MSI - Prestige 16” Laptop – Intel Evo Edition - Intel Core Ultra 9 – NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 with 32GB Memory – 1TB SSD - Stellar Gray

I wanted a laptop with the maximum legal battery size TSA will let you fly with (100wh). I was tired of laptops that didn't prioritize someee battery life and was excited to learn more about the Ultra line of chips. Oh, before I begin, MSI's naming convention sucks. So let me disambiguate that so you don't waste time learning. The Prestige line is MSI's highest end of business laptops capable of Gaming. This is the first year that MSI went full metal on a laptop and decided to try it on their Prestige line which has always leaned toward clean, elegant, laptops - but now they can. The prestiges of 5 years ago had lousy batteries but no more. I don't know if this is the first year, but MSI stuck a 99.9 Wh battery in here. (If you are serious about battery life, why would a manufacturer put anything but 99 Wh? That's why I had to look away from lenovo.) But they didn't just slap a big battery in there, even software wise it seems to have the ability to focus on battery savings. Anyhow. Secondly, all of this year's MSI prestige's come in 2 types. The "Prestige Evo Edition" and the "Prestige Studio Evo Edition". The "Studio" moniker just means that this particular Prestige you are looking at has an nvidia chip. If it doesn't say studio, the laptop is either miss-labled or doesn't have a discrete GPU. And "Evo" just means it meets Intel's new certification that means a laptop has an "Ultra" chip and a large enough battery to earn the "Evo" badge (other brand's laptop's can also earn the badge). Alright, maybe that helped you. Maybe not. Alrighty, now on to the review again. Well, all that talk about battery life... well, it's not BS. I'm not sure if I should thank Windows, MSI, or Intel Ultra chips but the battery life is fantastic. Certainly the best windows laptop I've ever owned... But I love that I can connect the cable and dive into some gaming in the evenings. In fact, the battery is so long, its the first "gaming" laptop that I am comfortable using without a cord, even on something important, even just on a regular basis lol. You know those gaming bricks that last 60 minutes... yeah, this is not that. It is insanely responsive, the screen has good brightness, the screen is sadly not OLED, but for a work/school first, gaming second kind-of laptop, it is great. And then when you need to untether, it still delivers. I mean, under light use, it must have gotten between 6-8 hours of screen on time, but scattered throughout the entire day. It is light. I heard it would be, but it's pretty wild. I have regular work laptops that have no discrete graphics weighing more or having the same laptop thickness. Kinda wierd how much MSI could pack in here. And let's not forget it has a 100Wh battery in there somehow... It even has a numpad on the right! When it comes to gaming, I've been playing some Helldivers lately and loaded that up. It ran it as well as my 5 year old desktop, only the laptop was pushing 1600p monitor vs my 1080p desktop monitor.... For about 5 minutes. Then the laptop started skipping. Well after some tinkering around, I realized it was thermally throttling. So, I grabbed some desk items and propped it up and boom - it was running smooth again in less than 15 seconds. Now I have one of those metal ski laptop lifter things that fold away really small for travel, but break em out when I do feel like gaming. It can run games very well, just need to give the underside of the laptop some serious room to breathe. The holes for it to breath underneath are like literally the entire back half of the laptop lol, and they all need room if you're doing some intense gaming. I haven't tried even loading a game on battery. I guess I could for curiosity... but I would never really game on pure battery? so I haven't tried that. But speaking of cords, it can charge all the way down to a 30W USBC phone charger! Which is awesome cause on business trips I just need to bring my phone charger and can leave the brick behind (even if it's not that large, (if I know I won't have time to game it's nice to travel light)). It also has 2 USB-C ports to charge (I like having a backup incase cats/dogs/toddlers/spouses "somehow" damage a jack. You have backup)). If I had any gripes, it would be that the numpad is a weird config. Takes a bit of getting used to... but I much prefer having it than not, for those excel days or data entry days. Also, I couldn't believe how much updating it had to do. I mean it was bugging me to restart and do updates like every day or two for like 2 weeks. And actually it was kinda buggy every now and then too during those two weeks... but now it's butter, and it isn't hassling me for updates anymore. So I'd keep that in mind when you get setup. Also, I dislike that it only has a 16" screen. I really wanted like 18". But I didn't want that so bad I'm giving up a huge battery or real battery life. I considered Dell's XPS line that is also kinda business first/gaming second they were the only ones I found that also had a 99Wh battery. But spec for spec they were more than MSI all the way up their offerings.

This MSI laptop is great. I purchased it because I needed something reliable with a fast processor and a good graphics card. I primarily use it for data science applications for my graduate studies. The full keyboard is a nice feature. This laptop is lightweight and well-built. The built-in Tobi-aware app is a great feature that I can turn on and off when necessary. I also like the physical shutter for the camera. The battery life has been good. The longest I have used it on battery power is 5-6 hours. The battery was about 35-40% after 5 hours and the performance never changed. I haven't tried running the laptop on battery for a full day.

Solid laptop for the new Intel Meteor Lake Chips. Originally got the Intel Core Ultra 7 model and returned it because I wanted the slighlty higher clock speeds along with the dedicated Nvidia GPU. For those who don't want to shell out the extra $400 the Intel Arc GPU is a solid choice, I was able to test Minecraft and a few other Steam games on the ARC GPU and the ran great. As for this specific model, I have already used it for data analysis and data science tasks, it has performed great. I have yet to use the 4060 GPU for machine learning tasks, but should run well. Tried out a few games and performance was good (turned down settings from Ultra to ensure higher framerates). The first few battery cycles I have been able to get 8+ hours on a charge with a data analysis/data science workload. Under the right battery settings, switching to the Arc GPU (Nvidia Control Panel) and turning brightness down, I think you could get 10-12 hours easy with light web surfing/Youtube use. Only criticism would be the offset mousepad, as I am not used to that, it has been a slow transition. I did not neccessarily need a dedicated keypad, but it has come in handy a few times already when I have had to work in Excel/Google Sheets.