64 PCWorld APRIL 2020REVIEWS MSI PRESTIGE 14
demonstrates one of the challenges laptop
manufacturers face in the quest for ever-
thinner and lighter machines.CPU PERFORMANCE
With so much hardware jammed into such a
light laptop, the compromise was always
going to be about
performance. MSI tries to
mitigate this by offering no
fewer than four profiles for
running the laptop: High
Performance, Balanced,
Silent, and Super Battery.
Performance profiles in
laptops are not new, but with
the MSI they are critical to
getting the most out of the
laptop.
On its default setting ofBalanced, for example, the CPU’s
performance is essentially limited
to that of a quad-core 8th-gen
CPU. Set the laptop to its High
Performance setting, and the CPU
is now basically on a par with
competing 6-core Core
i7-10710U laptops.
To give you a better idea of
just how the Prestige 14 performs,
we ran Cinebench R15’s multi-
threaded test on all of the modes.
The worst, not surprisingly, is
Super Battery, which limits the
CPU’s clock speeds to 400MHz—yes,
400MHz.
Silent lets it clock up to 2.6GHz and is
more accurately quiet, rather than “silent.” We
say that because some may think silent means
fans totally off and, uh, silent, but on silent
they do spin—quietly. The default BalancedLifting the lid on the MSI Prestige 14 causes the bottom edge of
the panel to tilt the laptop upward, increasing airflow.MSI’s Creator Center can automatically tweak approved
applications for increased performance by changing affinity, GPU
performance, and RAM performance.