It hasn’t been long since Windows laptop users longed for the long battery life of MacBooks. Most of the laptops we’ve dealt with so far couldn’t last more than three or four hours at most, or if they had longer battery life, they didn’t perform well.
For some time now we have seen moves from Intel, AMD and recently Qualcomm as Microsoft’s biggest business partners to change the disappointing state of Windows laptops. The emergence of new Core Ultra, Ryzen AI, and Snapdragon X series is the result of these movements and the starting point to end the nightmare of non-optimization and poor productivity of Windows laptops.
About a year has passed since the arrival of the first generation of Core Ultra series laptops, and now there are many laptops that are equipped with different models and SKUs of Miturelic chips; The chips in this and subsequent generations are supposed to restore the concepts of optimality and productivity and give new life to the x86 architecture.
Design and build quality
Thanks to its weight of 1.5 kg, Prestige 16 is very easy to carry and is the lightest laptop among 16-inch laptops on the market after LG Gram and Acer Swift Edge 16. The device has a clean and modern design and is almost considered among the slim laptops. Maybe if the laptop door was flat and less thick, it could better convey the feeling of a compact and so-called Slim laptop.
The thickness of the laptop helps to maintain its strength; So that it does not deviate by pressing the corners. The door opens and closes smoothly and thanks to a durable and high-quality hinge that keeps the display in place when open and does not allow it to slip while moving the device. The proper mass distribution of the product also allows you to open the laptop door easily with one finger and up to an angle of 180 degrees.
MSI says that the body material of Prestige 16 is a combination of magnesium and aluminum to reduce weight and convey a more premium feeling to the user; But the body structure is not as dense as all-aluminum laptops and evokes something between plastic and metal. In addition, due to the injection molding process of the body, the elegance and machining of aluminum laptops cannot be seen; But instead, it shows higher durability and strength against external factors (such as impact and scratches).
Prestige 16 laptop is produced only in gray color. A color that shows more dirt on the paper and will probably make you sensitive about the remaining stains and fingerprints on the body; But we must say that fortunately, such an unpleasant phenomenon does not become an issue with this laptop, and compared to aluminum laptops with a dark color, you will see less stains on the laptop door and hand rest.
Prestige 16 doesn’t have anything special except for a few things. The laptop follows forms and sharp lines in its design, especially in the corners. The 16-inch screen is also protected by a plastic frame and not so narrow borders. This margin reaches its maximum in the lower part of the screen even with the 16:10 aspect ratio; Of course, in return, it has provided more space for the resting place of the hand as well as the trackpad.
A part of the upper edge of the display is dedicated to a glass strip that, apart from the webcam, hosts several sensors and a thermal camera for facial recognition to meet the minimum hardware requirements of the Windows Hello authentication system, as well as a physical privacy shutter. In addition to this strip, another infrared sensor can be seen on the right side, which is intended for a security feature and we will discuss it further.
Ventilation of the Prestige 16 laptop takes place through holes on the bottom cover and grills that are installed near the edges of the chassis. For this reason, on the left and back edge, grooves for air intake/exit can be seen. Since this laptop uses a fan to cool only its processing chip, the holes and grills on the right side only play the role of keeping the appearance of the laptop.
Keyboard and trackpad and ports
The Prestige laptop uses a full-size island keyboard, which means that the number pad (Numpad) also includes keys. Thanks to the standard dimensions, suitable movement depth, as well as the impact feedback that occurs when the keys are pressed, the typing experience with this keyboard is pleasant and desirable. In addition, the keyboard uses a single-zone white backlight, and the power key also hosts a fingerprint sensor in its heart.
Fortunately, a large space has been allocated to the Prestige 16 trackpad, which is not located in the middle of the laptop and has a tendency towards the left side. Unlike plastic trackpads, Prestige’s glass trackpad does not create much friction with the fingertips; So the finger slides easily on it. The trackpad is also very sensitive to tapping and gestures; But its clicks are dry and firm, and the corners sink in a lot.
The ports are located on the right side and back of the laptop. I tried to deal with it with the idea that the less used ports are probably on the back; But when I checked the left and right side several times for the USB port to install Windows, I noticed that the USB-A port is located on the back of the laptop.
In a situation where most of us make a mistake in finding the right direction to connect the USB-A cable or flash and turn them several times! Now, by placing this port on the back of the Prestige 16, you have to lift the laptop or get up yourself to identify the location of the USB port. The Taiwanese have even placed two USB Type-C ports on the back of the Prestige 16 laptop.
Fortunately, a dedicated port is not considered for charging the Prestige laptop, and due to the support of both USB-C ports for power delivery, you can charge the laptop using adapters compatible with this standard in addition to its own 100-watt adapter.
Screen and speaker
The Prestige laptop has a 16-inch screen with a 16:10 aspect ratio, which is produced in two types of IPS and OLED panels with QHD and 4K resolutions; The model I had for review uses an eight-bit IPS panel with a resolution of 2560 x 1600 pixels. Both panels have a 60 Hz refresh rate and there is no news of higher rates.
It seems that the manufacturer is confident enough about the brightness of the display to use a glossy coating despite the strong reflection and reduced readability in bright environments for the display so that the colors look more stunning and pure. Glossy coating also improves contrast and black depth; But the brightness of the display in my measurement did not exceed 335 nits and did not reach the 400 nits announced by the manufacturer.
The MSI True Color tool is not available to adjust the monitor’s color profile; Therefore, the default Windows profile is used to display colors. Since the coverage of the sRGB range is complete and exceeds the standard, it can be considered defined in the DCI-P3 space, although this space is not completely covered. In this case, the colors are slightly saturated and tend to be cold to make the content more enjoyable to watch.
The accuracy of the produced colors is not bad for the class of such laptops; But compared to competitors, it doesn’t feel good. In general, the visual experience of the Prestige 16 display is satisfactory, and its brightness is suitable for working in indoor environments, and there is no news of those dead and soulless colors of cheap laptops; But considering its price tag, it could perform better in terms of brightness and color accuracy.
Prestige 16 uses two 2-watt speakers to produce stereo sound, which are not very powerful in terms of bass and volume; But in terms of sound separation, they perform well, and instrumental and vocal sounds are played with good clarity at maximum volume and do not create noise; Of course, using the DTS Audio software, you can customize the default sound equalizer or use ready-made modes to enhance bass, vocals, and treble.
Hardware, performance and battery life
Prestige 16 is produced in versions with Core Ultra 5-125H, Core Ultra 7-155H and Core Ultra 9-185H processors; There is also the possibility of a laptop in Studio versions equipped with RTX 4050 and RTX 4060 discrete graphics.
The version under review is powered by a Core Ultra 7-155H chip and has access to 32 GB of dual-channel LPDDR5-6400 RAM integrated with the motherboard. The Prestige 16 storage drive is a PCIe 4.0 SSD with a capacity of one terabyte and provides an additional M2 port supporting the same interface to increase storage space.
The Meteorlake family of chips use tiles with different fabrication technologies to separate different modules. Apart from the Compute tile, which uses 8 low-power cores and 6 powerful cores with access to 24 MB cache, the SoC tile has two very low-power cores for light processing, which can show more optimal behavior with 6nm manufacturing technology and prevent A useless conflict of the Compute unit.
There are two neural processing engines called Intel AI Boost for artificial intelligence processing in the heart of the chip; But one of the most important features of the Meteoric chip goes back to its graphics unit. The Graphics unit, which is produced with 5nm manufacturing technology, works on the basis of a weakened version of the Xe-HPG architecture called Xe-LPG, which in this version consists of 8 cores, 128 execution units and 1024 shading units, thanks to the support of features such as Intel XeSS and retracing. Intel has chosen the title Intel Arc for it; Of course, provided that at least 16 GB of RAM is available.
Like other MSI laptops, the Prestige 16 uses the MSI Center software to manage hardware, customizations, and resource controls, and you should refer to this software to change performance profiles. The software provides four profiles including Extreme Performance, Balanced, Silent and Super Battery. Now we will have a brief escape to the performance of the device in the most powerful performance profile when connected to electricity.
By running the Cinebench test, the chip reaches a turbo frequency of 4.8 GHz for a few seconds. In this short period, the maximum power consumption injected into the processor exceeds 65 watts; But gradually it stabilizes almost at the limit of 45 watts. Using the 55-watt version compared to the 28-watt version in the Zenbook laptop improved the processing performance by 13% and made web browsing and daily use 20% faster.
Based on the score of the 3DMark game simulator, the Prestige 16 is also 13% faster than the Zenbook 14 in terms of graphics; But its computing score is not significantly different from the Asus laptop. To understand the efficiency of the graphics that is in the heart of this chip, it can be said that it offers performance equivalent to the RTX 2050 graphics of the laptop version by receiving 28 watts, and in games it is on par with MacBook Air M3.
The Prestige 16 laptop is not designed for gaming; But the output frame rate of some heavy games shows that you can have a good gaming experience even with medium to high graphics settings. For example, the Forza Horizon 5 game with High graphics settings does not have a difficult path to achieve an average frame rate of 43 frames per second, or even Cyberpunk, which achieves a 30 frame rate with Ultra graphics settings and relying on Intel XeSS.
By disconnecting the laptop from the outlet, you can play games without much loss of performance. In this situation, Forza runs in the range of 36 to 40 frames. These results are obtained from playing heavy and graphic (AAA) or moderately heavy games, and you can expect higher numbers in more common and lighter games.
Before the introduction of Meteoric chips, Apple Silicon MacBooks were among the few laptops that maintained their agility and agility in battery-dependent mode without impairing the user experience in the slightest; But Meteoric and recently Lunatic chips are dealing with this big weakness of Windows laptops and good progress has been made, so we can say that the performance of the Prestige 16 laptop chip in CPU-oriented processing is only a negligible 2-5% in GPU processing. – The axis is also limited by 10%.
The drop in laptop performance is worst in everyday laptop use, web browsing and working with professional software such as Premiere; But still, the maximum effect that the chip receives in this regard does not exceed 13%; Of course, in Photoshop, exceptionally, this distance reaches about 37%, which probably comes from the 60% drop in graphics computing power when the device is disconnected from the power supply.
Fortunately, the cooling fan of the Prestige 16 laptop produces very little noise during heavy processing at the fastest possible speed, and the device itself rarely gets hot. In fact, if the processor is not subjected to a heavy processing load, in normal use it has a temperature between 38 and 45 degrees Celsius, and in this situation the laptop fan works at a lower speed and there is no sound from it at all; Therefore, you will only notice the sound of the fan during heavy use.
In long-term heavy processing, the device may get a little hot; But it intelligently manages the power and frequency so that the processing process goes to the end without any problems or performance loss. The interesting point is that the processor behaves milder in the battery-dependent mode and at the beginning of the stress test it starts working with power within its thermal design power (TDP) range; In this way, the processor does not face a thermal shock and starts heating up later, and as a result, it has a more uniform performance.
In the plugged-in mode, more power (around 70 watts) is injected into the processor at the beginning of the process to reach the frequency of 4.8 GHz for a moment and show its highest performance level, then it keeps the power in the range of 50-60 watts for 5 minutes and Finally, after 10 minutes, it fluctuates in the range of 45 watts. Powerful cores also have a lot of ups and downs up to half of the test time, and we see that the processor speed is higher in the unplugged mode.
After approximately 17 minutes, the CPU reduces the frequency of its low-power cores and returns the high-power cores to the 2.8 GHz circuit, which is the behavior that the chip exhibits when running on battery from the beginning and maintains this state until the end. . Under any conditions, the graphic consumes 20 watts until it receives its power from the battery, and the temperature of its hottest point does not exceed 80 degrees Celsius; But in terms of performance, it does not follow the path in a linear and completely stable way.
To provide the necessary power and energy for Prestige 16, MSI has used a 99.9 watt-hour battery, which is the maximum capacity allowed for use in a laptop, and usually, except for the flagships, we have rarely seen batteries with such a capacity in such laptops. From the beginning, it was thought that the combination of the most powerful battery and the presence of an optimized chip, especially in daily use and watching movies, would lead to stunning charging.
If the screen brightness is set to 200 nits and wireless connections are disconnected, the Prestige 16 laptop can play 720p Zoom video for 20 hours and last for more than 13 hours in daily use, which is a new record not only compared to Windows laptops but also to most MacBooks.
In my tests, when using the laptop for things like web browsing, working with Office, watching photos and videos, and working with Windows File Explorer, the device consumes between 4 and 15 watts of power, which is fine for everyday use and situations like presenting in classes. and meetings, it becomes a rare and wonderful option among Windows laptops, and moreover, you can rely on it for one to two days of use without worrying about carrying a charge and worrying about performance loss.
Special features and facilities
MSI, in collaboration with Tobii, has put together a set of different sensors and cameras for face recognition in order to increase productivity on the top edge of the display. On the other hand, the sensors allow the user to protect his privacy from strangers looking at his laptop screen.
After installing Windows, a software called Tobii Experience is automatically installed on the system when the device is connected to the Internet or drivers are installed. Various facilities are available in this software, before using them, you must activate the set of sensors through this tool. For productivity, you can enable various features such as Auto Framing to automatically reposition the image frame by following the subject in video calls. You can also create an avatar of your face and display it in video conferences instead of your real image.
When you get up from the laptop, you can make the laptop screen go dark after a while or the screen won’t turn off until you are sitting in front of the laptop and reading something. Another interesting feature is tracking eye movements, so if two or more monitors are connected to the laptop, you can select a window and look at the monitor you want, leave the window in that area, or change the position of your cursor with eye movement.
Another part of the Tobii Experience software is to increase privacy; Of course, to use these features, the camera and sensors are always on, which may cause privacy concerns and lead to increased battery consumption; But if you are interested, there are options such as blurring the screen if you leave the laptop, or having people around you look at the laptop screen and notify you, and even lock Windows when you leave the laptop. In video calls, you can play an image instead of the webcam image when you are not present.
The Tobii Experience tool provides users with some health solutions and prevention of eye fatigue; For example, it records the time you stare at the screen and your distance to the screen, and if necessary, sends warnings to the user to rest their eyes or maintain a safe distance.
MSI has also equipped the laptop with Intel’s Killer Wi-Fi series modem to enable connection to networks compatible with the new Wi-Fi 7 standard with greater speed and security.
Summary and comparison with competitors
These days, laptops that are powerful enough for daily tasks and specialized tasks such as working with professional software, engineering and programming, and that can last at least a day without the need for a charger, are in high demand. The Prestige 16 laptop is a good choice among 16-inch laptops on the market, with a great battery life and a chip that performs optimally for both everyday use and professional use.
With all the positive features of Prestige 16, there are some flaws such as the placement of important ports such as USB on the back of the laptop. Also, considering the price tag of 80 million Tomans, in this price range, you can find more powerful laptops with an OLED display and higher refresh rate, which are convertible and support touch screens.
What do you think about the Prestige 16 laptop? Are the capabilities and features of this laptop attractive to you or do you prefer to go for another laptop with the same price tag?