MSI Prestige 13 Evo Review

Full-size laptops may be having a growth spurt, with 15.6-inch screens replaced by 16-inch panels and 17.3-inch gaming rigs growing to 18 inches. Regardless, 13.3-inch ultraportables are still going strong, tempting business execs and consumers alike with unbeatable portability. MSI's Prestige 13 Evo ($1,499) is one of the lightest contenders at just 2.18 pounds, delivering admirable performance and battery life. But it's not an outstanding value, and therefore falls short of Editors' Choice honors.

One Well-Equipped Configuration 

Available in Pure White or our test unit's Stellar Gray, the Prestige 13 Evo has a magnesium-aluminum alloy chassis measuring 0.67 by 11.8 by 8.3 inches. That's a bit thicker than (in a footprint that fits between) the Dell XPS 13 (0.55 by 11.6 by 7.9 inches) and the Apple MacBook Air (0.44 by 12 by 8.5 inches). The MSI is the lightest of the three, however—the XPS and Air weigh 2.59 and 2.7 pounds, respectively.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Our Prestige review unit (MSI's model A13M-050US) is built around Intel's new 13th Generation Core i7-1360P processor with four Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, and support for up to 16 concurrent threads. It carries 32GB of memory and a 1TB NVMe solid-state drive (SSD) plus Windows 11 Pro. The CPU's Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics drive a 1,920-by-1,200-pixel non-touch IPS display with today's fashionable 16:10 aspect ratio. 

MSI's screen bezels are slim. As you open the lid, its bottom edge (like that of several MSI, Asus, and other laptops) lifts and tilts the keyboard at a slightly elevated typing angle. MSI says the Prestige has passed MIL-STD 810G tests against road hazards like shock and vibration; you'll feel a bit of flex if you grasp the screen corners or mash the keyboard, but the system generally feels sturdy. A face recognition webcam and keyboard fingerprint reader provide two ways to skip typing passwords with Windows Hello.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The laptop's left side holds two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports, an HDMI video out port, an audio jack, and the AC adapter connector. One USB 3.2 Type-A port joins a microSD flash card slot and a Kensington security-cable locking notch on the right. Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth handle wireless connections.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Making the Most of a Small Space 

This laptop's webcam has a sliding privacy shutter and 1080p resolution, sharp enough to show your Zoom or Microsoft Teams colleagues if you're having a bad hair day or skipped shaving. It captures reasonably well-lit and colorful images with almost no noise or static. 

The backlit keyboard earns points for putting the Delete key in the top right corner instead of to the left of the combined power button and fingerprint reader, though Delete and other top-row keys like Escape are dinky. The keys provide a shallow but fairly snappy typing feel with decent feedback. A decent-size buttonless touchpad takes just the right amount of pressure for a quiet click.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

This keyboard suffers, however, from a clumsy collision at its lower right. The right Control key is only half-sized, sharing its space with a second backslash key, and while you'll find dedicated Page Up and Page Down keys—they pair with the Fn key for Home and End—they're even more awkward than laptops that relegate those navigational functions to Fn and the cursor arrow keys. The arrows and navigational pair are crowded onto six half-sized keys, measuring barely a quarter-inch by a half-inch and touching each other; it takes extreme care and precision to tap the key you want.

Bottom-mounted speakers produce sound that's only moderately loud but not distorted or harsh at peak volume; you won't hear much bass, and drumbeats sound a bit staticky, but the audio quality is decent overall. Highs and midtones are clear, and you can make out overlapping tracks through these speakers. DTS software provides music, movie, and game presets, as well as an equalizer.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The 1,920-by-1,200-pixel display is colorful and bright, with wide viewing angles and clean white backgrounds (helped by the ability to tilt the screen all the way back). Colors don't pop like poster paints here, but they are rich and well saturated, and fine details are clear, with no pixelation around the edges of letters. 

An MSI Center utility combines system information and updates; toggles for things like the webcam, Windows key, and microphone noise cancellation; and automatic, high-performance, balanced, or quiet cooling modes.

Testing the MSI Prestige 13 Evo: Five Light Heavyweights Square Off 

Competition is fierce among premium ultraportables. The Dell XPS 13 and the Apple MacBook Air are perennial top picks, while the AMD-based Lenovo ThinkPad Z13 is an Editors' Choice winner for small offices. The 14-inch Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon is an even greater favorite, but we decided to let the Z13 represent Lenovo in today's benchmark contest and gave the last slot to the HP Elite Dragonfly G3, a more costly business-oriented ultraportable with a spiffy 3:2-aspect-ratio screen.

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. 

Three other 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 HandBrake 1.4 is an open-source video transcoder we use to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). Geekbench by Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. 

We also test each system's content-creation chops with PugetBench for Photoshop by Puget Systems, an automated extension to Adobe's Creative Cloud image editor that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated tasks ranging from opening, rotating, and resizing an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters. It's not charted here because only the MSI and Dell completed the benchmark. (The Prestige trounced the XPS by a score of 1,038 to 451.)

The Core i5-powered XPS 13 generally trailed its Core i7 and Apple M2 rivals, but even it cleared the 4,000 points that indicate excellent office productivity in PCMark 10. Meanwhile, the MSI led the way overall with top-notch performance, leaving the MacBook Air and ThinkPad Z13 nipping at its heels. The numbers indicate a professional machine that will handle any basic work task without issue.

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 also 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.

The Prestige 13 Evo placed in the front half of the pack here. Apple's laptop is arguably the standout, but none of these ultraportables came anywhere near the visual pace of mobile workstations and gaming laptops with dedicated GPUs instead of integrated graphics. Their after-hours pastimes are limited to casual gaming and video streaming, not Doom or Resident Evil. 

Battery and Display Tests 

We test each laptop's 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. 

To evaluate laptop displays, we use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows 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).

We expect long battery life from ultraportable laptops, and this quintet delivers. Even the Dell, with the shortest runtime, lasted 12 hours, and the MSI showed a lengthy 16 hours of stamina. The MacBook Air and ThinkPad Z13 led the way with vivid color, but the Prestige's screen palette and brightness put it in the middle of a deeply impressive field. It's a fine choice for anything short of professional image editing or prepress work.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Verdict: Worth a Look, But Not a Leader 

The MSI Prestige 13 Evo is a well-configured, well-performing, and well-weighted ultraportable that's not overpriced at $1,499, but it's not outstanding either. Business execs will be tempted by Lenovo's superlative ThinkPad X1 Carbon, while Apple iPhone and Apple Watch devotees will likely consider a MacBook first.

As for consumers, you won't be able to help but eye two Editors' Choice winners from HP with more dazzling OLED displays. First, you have the HP Pavilion Plus 14, priced a couple of hundred bucks below the MSI, and then you'll see the HP Spectre x360 13.5, a convertible that costs a few hundred more but is worth it. The Prestige's lower screen resolution and awkward keyboard keep it from the top rank.