This is a really good enough laptop for a lot of people and surprisingly good graphics performance by Intel. Is 1 Watt display not a requirement for Evo?
My 2019 XPS132N1's digitizer experience really sucks, but I looked around the market and nothing really serves as a solid upgrade. If the latest Surface Book weren't so expensive with soon to be outdated graphics that would be my first choice.
Offering a laptop with a 16x9 display when it's almost 2021 is pretty well. Get with the times MSI. 16x9 is fine on a large display, but laptops greatly benefit from some extra vertical real estate
almost bought this, luckily that I saw at the last time that, at the begining of 2021, it doesn't have at least one USB 3.x.A port ... good thing it has a TOTALLY USELESS 2.0.A one.
I would torture the guys at msi for this stupid decision. what a bunch of retards .
I am totally confused by this decision as well. What a complete waste of a computer. What are you supposed to do with external storage devices that connect with USB A? Carry around adapters, or just deal with USB 2.0 speeds? In 2021!?!?
And as a general complaint with most "nice" laptops these days, what if you use a mouse that connects via USB??? No flash drives then?
Might as well be an Apple product.
And no, it isn't a typo. The MSI site shows this across the board for all configurations of this model "USB: 1x USB 2.0"
The USB 2.0 port is for your mouse. That's why it's on the right side. For faster peripherals like storage devices, it has two Thunderbolt ports. If you insist on keeping your legacy storage devices then yeah, you'd need to get a USB-C cable for your device, or carry an adapter.
Or use one of my dozens of USB-A 3.0 64-256 GB thumb drives. Or my external Blu-ray drive that has a tethered cable.
Modern EFI and OSes can handle running a keyboard or mouse just fine over USB 3.0/3.1/3.2/4. There is no reason to continue to offer a USB 2.0 USB port.
While I agree that the choice of USB 2.0 is bizarre, my guess is that it's due to SOC peripheral bandwidth limitations - those two TB4 ports consume a LOT of PCIe lanes, and IIRC Tiger Lake has a relatively low PCIe lane count due to thermal and power constraints.
USB port connections are separate from whatever PCIe lanes are going to the thunderbolt ports. There is absolutely no way another 3.0 port was not available. Even if by some insane reason this is really true, they could have put a 3.0 hub on board like many desktop boards do. After all, both TB4 ports are required to have full USB 3 functionality. So this is just MSI being dumb.
The point is that they can easily slot in more USB ports if they choose to since this is a 14". There is enough room to do so. The fact they didn't is a mistake.
Me too, a good office mouse is about a magnitude faster to operate than a trackpad, with a powered scroll wheel, a horizontal scroll wheel, and multiple shortcut buttons that can be mapped to forward, back, zoom etc.
+1. Trackpads are unbearably slow. People at my office use one when they must but you go to any big meeting and basically every single person carries a mouse in with them.
USB 2.0 for a mouse? Why not just get a Bluetooth mouse? Who wants to waste a port with a dongle when the tech for external input devices is already built-in to the laptop wireless controller?
It makes sense on gaming laptops for users wanting to use a wired mouse with minimal latency. Not sure what sense it makes on a device like this, though.
I can accept this rationale on a device that has 2 or 3 USB 3 A ports along with the USB 2 port, but when it's the only USB A port on the device it's a poor showing. It's a bit premature to refer to any storage device not using USB-C as "legacy".
**The CPU runs at an all-core turbo of 4.3 GHz initially with a peak power draw of almost 52 Watts, and then settles down to a sustained 30-Watt draw for the duration with the CPU frequency...** _________________________________________________
Would be nice if AT actually identified the X-axis title and time scale.
INCREDIBLY DISAPPOINTED on how this has been presented.
In what has been a difficult year for everyone, I can see how this lapse in my judgement has hurt significantly. I apologize, and have updated the offending table.
So Intel's top-of-the-line Tiger Lake CPU trades blows with AMD's second-best, last-gen APU. Not sure if I should be impressed with how well AMD is doing these days, or depressed by how far Intel has fallen. It should be worrying to Intel's marketing team that a low-end brand like Acer Swift can compete so well with a top-end EVO-branded laptop. Wonder how they're going to spin that?
It's nice to see actual competition in the laptop space, though. AMD 4000-series APUs, Intel Tiger Lake, AMD 5000-series APUS, Intel's next gen (forget the name). Will be an interesting 2021 for laptops. :)
M1 smashes AMD in any workload that is not Cinbench R23 Multithread. There.
Otherwise, the M1 is superior is just about every way including power, temperature, battery life, no throttling on battery, GPU, encoding and decoding, SSD speeds, and of course, single thread.
that's already been tested and proven untrue. it is far superior in efficiency, but loses when more than 4 cores/8 threads are utilized and when memory systems are comparable. either its artificially capped to keep power down or the design's efficiency curve falls off at higher frequencies because it absolutely does not outperform x86 8C/16T parts. it's also on a cutting edge node competing with 7nm/10nm parts yet its basically the same single thread performance as zen 3, so not exactly blowing anyone away with just raw architecture.
It is true. The M1 is faster than the 4900HS in multithread Geekbench which tests a variety of workloads and it's significantly faster in single core. And unlike AMD processors, it does not throttle when it's on battery and it has 2x more battery life in general.
So no. AMD's very best mobile processors can't touch the M1.
1. The G14 is considerably heavier and thicker 2. The G14 doesn't have a webcam or card reader 3. The G14 doesn't have Thunderbolt 4. The G14 doesn't have dedicated navigation keys
If you don't need a gaming laptop, the better question is, why would one consider the Zephyrus G14?
Handbrake Transcoding (Hardware): the tester has zero clue about what he is doing. Is he testing the FF/low power or the much slower Hybrid of Quicksync and what target usage did he use: quality, balanced or speed. The fully fixed function encode is really fast on Tigerlake. Pretty sure he did use the slow Hybrid+quality/balanced encode.
The main problem is that he most likely didn't use the fully fixed function encode mode from Tigerlake, the performance gap would be much bigger to the software version and most likely he is comparing the fixed function of Renoir against Hybrid from Tigerlake. Without any infos about the encode settings this is an useless benchmark. And even for the software version, no info what x264/x265 preset he did use. This is not a good test.
I feel this is where testing of laptop is very tricky because of the many variables that will affect performance. This MSI laptop is probably one of the best Tiger Lake implementation out there for sure just by virtue of the performance. But the performance of laptops with Tiger Lake CPUs vary widely (I guess it is not just a problem with Tiger Lake, but across any CPU used) depending on how aggressive is the power setting, and how well they implement cooling. Also, comparing it with the Acer Swift 3 with a Ryzen 7 4700U may not be the best idea considering its almost an entry level laptop, just a notch above the even more budget Aspire series. So I expect the parts/ components and cooling to be inferior to the Prestige 14 Evo which will affect performance results across the board.
This is a fair point. The Swift 3 has been shown a few times to be a fairly poor showing for the Ryzen 7 4700U, whereas this implementation is one of the best for Tiger Lake. Most devices with TGL do not hit these performance levels, let alone sustain them.
Of course, that's a problem for platform comparison - for comparing the actual devices available to consumers, it's fair to show how close the cheaper devices can get to the performance of a premium device.
I knew I wanted Tiger Lake w two Thunderbolt 4 ports and Xe graphics (not discrete, for Linux compat), and was seriously looking at this, but ended up ordering a Razer Book 13 instead. The Razer looks a little more well made plus has vapour chamber cooling.
When I was researching, I tried using MSI's online chat to ask if this had eGPU support over Thunderbolt, and the rep connected, but never responded after 30 minutes, and then "hung up" on me. I figured if that was what I should expect from MSI support, best to stay away. Not that I have any faith in *any* company to provide decent support anymore *sigh*.
It's more profitable long-term to provide dismal support. As long as everybody in the PC market is providing a roughly equally poor standard of support, then it ceases to be a factor for comparison, and they can all benefit by paying poorly-trained and demotivated staff a pittance.
The USB 2.0 port is possibly for 1. Installing various flavors of linux. 2. Allowing mouse/KB connection while blocking data transfer in an office environment. I've worked on hundreds of machines where OS installation just didn't work properly with the media connected to a USB 3.0 port. Granted, this was a few years ago, but I cant see other logical reasons for it.
Only if those CPUs are Intel, and only if we continue to pretend that a 50W turbo and ~35W continuous power draw is "15W". 65W Zen 3 nukes this from orbit.
If you actually limit the CPU to 15W long power draw (or even 20W) it's significantly slower.
The battery life results belie the "but it's not 15W, it's really 50W!" claims. There's a reason constant-power CPU operation was abandoned by everyone at least a decade ago.
They should've put the Fn key on where that stupid duplicated key is so that the right Ctrl key would be in full-size. I don't understand why they thought having two backslash keys were a good idea.
What a stupid design with the back edge of the display is also the foot when the lid lifts up (copied from Asus). Warning: 1- Don't open and close the lid too often or the hard plastic feet will wear out and get scratches which will catch dust making your laptop looks nasty. 2- Type lightly. Don't rest your palms on the laptop when you type or the hinges might break.
I fully agree. A comparison with the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 14ARE05 powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 4800U should have been part of the mix. It is a must better implementation of the Ryzen 4xxx platform and it has a stronger GPU. As you might guess, I do own that particular laptop....
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Vitor - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
Im just glad the display has decent accuracy.Teckk - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
This is a really good enough laptop for a lot of people and surprisingly good graphics performance by Intel. Is 1 Watt display not a requirement for Evo?gizmo23 - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
This laptop with 16:10 ratio display = take my money. As it is, I think my XPS will have to last a bit longer.s.yu - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
My 2019 XPS132N1's digitizer experience really sucks, but I looked around the market and nothing really serves as a solid upgrade. If the latest Surface Book weren't so expensive with soon to be outdated graphics that would be my first choice.oRAirwolf - Saturday, December 19, 2020 - link
Offering a laptop with a 16x9 display when it's almost 2021 is pretty well. Get with the times MSI. 16x9 is fine on a large display, but laptops greatly benefit from some extra vertical real estatemobutu - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
almost bought this, luckily that I saw at the last time that, at the begining of 2021, it doesn't have at least one USB 3.x.A port ... good thing it has a TOTALLY USELESS 2.0.A one.I would torture the guys at msi for this stupid decision. what a bunch of retards .
ozzuneoj86 - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
I am totally confused by this decision as well. What a complete waste of a computer. What are you supposed to do with external storage devices that connect with USB A? Carry around adapters, or just deal with USB 2.0 speeds? In 2021!?!?And as a general complaint with most "nice" laptops these days, what if you use a mouse that connects via USB??? No flash drives then?
Might as well be an Apple product.
And no, it isn't a typo. The MSI site shows this across the board for all configurations of this model "USB: 1x USB 2.0"
Yakinabe - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
The USB 2.0 port is for your mouse. That's why it's on the right side. For faster peripherals like storage devices, it has two Thunderbolt ports. If you insist on keeping your legacy storage devices then yeah, you'd need to get a USB-C cable for your device, or carry an adapter.CharonPDX - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
Or use one of my dozens of USB-A 3.0 64-256 GB thumb drives. Or my external Blu-ray drive that has a tethered cable.Modern EFI and OSes can handle running a keyboard or mouse just fine over USB 3.0/3.1/3.2/4. There is no reason to continue to offer a USB 2.0 USB port.
The_Assimilator - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
While I agree that the choice of USB 2.0 is bizarre, my guess is that it's due to SOC peripheral bandwidth limitations - those two TB4 ports consume a LOT of PCIe lanes, and IIRC Tiger Lake has a relatively low PCIe lane count due to thermal and power constraints.timecop1818 - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
USB port connections are separate from whatever PCIe lanes are going to the thunderbolt ports. There is absolutely no way another 3.0 port was not available. Even if by some insane reason this is really true, they could have put a 3.0 hub on board like many desktop boards do. After all, both TB4 ports are required to have full USB 3 functionality. So this is just MSI being dumb.Cliff34 - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
The point is that they can easily slot in more USB ports if they choose to since this is a 14". There is enough room to do so. The fact they didn't is a mistake.KPOM - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
I don’t understand why people use a mouse with a notebook in 2020 (almost 2021). Trackpads are just more natural fits for most tasks.0iron - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
I use mouse with a laptop almost all the time. Trackpads will hampered productivity. For web browsing & media consumption it's still ok.s.yu - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
Me too, a good office mouse is about a magnitude faster to operate than a trackpad, with a powered scroll wheel, a horizontal scroll wheel, and multiple shortcut buttons that can be mapped to forward, back, zoom etc.DougMcC - Saturday, December 19, 2020 - link
+1. Trackpads are unbearably slow. People at my office use one when they must but you go to any big meeting and basically every single person carries a mouse in with them.Samus - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
USB 2.0 for a mouse? Why not just get a Bluetooth mouse? Who wants to waste a port with a dongle when the tech for external input devices is already built-in to the laptop wireless controller?sonny73n - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
The idiots think RF dongles makes their mouse better and faster than Bluetooth 5.0.s.yu - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
Peculiar idiots.Spunjji - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
It makes sense on gaming laptops for users wanting to use a wired mouse with minimal latency. Not sure what sense it makes on a device like this, though.Spunjji - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
I can accept this rationale on a device that has 2 or 3 USB 3 A ports along with the USB 2 port, but when it's the only USB A port on the device it's a poor showing. It's a bit premature to refer to any storage device not using USB-C as "legacy".Deicidium369 - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
Not like you would REALLY be a customer ...tipoo - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
Any impressions on how the Intel publicized Ryzen 10 second boost delay on battery impacts real world system responsiveness?Smell This - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
**The CPU runs at an all-core turbo of 4.3 GHz initially with a peak power draw of almost 52 Watts, and then settles down to a sustained 30-Watt draw for the duration with the CPU frequency...**_________________________________________________
Would be nice if AT actually identified the X-axis title and time scale.
INCREDIBLY DISAPPOINTED on how this has been presented.
Brett Howse - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
In what has been a difficult year for everyone, I can see how this lapse in my judgement has hurt significantly. I apologize, and have updated the offending table.lmcd - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
This travesty will likely shake the earth to its core. Next earthquake's on you bud ;)Smell This - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
Thanks, BrettNo worries, Mate
henkhilti - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
Looks like 36W sustained to me, not 30W.phoenix_rizzen - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
So Intel's top-of-the-line Tiger Lake CPU trades blows with AMD's second-best, last-gen APU. Not sure if I should be impressed with how well AMD is doing these days, or depressed by how far Intel has fallen. It should be worrying to Intel's marketing team that a low-end brand like Acer Swift can compete so well with a top-end EVO-branded laptop. Wonder how they're going to spin that?It's nice to see actual competition in the laptop space, though. AMD 4000-series APUs, Intel Tiger Lake, AMD 5000-series APUS, Intel's next gen (forget the name). Will be an interesting 2021 for laptops. :)
yeeeeman - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
Where is current gen AMD APU if 4700U is last gen?4700U is still current gen until we get 5000 series products which will happen in march next year.
Spunjji - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
It's a fair point. The 4000 series isn't last-gen until the newer devices are out. It still competes pretty well, though.lucasdclopes - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
AMD's CPUs beating Intel's CPU.Intel's IGP beating AMD's IGP
What a time to be alive...
Speedfriend - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
And Apples CPU and GPU smashing both. On its first attempt...zodiacfml - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
Not really, AMD's high end mobile APUs can compete or beat the M1 on heavy workloads. to be fair, m1 is Apple's entry level designKPOM - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
The point is that the M1 draws so little power, Apple removed the fan from the MacBook Air and still tripled its multi-core performance.senttoschool - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
M1 smashes AMD in any workload that is not Cinbench R23 Multithread. There.Otherwise, the M1 is superior is just about every way including power, temperature, battery life, no throttling on battery, GPU, encoding and decoding, SSD speeds, and of course, single thread.
whatthe123 - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
that's already been tested and proven untrue. it is far superior in efficiency, but loses when more than 4 cores/8 threads are utilized and when memory systems are comparable. either its artificially capped to keep power down or the design's efficiency curve falls off at higher frequencies because it absolutely does not outperform x86 8C/16T parts. it's also on a cutting edge node competing with 7nm/10nm parts yet its basically the same single thread performance as zen 3, so not exactly blowing anyone away with just raw architecture.lemurbutton - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
It is true. The M1 is faster than the 4900HS in multithread Geekbench which tests a variety of workloads and it's significantly faster in single core. And unlike AMD processors, it does not throttle when it's on battery and it has 2x more battery life in general.So no. AMD's very best mobile processors can't touch the M1.
Kuhar - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
Don`t bother with delusional apple fanboys.Sailor23M - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
@senttoschool Well put, TY.zodiacfml - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
Can't read this. Why would one consider this unless one doesn't know of ASUS' Zephyrus G14 lineup?JfromImaginstuff - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
Short answer: businessRookierookie - Monday, December 21, 2020 - link
1. The G14 is considerably heavier and thicker2. The G14 doesn't have a webcam or card reader
3. The G14 doesn't have Thunderbolt
4. The G14 doesn't have dedicated navigation keys
If you don't need a gaming laptop, the better question is, why would one consider the Zephyrus G14?
mikk - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
Handbrake Transcoding (Hardware): the tester has zero clue about what he is doing. Is he testing the FF/low power or the much slower Hybrid of Quicksync and what target usage did he use: quality, balanced or speed. The fully fixed function encode is really fast on Tigerlake. Pretty sure he did use the slow Hybrid+quality/balanced encode.lmcd - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
The quality levels on fully fixed function encode are NOT uniform across vendors and is useless as a benchmark.mikk - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
The main problem is that he most likely didn't use the fully fixed function encode mode from Tigerlake, the performance gap would be much bigger to the software version and most likely he is comparing the fixed function of Renoir against Hybrid from Tigerlake. Without any infos about the encode settings this is an useless benchmark. And even for the software version, no info what x264/x265 preset he did use. This is not a good test.Spunjji - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
"most likely he is comparing the fixed function of Renoir against Hybrid from Tigerlake"What's your basis for making that claim?
watzupken - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
I feel this is where testing of laptop is very tricky because of the many variables that will affect performance. This MSI laptop is probably one of the best Tiger Lake implementation out there for sure just by virtue of the performance. But the performance of laptops with Tiger Lake CPUs vary widely (I guess it is not just a problem with Tiger Lake, but across any CPU used) depending on how aggressive is the power setting, and how well they implement cooling. Also, comparing it with the Acer Swift 3 with a Ryzen 7 4700U may not be the best idea considering its almost an entry level laptop, just a notch above the even more budget Aspire series. So I expect the parts/ components and cooling to be inferior to the Prestige 14 Evo which will affect performance results across the board.Spunjji - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
This is a fair point. The Swift 3 has been shown a few times to be a fairly poor showing for the Ryzen 7 4700U, whereas this implementation is one of the best for Tiger Lake. Most devices with TGL do not hit these performance levels, let alone sustain them.Of course, that's a problem for platform comparison - for comparing the actual devices available to consumers, it's fair to show how close the cheaper devices can get to the performance of a premium device.
hubick - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
I knew I wanted Tiger Lake w two Thunderbolt 4 ports and Xe graphics (not discrete, for Linux compat), and was seriously looking at this, but ended up ordering a Razer Book 13 instead. The Razer looks a little more well made plus has vapour chamber cooling.When I was researching, I tried using MSI's online chat to ask if this had eGPU support over Thunderbolt, and the rep connected, but never responded after 30 minutes, and then "hung up" on me. I figured if that was what I should expect from MSI support, best to stay away. Not that I have any faith in *any* company to provide decent support anymore *sigh*.
lmcd - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
ASUS provides great support for its monitors. No idea if that extends to laptops but it might?Otherwise I'm right with you on the terrible support.
Spunjji - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
It's more profitable long-term to provide dismal support. As long as everybody in the PC market is providing a roughly equally poor standard of support, then it ceases to be a factor for comparison, and they can all benefit by paying poorly-trained and demotivated staff a pittance.0iron - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
I hope there's some explanation on PCMark 10 - Productivity results.vikas.sm - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
The USB 2.0 port is possibly for1. Installing various flavors of linux.
2. Allowing mouse/KB connection while blocking data transfer in an office environment.
I've worked on hundreds of machines where OS installation just didn't work properly with the media connected to a USB 3.0 port. Granted, this was a few years ago, but I cant see other logical reasons for it.
Samus - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
I can't believe how fast these 15-watt CPU's are. They obliterate many current 65w+ desktop CPU's.Spunjji - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
Only if those CPUs are Intel, and only if we continue to pretend that a 50W turbo and ~35W continuous power draw is "15W". 65W Zen 3 nukes this from orbit.If you actually limit the CPU to 15W long power draw (or even 20W) it's significantly slower.
edzieba - Monday, December 21, 2020 - link
The battery life results belie the "but it's not 15W, it's really 50W!" claims. There's a reason constant-power CPU operation was abandoned by everyone at least a decade ago.logoffon - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
They should've put the Fn key on where that stupid duplicated key is so that the right Ctrl key would be in full-size. I don't understand why they thought having two backslash keys were a good idea.sonny73n - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
What a stupid design with the back edge of the display is also the foot when the lid lifts up (copied from Asus).Warning: 1- Don't open and close the lid too often or the hard plastic feet will wear out and get scratches which will catch dust making your laptop looks nasty. 2- Type lightly. Don't rest your palms on the laptop when you type or the hinges might break.
sonny73n - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
And yay, the power button is where the delete key should be (also copied from stupid Asus Zenbook design).s.yu - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
Reminded me of the X1 Yoga, but I discovered that it uses Comet Lake in late 2020...XSevenX - Saturday, December 19, 2020 - link
I don't understand why you are testing the best tiger lake with XE 96 and compare with the 4700U which is not the best Ryzen 4000...Just compare with 4800U in order to be fair..
I don't understand, do you want to sell only tiger lake?
BartD - Saturday, December 19, 2020 - link
I fully agree. A comparison with the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 14ARE05 powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 4800U should have been part of the mix. It is a must better implementation of the Ryzen 4xxx platform and it has a stronger GPU. As you might guess, I do own that particular laptop....