45 Ethernet jack for wired networking.

The MSI also boasts Killer WiFi 6E with a 2×2 antenna array for wireless networking, and Bluetooth 5.2 for audio and peripherals.

Testing the CreatorPro X17: MSI Puts Its Money Where Its Mouth Is

For our benchmarking and evaluations, I compared the MSI CreatorPro X17 with several systems, most of them competing workstation laptops. First, I looked at the most similar workstation, the powerful but pricey Lenovo ThinkPad P15 Gen 2. I also included the Dell Precision 7560 and a recent Editors' Choice award holder for high-end workstation laptops, the HP ZBook Fury 15 G8, which are the best we've seen for working in CAD or 4K, respectively.

We previously had another Editors' Choice holder sharing the title with the ZBook Fury, the HP ZBook Studio G8, but I decided to leave room for a broader representation of choices in our testing comparisons. To give an adequate measure of how the workstation MSI fared against a similarly equipped gaming machine, I also compared it with the MSI GT77 Titan, which is a very similarly equipped system, but lacking the professional, ISV-certified graphics offered by the CreatorPro X17.

Productivity Tests 

The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage. (See more about how we test laptops.) 

Three further benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). 

Our final productivity test is workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop(Opens in a new window), which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

You simply cannot ignore it: The CreatorPro X17 is an absolute powerhouse, leading the pack in nearly every test we run. This was especially evident in tests like Cinebench and Geekbench, where the Core i9-12900HX's raw processing power delivers scores that nearly double other workstations' best results.

If you need to do more, the MSI CreatorPro X17 has the muscle to do it, often in half the time. The only real competition for the X17, in fact, is the MSI GT77 Titan, which offers extremely comparable results, thanks to a very similar design and component selection.

Graphics Tests 

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark: Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics), and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). 

To further measure graphics performance, we run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

In graphics tests, as with processor performance, it's no surprise that best-in-class hardware delivers leading scores. The CreatorPro X17 again led in most tests by a healthy margin, facing the stiffest competition from the equivalent MSI gaming machine, the GT77 Titan. Likewise, you'll be able to run just about any kind of 3D modeling or 4K rendering project with performance numbers like these.

Workstation-Specific Tests 

The real test of any workstation doesn't lie in our usual productivity benchmarks or graphics tests, but in our workstation-specific testing, where we stress the high-powered hardware with simulations of actual workstation applications. We start these tests with a professional media editing test in Adobe Premiere, using another version of PugetBench to pit the system against a challenging sequence of video manipulation, to really push the limits of what the laptop can do.

We follow this up with two workstation tests. The first, Blender, is an open-source 3D suite for modeling, animation, simulation, and compositing. We record the time it takes for its built-in Cycles path tracer to render two photo-realistic scenes of BMW cars, one using the system's CPU and one the GPU (lower times are better). BMW artist Mike Pan has said he considers the scenes too fast for rigorous testing, but they're a popular benchmark. 

Our most important workstation test, SPECviewperf 2020, renders, rotates, and zooms in and out of solid and wireframe models using viewsets from popular independent software vendor (ISV) apps. We run the 1080p resolution tests based on PTC's Creo CAD platform; Autodesk's Maya modeling and simulation software for film, TV, and games; and Dassault Systemes' SolidWorks 3D rendering package. The more frames per second, the better.

The same hardware that lets the CreatorPro X17 put up great numbers in our performance and graphics tests enable the machine to produce some of the best scores we've ever seen in a mobile workstation. That high-octane performance results in the speediest completion times in Blender CPU and GPU rendering tests, and superb performance in simulated workloads in Creo, Maya, and Solidworks. 

In those last few tests, we see slightly better numbers offered by the similarly-equipped MSI GT77 Titan. However, you'll get that extra power at the expense of the reliability and peace of mind that your software is guaranteed to work properly as you render complex designs.

Battery and Display Tests 

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel (opens in a new window) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. 

For color testing, we use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

In our battery test, the MSI lasted just 6 hours and 29 minutes—in video playback. That's far from a demanding load, but it's not out of line with other workstations, which are closer to 7 or 8 hours. The outlier in this bunch is the Lenovo ThinkPad P15 Gen 2, which wowed us with more than 10 hours of battery, but none of these machines will last a whole workday off-plug when actually put to work.

MSI has equipped the CreatorPro X17 with a 99.9Wh battery, which is the largest that you can legally bring in an airplane carry-on, so the battery life isn't short due to lack of battery bulk. No, this is all about power, with a high-res screen, high-wattage components, and the necessary cooling hardware chewing through the battery even for something as simple as video playback. This isn't a machine built for portability or battery efficiency; it's built for raw power, and these battery life results reflect that.

Display-wise, the MSI goes toe-to-toe with the best around, matching the leading 4K workstation HP ZBook Fury 15 G8 in color reproduction, and delivering an impressive 445 nits of max brightness. All that adds up to a 17-inch workstation that looks great, but won't go light on the power, so don't forget to bring that giant power brick.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Verdict: The Premium Workstation for Unmatched Power

The best components combine with a proven, performance-maximizing design to make the MSI CreatorPro X17 one of the most formidable workstations you can buy. It dominated nearly every test we put it through, and its capabilities frequently trounce some of the best competing workstations we've reviewed. It's enough to unseat the Lenovo ThinkPad P15 Gen 2 as the best premium workstation in terms of raw performance. But independents will pay dearly for that leading performance, with a design that's big and heavy, and a price tag that's even heavier.

If you're less concerned with reliability and software compatibility, you can opt for the gaming-focused MSI GT77 Titan, but it's almost the same machine, aside from a few cosmetic RGB lights and a gamer-grade GPU. The MSI CreatorPro X17 is the workstation laptop to get if money is no object and performance is an absolute must, producing numbers that our previous Editors' Choice award holders, the HP ZBook Fury 15 G8 and HP ZBook Studio G8, could only dream of.