MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo

It's easy to spend more than $2,000 for a desktop replacement laptop with a dazzling OLED display—one of our favorites, the Gigabyte Aero 16 OLED, was $2,199 as tested and the Dell XPS 15 $300 above that. MSI's Prestige 16 AI Evo fills the bill for just $1,449 with one of Intel's brand-new Core Ultra processors. It's more suited to everyday productivity than content creation or gaming, let alone demanding workstation apps. But it's a genuine bargain that earns an Editors' Choice nod for desktop-replacement productivity laptops.

Design: Stealthy Looks, Balanced Configs

The "AI Evo" in this laptop's name combines the touted neural processing component of Intel's Core Ultra chips and the chipmaker's branding for advanced ultraportables, though the 16-inch Prestige is a bit over our weight limit for that class at 3.31 pounds. All Prestige 16 AI Evo models rely on the CPU's Intel Arc integrated graphics, though MSI offers an AI Studio sibling with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 discrete GPU.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Speaking of models, our test unit (code B1MG-005US) is $1,449 at B&H—99 cents more at Micro Center—with a Core Ultra 7 155H (six Performance cores, eight normal and two low-power Efficiency cores, 22 threads), a 1TB NVMe solid-state drive, a generous 32GB of memory, Windows 11 Home, and an OLED non-touch screen with 3,840-by-2,400-pixel resolution. Best Buy will save you $50 if you settle for a 1,920-by-1,200 IPS panel, or match our Prestige's price with a faster Core Ultra 9 chip but the IPS screen and only 16GB of RAM. A $1,649 flagship version upgrades our Core Ultra 7 OLED system with a 2TB SSD and Win 11 Pro. 

Its Stellar Gray color is ultraconservative, but the Prestige looks sharp in a seamless magnesium-aluminum chassis measuring 0.75 by 14.1 by 10 inches. That more or less matches the HP Envy 16 (0.78 by 14.1 by 9.9 inches), though the HP is considerably heavier at 5.17 pounds, as is the Gigabyte Aero 16 at 4.6 pounds. The MSI has passed MIL-STD 810H torture tests for travel hazards like shock, vibration, and high and low temperatures; there's quite a bit of flex if you torque the screen corners but none if you press the keyboard deck.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Medium-thin bezels surround the 16-inch display. The 1080p webcam above it has a sliding privacy shutter and offers IR face recognition—one of two ways to skip typing passwords with Windows Hello, since there's a fingerprint reader built into the power button. The lid opens 180 degrees to lie flat; the F12 key inverts the screen image for a colleague sitting across from you.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Most of the MSI's ports—one HDMI, one USB 3.2 Type-A, and two USB-C Thunderbolt 4—are at the back, though audio and Ethernet jacks join an SD card slot at right. There's a Kensington lock slot on the left edge. The compact AC adapter has a USB-C connector. Intel Killer Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth are standard.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Display and Features: Hey, Good Lookin' 

Before you punk kids get off my lawn, you should gather round and let me tell you how lucky you are to get a better-than-4K OLED screen on an affordable laptop. Why, in my day we were grateful for 1,024-by-768 resolution and 16 colo—hey, where'd everybody go? Oh, well, suffice it to say that the MSI's 16:10-aspect-ratio display is a highlight, with razor-sharp details, no pixelation around the edges of letters, abundant brightness, and sky-high contrast.

Colors are full and deeply saturated, with inky blacks and washday-white backgrounds. Viewing angles are wide, and both images and streaming videos are a treat to look at. It might not quite match the very finest laptop displays (I'm thinking of HP workstations' DreamColor panels and the top-end MacBook Pros), but it's basically sensational.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The MSI's bottom-mounted speakers aren't sensational—they produce full but not especially loud sound even at top volume—but aren't harsh, tinny, or boomy, either. There's not much more than a hint of bass, but vocals and instrumentals are clear, and you can make out overlapping tracks. DTS audio software offers music, movie, game, and custom presets—the last with treble, bass, and vocal boost and stereo-effects adjustment—and an equalizer. 

The 1080p webcam supports Windows' updated videoconferencing effects (auto framing, eye contact, and background blur). It captures slightly soft-focus but well-lit and colorful images with minimal noise or static, ranking well ahead of many notebooks' cheap 720p cameras.

The Prestige comes with a Norton security trial and MSI Center software, which combines hardware monitoring and driver updates with a choice of power/cooling/fan noise modes, keyboard and sleep settings, and options to avoid OLED panel burn-in. A downloadable module adds AI noise cancellation for conference calls.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The MSI's keyboard makes room for a numeric keypad, which is both nice for spreadsheet jockeys and (with Num Lock turned off) the only way you'll get Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down, since there aren't dedicated keys for those maneuvers. The keyboard is brightly backlit, and its layout is fine, but its typing feel is shallow and kind of wooden rather than snappy or responsive. On a happier note, the large, buttonless touchpad glides and taps smoothly and has a comfortable, quiet click.

Testing the Prestige 16: More Than Enough for Most Jobs 

Given the Prestige 16 AI Evo's low price, our benchmark charts omit rivals that cost a grand more like the Dell XPS 15 and Lenovo ThinkPad Z16 Gen 2, though we did include the over-$2K Gigabyte Aero 16 OLED. The AMD Ryzen 7-powered Acer Swift Edge 16 is in the MSI's price range and qualifies as an ultraportable at 2.73 pounds. 

The Asus Vivobook Pro 16 actually costs $50 less than the Prestige with a beefy Core i9 CPU and GeForce discrete graphics, thanks to a humbler 1,920-by-1,200-pixel IPS screen. HP's Envy 16 also boasts Core i9 and RTX 4060 silicon, with a slightly sharper 2,560-by-1,600 IPS panel.

Productivity Tests 

We run the same general productivity benchmarks across both mobile and desktop systems. Our first test is UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive. 

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 Geekbench 5.5 Pro from Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. We also 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). 

Finally, we run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Systems, 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.

The MSI landed solidly in the middle of this high-powered pack, nearly doubling the 4,000 points that indicate excellent everyday productivity in PCMark 10 and posting a respectable if not leading score in Photoshop. It's no Core i9 screamer, but apps like Microsoft 365 are cake for it. 

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). 

We usually add two OpenGL tests from the cross-platform GPU test GFXBench 5, but the Prestige was a rare failure at that benchmark, its Wi-Fi 7 refusing to make the necessary connection to the provider's servers. We had no other online problems with the MSI, so were stumped.

The Prestige managed to avoid last place because, as we've seen in other reviews, the Core Ultra chips' Intel Arc integrated graphics are a rung above older silicon like the Acer's. But the laptops with dedicated GPUs predictably clobbered it. Gamers and CGI renderers will look elsewhere. 

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) 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. 

We also 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).

MSI boasts that the Prestige 16 has a massive 99.9WHr battery, and it showed as only the Envy came within hailing distance of its near-19-hour unplugged runtime in our video test. Its OLED screen proved equally stunning, with unbeatably rich color and ample brightness (though the Asus' and HP's displays did very well by IPS standards).

Verdict: A Core Ultra That's Ultra-Worth Snatching Up 

The Prestige 16 AI Evo isn't an roaring-performance workstation or gaming rig, and a more supple keyboard and second USB-A port would be nice. But those are truly all the nits we can pick. It seems like only yesterday that a desktop replacement notebook with a screen this splendid would set you back $3,000 and be lucky to last six hours on battery power, but the MSI costs half that and runs three times as long. It earns an Editors' Choice award as a first-class value among modern desktop replacements.