NotebookCHECK - Notebook Forum

In my opinion its more like a multimedia rather than an office laptop. No one needs a 1650max-q and a 4k 100%adobergb screen for office.

Not sure how you really do your wifi battery tests, but under the same "test", on my unit(1080p model) i'm also getting around 7.5 hours, which is not that good considering the resolution. I've had it for 3 weeks now and battery life kinda disappointed me because i expected 9+ hours on my usecase. Undervolting didn't help at all, only helped a bit of performance and temps.

Also, i asked MSI and they said that they intentionally blocked Sport mode while on battery to preserve battery life, that's why cpu PL1 won't boost to 45W or more while on stress tests like it does on power. -125mv undervolt resulted in +400Mhz on all 6 cores while on battery on CBR15 (from 2ghz to 2.4ghz on all 6 cores at 100% cpu unilization).

Quote from: Lum Dermaku on November 12, 2019, 21:26:01
Not sure how you really do your wifi battery tests, but under the same "test", on my unit(1080p model) i'm also getting around 7.5 hours, which is not that good considering the resolution. I've had it for 3 weeks now and battery life kinda disappointed me because i expected 9+ hours on my usecase. Undervolting didn't help at all, only helped a bit of performance and temps.

Also, i asked MSI and they said that they intentionally blocked Sport mode while on battery to preserve battery life, that's why cpu PL1 won't boost to 45W or more while on stress tests like it does on power. -125mv undervolt resulted in +400Mhz on all 6 cores while on battery on CBR15 (from 2ghz to 2.4ghz on all 6 cores at 100% cpu unilization).

Also, on a very quiet room fan nosie is very audible and annoying even on idle and light tasks where cpu doesn't go beyond 50C, the fans spin at 2800rpm (gpu fan which makes the most noise) and 3000-3100rpm (cpu fan) or 2700 fan1 and 2900 fan2 best case scenario for 35C idle temps.

I installed dragon center and made a custom fan profile which seemed to fix this fan noise issue and until the cpu reaches 60C, that stupid gpu fan doesn't spin at all and the laptop is very silent, that cpu fan isn't noticeable at all and you'll hear it only if you concentrate on it. At 60C cpu temp, it immediately starts to spin at 2800rpm. The temps seem to be not so different with or without that bigger gpu fan spinning - at idle with both fans spinning the temps are around 35-45C, with that gpu fan turned off: around 40-50C at most. Under light tasks it doesn't reach 60C but if i launch a heavier app like Android Studio, the temps pass 60, the second gpu fan turns on and starts spinning at 2800rpm, and when cpu temps go lower, gpu turns off.
Installing Dragon Center means that you will have to uninstall Creator Center and you lose some functionality like: caps lock,mute&mic button light doesn't turn on/off when either key is enabled, you lose that 180degree flip screen option.

I know it is a personal preference, but why did you rate keyboard typing so low? It is actually very pleasing to type on and easy to get used to and it has quite some key travel. Also touchpad is pretty great.

love this cpu-gpu combo

Can you please do a full review on the Prestige 14?  It's the more interesting one imho with the same performance in a smaller package. Would love to see if the cooling solution works..

What is the key travel distance of the keyboard? Does the hardware of the screen incorporate a blue light filter? Are their any laptops that have a blue light filter that is hardware based? Does anyone know of a fan control program to silence the laptop that does not require the uninstalling of MSI Creator Center? To Lum Dermaku, why is it necessary to uninstall Creator Center to install Dragon Center?

Quote from: jk on November 13, 2019, 07:28:14
What is the key travel distance of the keyboard? Does the hardware of the screen incorporate a blue light filter? Are their any laptops that have a blue light filter that is hardware based? Does anyone know of a fan control program to silence the laptop that does not require the uninstalling of MSI Creator Center? To Lum Dermaku, why is it necessary to uninstall Creator Center to install Dragon Center?

It has 1.5mm key travel.

When i tried to install it for the first time when Creator Center was already installed, it recognozed Dragon Center as some form of update for Creator Center ( and vice versa: when installing CC when DC is already installed...), because it conflicts performance profiles and fan profiles. Also, the dragon center i installed was Gs65's, so that's why i lost some keyboard shortcuts functionalities.

I wrote a thread on reddit 2 weeks ago and explained a lot of other stuff there including these fanprofiles: redd[insert dot here]it/dnfeu4

As of blue light filter hardware wise, i don't think it actally has that but the display's color temp is rated to be at right at around 6500K so it is very neutral. There is an Msi app that changes color profiles including a blue light filter but i use windows's night light when i want to.

Hopefully you will get to review the version with 1080p screen in the future. Looking forward to the prestige 14 review next. However the preview already shows slower cpu speeds, probably due to lighter cooling system. I prefer the smaller battery capacity of the prestige 14 for the lighter weight. The extra battery weight is not necessary in the prestige 15. I would have liked to see double m.2 slots on the prestige 14 and there seems to be enough space in the motherboard if they wanted to do it.

My experience is better than what this review or the reviewer does.
It is considered a perfect laptop to nowaday standard, and no other laptop will do better than it performance wise. The better build XPS 15 is trashed compared to Prestige 15 new design.

Quoteno Kensington Lock or integrated full-size SD reader
high CPU and GPU temperatures when under load
CPU throttling when under 100 percent utilization
servicing requires tearing a factory seal sticker
base and lid could be more rigid
key feedback could be stronger
fans will never idle
spongy clickpad

This laptop is among one of the smallest 15.6" laptop today, 357x234x17. 1st to ASUS UX534. That is why they can't fit a full size SD card onto this, but they do let you add another m.2 8022 SSD inside, which is much better considered this will target multimedia audience.
Come on man, which laptop doesn't get high on tempature underload? It is what matter when they let it crank up to that 95*C Temp or not. Which laptop this slim and portable let you crank up to >3.0GHz on 6-core under full load? After UV -125mV it can run 3.6GHz no more than 85*C.
Get your common-sense together really.
Factory seal means nothing when it comes to the law of the desinated country.
Keyboard and touchpad feedback is absolutely fine, if not one of the best for it form. Whatever you take into this review, you don't seem to consider the form factor of this device don't ya.
Fan does go to idle if you activate Super Battery or Silent mode. Eventhough the fan is barely noticable to be fair.

Given a score of 83% is unacceptable to me, when the XPS 15 9570/9590 has a better score despite so many problems and patches since its release.

The reviewer doesn't seem to be exactly knowledgable about the product he is reviewing, consider this is not the first take among its 15" form.

To Lum Dërmaku, Thanks for the reply. I have another question for you. Do you know if it is possible to run VMetal on this laptop? It is a virtualization software program for Nitrux a Linux distribution. Below are comments and steps to test VMetal. Thanks ahead of time.

nxos dot org/en/faq/#what-is-vmetal (cannot use exact link, low post count)
To use VMetal you must be able to select one of the two GPUs in your system as a primary display output or as an initial display output in the UEFI of the laptop. If you're on Linux run the following script in a terminal window. Copy the code, paste it on a blank document, and give executable permissions to the file.

#!/bin/bash

# Find IOMMU Groups
for d in /sys/kernel/iommu_groups/*/devices/*; do
  n=${d#*/iommu_groups/*}; n=${n%%/*}
  printf 'IOMMU Group %s ' "$n"
  lspci -nns "${d##*/}"
done

# Did this PC boot in UEFI or BIOS?
[ -d /sys/firmware/efi ] && echo UEFI || echo BIOS

# Find if CPU is 64-bit
grep -w -o lm /proc/cpuinfo | uniq

# Find if CPU uses SVM or VMX extensions
egrep -o '(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo | sort | uniq

The review is wrong about one statement - the Zenbook 15 (be it UX534 or UX533) is not 100-200 grams heavier - it is the same (sometimes lower) weight! Give or take a negligible amount of grams.

How can i install dragon center? Uninstalling creator center dosnt work, in DC there is a massage "Please download CC from Microsoft store" , What i have done wrong?

Quote from: Kirill on November 17, 2019, 06:16:52
How can i install dragon center? Uninstalling creator center dosnt work, in DC there is a massage "Please download CC from Microsoft store" , What i have done wrong?

Uninstalled in from Control Panel, i downloaded GS65's Dragon Center from MSI support website for that laptop and installed in from one of three setups inside the Extras folder, not the setup in the main folder.

I have been having this issue that resting my palms (or any object for that matter) on either side of the touchpad is registered as a click. This is super annoying when I am moving the mouse as occasionally it goes into click&drag mode because it recognized my palm as a click (note that my palms are completely off the touchpad).

Has anybody had this issue? have you been able to resolve it in anyway?

I've managed to fix the misclicking with a few hardware modifications.

Quote from: For Science! on November 22, 2019, 00:49:14
I've managed to fix the misclicking with a few hardware modifications.

How did you fix it?

HI, it seems that the 14 inches model has two USB 2.0 instead of the 2 USB 3.1 gen1 A of the 15 inches version. Not the same.

Quote from: Lum Dermaku on November 17, 2019, 14:29:35

Quote from: Kirill on November 17, 2019, 06:16:52
How can i install dragon center? Uninstalling creator center dosnt work, in DC there is a massage "Please download CC from Microsoft store" , What i have done wrong?

Uninstalled in from Control Panel, i downloaded GS65's Dragon Center from MSI support website for that laptop and installed in from one of three setups inside the Extras folder, not the setup in the main folder.

I did this. But after install I am unable to launch Dragon Center. From Programs x86 there is a bunch of executables but none seem to do anything on their own.

I must be missing a thing.
Which file / programme to you have to launch in order to reduce fan speeds ?

Would be great if MSI could fix this one and only issue otherwise I'll have to return the device. I hate fan noise.

Quote from: Lum Dermaku on November 12, 2019, 21:57:23

Quote from: Lum Dermaku on November 12, 2019, 21:26:01

I installed dragon center and made a custom fan profile which seemed to fix this fan noise issue and until the cpu reaches 60C, that stupid gpu fan doesn't spin at all and the laptop is very silent, that cpu fan isn't noticeable at all and you'll hear it only if you concentrate on it.

Tried your Redit trick but could not reproduce it even after uninstalling creative center, reboooting, reinstaller dragon center 2 etc.

Once I install from the setup_G.exe, I cannot find the program in the folder under Programs x86. There's a bunch of files and folders but no dragoncenter.exe.

Could you help me out and detail the steps ?

Quote from: jk on November 23, 2019, 19:58:10

Quote from: For Science! on November 22, 2019, 00:49:14
I've managed to fix the misclicking with a few hardware modifications.

How did you fix it?

Hi! So Sorry for the neglected response. In short I did two things: the first did not solve the issue, but may (or may not) have been required for the 2nd step, which actually did solve the issue.



I established that the root cause of the issue is a flex of the upper part of the chassis with respect to the bottom rubber feet, as the problem was much easier to reproduce when the laptop was on a flat surface (i.e. a table) as opposed to when the base was off the surface.



The first thing I did (note: this alone did not fix the problem) was to try to pad out the upper part of the chassis against the battery. I opened the laptop, and removed the battery, and in the sides of the trackpad, added 1.0 or 1.5 mm (sorry can't remember) thermal pads. I marked the vague area that I put the thermal pads on, please note that it would be under the battery as pictured below.

The above did nothing towards the misclick, but then I realised the flex of the upper chassis was actually caused by the battery not laying flat with respect to the top. In the picture above you can see a bit of plastic from the battery resting on top of a metal piece. This actually causes the battery to be slightly raised in the middle, giving rise to flex either side of it. This curious plastic circle I believe was used for a screw in a previous model?

Anyway, the step which fixed it for me (and may or may not require the thermal pads above) was to cut into the plastic so that the metal does not intefere with the battery resting. Obviously this is a destructive mod and so do at your own risk, but this has completly solved my issues with misclicking due to the weight of my arms on the side of the laptop.

I'm confused - why does the review text mention Colour deltaE of 1.57 while all the tables/data show ~ 3.36

Currently considering buying prestige 15. As mentioned in article, is this "slow black-white response times; noticeable ghosting" situation really noticeable for a common user? And how about the battery life of light use? Thanks so much.

With normal use of an common user ghosting is not visible on this device and I am very critical of it, so no problems at all.
About battery life: as always the answer: it depends very much on the usage. I work a lot with photo editing programs and the battery life is about 6 hours at 75 brightness and battery power plan.

The throttling issue exists, however it is easily removed through ThrottleStop. I did an undervolting of - 125 for CPU and CPU clock and the temperature fell from permanent 92-94 to 80-83. With the frequency staying the same. And then no throttling. Using of MSI Afterburner does also help with the GPU.
So, it has problems out of the box, but they are tweaked in a simple way. After these tweaking exercise the performance is awesome (especially on CPU side).
Moreover in 95% of your normal activities you will not face any throttling issues even with the out of box version.

Quote from: For Science! on December 15, 2019, 21:54:43
Anyway, the step which fixed it for me (and may or may not require the thermal pads above) was to cut into the plastic so that the metal does not intefere with the battery resting. Obviously this is a destructive mod and so do at your own risk, but this has completly solved my issues with misclicking due to the weight of my arms on the side of the laptop.

pics! well deserved rare upvote :)

Is the slot m2 pcie 3x4 or 3x2?

Quote from: Argonaut86 on January 31, 2020, 10:08:50
The throttling issue exists, however it is easily removed through ThrottleStop. I did an undervolting of - 125 for CPU and CPU clock and the temperature fell from permanent 92-94 to 80-83. With the frequency staying the same. And then no throttling. Using of MSI Afterburner does also help with the GPU.
So, it has problems out of the box, but they are tweaked in a simple way. After these tweaking exercise the performance is awesome (especially on CPU side).
Moreover in 95% of your normal activities you will not face any throttling issues even with the out of box version.

Thank you for your info! Just a question..is it true that when unplugged the tdp is set to just 15 w instead of 45 w? I would like to use it for 3d stuff and rendering but i'm used to travel a lot so i'm not always plugged in! Thanks

@Argonaut86
Maybe you or someone else could adjust the exact settings in ThrottleStop (with screenshots). That would be great, because my MSI crashes at -125 after a while or immediately (reboot). Do you have DRAGON Center running in parallel? Could that be the cause?
It would be great if somebody would provide his settings here, because profit in the temperature settings is obvious.

Quote from: mikelino666 on February 05, 2020, 22:29:37

Quote from: Argonaut86 on January 31, 2020, 10:08:50
The throttling issue exists, however it is easily removed through ThrottleStop. I did an undervolting of - 125 for CPU and CPU clock and the temperature fell from permanent 92-94 to 80-83. With the frequency staying the same. And then no throttling. Using of MSI Afterburner does also help with the GPU.
So, it has problems out of the box, but they are tweaked in a simple way. After these tweaking exercise the performance is awesome (especially on CPU side).
Moreover in 95% of your normal activities you will not face any throttling issues even with the out of box version.

Thank you for your info! Just a question..is it true that when unplugged the tdp is set to just 15 w instead of 45 w? I would like to use it for 3d stuff and rendering but i'm used to travel a lot so i'm not always plugged in! Thanks

Yes, the cpu's PL2 and PL1 are both set to 15W when the laptop is on battery power. MSI intentionally limited the performance to extend batterylife (makes a bit no sense but that's what they told me). Unfortunately there's no way around this but -125Mv undervolt helps on  around 20% performance improvement (most noticeably when all 6 cores are 100% used), the clockspeeds jump from 2Ghz to 2.4Ghz (when all 6 cores are 100% utilized, didn't test single core performance). As far as i know, gpu performance is not throttled when on battery power compared to when the laptop is plugged in.

The biggest issue i faced was that when under heavy combined CPU and GPU load the 90 watt power brick didn't seem to be adequate.

This does at least mean the power brick is on the smaller size for travel.

While using this laptop full performance wasn't too far off and this was only when fully loading up both processor and graphics together, though undervolting did help out a bit.

This is almost the perfect notebook for me, nice specs, regular sized arrow keys, decent design. I will wait to the next year for better build quality and better heat management (nothing wrong with laptop being thicker!). I would pay 300$ more for these features.

Biggest handicap of an ultra cpu is that, it has very limited PCI express lines of only 16. 8 of this line used for graphics. Other 8, divided into 4 + 4. One of 4 is USB and wireless (camera, sound etc.) Left only 4. This is for M.2's. But, if there are two M.2 slots, they share this, so only 2 PCI lines left for each. So, the read & write performance drops to 2GB maximum. If there is only one M.2, that maybe much better. It can run at full speed. Finally, Intel must increase this line to 20 for better double slot M.2 performance.  ???

Not as great as I would have hoped.

The bad:
The screen's response time is bad. Extremely bad. Like something from the passive matrix era, every moving thing is super blurry.
The HDMI2.0 output (yes it has one despite the article saying it only has an 1.4) is not working with all devices. Internally its an active displayport to HDMI2.0 converter, thus HDR is not working, DDC/CI is not working (you cant control the monitor's brightness from the notebook for example if the monitor supports it), some devices simply refuses to go 4k 60hz, others drop the connection after a while, others work flawlessly (but still no HDR and DDC/CI).
The fans are LOUD. Shouting LOUD. At idle its good, you can hardly notice it, but once you load the system they spin up quick. And as loud as they are they do not move a lot of air. My old asus g551 moves a lot more air barely audible compared to this msi.
The accessories the article mentioned were not included with my unit.
The system is not stable at the default clocks, I had to down clock the nVidia GPU by 70MHz to not have random crashes.
There is no dedicated sleep button (not even an FN combo)... Apparently a screen flip button was more important (which btw could be easily done with a keycombo via the intel driver without the need for a dedicated button...).
The utility software is slow. Like the "creator app" (where you can control some of the functionality like fan curves, system modes, etc) takes up to half a minute to start up and 3-10 seconds to just appear if it was minimized. Sometimes it shows almost instantly, but this is not the majority.
The sound card is bad. Really bad. I know this is not mostly msi's fault but realtek's. It can only go up to 48khz/24 bit while even my oldest system (10+ years old) can do 96khz/24 bit, and my 5+ year old asus gaming machine can do 192khz/24 bit. Even my monitor's output is 96khz/24bit.
In general the realtek soundcard driver is bad. Why does it take a fullHD monitor to show two drop down boxes with 2 items? Why cant it recognize what type of device I plug into the jack? Why cant I set it permanently? Why does it need 2 "drivers" just for the combo jack to work? Why are the sound effects/enhancements enabled by default? I was wondering why my music sounds like s***, and turned out to be some default settings enabled "enhancements".
The microphone gets hit with the outgoing airflow from the fans resulting making a ton of noise.
The headphone and internal speakers are not a separate device/output. If you forgot to unplug your headphones before standing up from the machine good luck noticing incoming calls. All my other devices has these as separate audio devices so even if I forgot to unplug my headphones skype will ring on the internal speakers too.
Could have easily put a full size SD card slot on the side... Converters from micro to full exists but not the other way around, so its not possible to use full size sd cards without an external reader.
It heats up under load. Badly. Like the whole machine becomes painful to touch.
It heats up even under slight load. More than I would find acceptable.

The meh:
Keyboard: It's nor good nor bad. Definitely not bad, but it feels like its 10% larger than others and I constantly make mistakes on it. But its actual size is the same as any other of mine.
Keyboard layout is interesting. They tried to combine multiple physical layout to reduce the number of different upper case types they have to manufacture.
nVidia GPU is only connected by a x4 interface, this can be a bottleneck in some applications.
If you plug anything in the HDMI port it enables the dedicated GPU resulting in a much shorter battery life.
The power button is not on the side, but could have as its possible to dock the notebook via a thunderbolt cable, you have to open it up to turn it on if your dock does not have a power button.
Webcam is meh. Its only 720p and even at that it feels like upscaled 480p.
Coilwhine. Obviously they will send one for review which does not do it, but mine does. Not loud, but definitely audible.

The good:
Screen colors are good! Viewing angles are good.
The two ram slots and two m.2 are great! I put 32gb of ram in it and another SSD.
The performance is great, it does not throttles significantly under full load.
The general build quality is excellent, all metal chassis even on the bottom.
I feared that the WiFi antennas are in a bad place (bottom side, on the front of the device), but they work great, speeds are great.
Its thin and light.
Linux works on it. Only the fingerprint reader which does not work. Everything else does as far as I tested!
Battery life is great on light load.
The charge limiter is great! Its possible to limit to 60% which is awesome!
You can charge with either of the thunderbolt ports.
You can customize the fan curves, but it just shows "cold to hot" instead of actual temperature values.

Conclusion: its a good machine, but far from perfect. It would have not taken long/much to fix said issues.

"MSI claims full AdobeRGB coverage which we can confirm with our own independent measurements."

On the other hand, from measurements :  "84.8% AdobeRGB"

Apparently 85% is the new "full".

This seems to be an interesting product, I mean the size and weight is impressive, thunderbolt 3 x2, i7-10710U cpu, GTX 1650 MaxQ gpu, dual M.2 slots, 32GB of dual channel ram, sufficient up to date ports, nice wide trackpad, dual fans and so is the 82w battery. I prefer the 15.6" format, in my case, just too many sacrifices when you go below this size. I am a little confused with so many manufacturers installing poor performing 4K screens on so many laptops these days, I wouldn't even consider casual gaming with this one. I would maybe go with this laptop if it had a different screen, I'm sure the battery autonomy would also benefit from this.

So I'm seeing a mixed bag of comments here, I really want to know what to ppl that have actually purchased this feel...

I'm looking around for a lightweight video editing creator package

So far I'm looking at at this and a Dell G7 15 - 7500

I'm torn between extra power of the NVIDIA(R) GeForce RTX(TM) 2070 8GB GDDR6 on the Dell and the portability of the MSI. Honestly, I don't really want a Dell, time for a change.

If anyone cares to comment between these two options (yeah I know it's like chalk-n-cheese) but it'd be too lengthy to explain my rationale.

For those wanting a top laptop, if you can afford a 2.000€ laptop, buy another one instead of this. And i explain why...
I´ve been using it for months now (4k display, 32gb, 2TB, GFX 1650ti version) and after working on photography and video with it, with premiere and mostly on camera raw (almost no photoshop), even when plugged the laptop gets really hot and to stop this you have to start tunning the fans at top speed, playing with a lot of msi apps already installed that, i think, they are fighting to control what windows does once installed (drivers mostly) so you have two apps controlling your battery, two things controlling the screen resolution and color management, and so on.
The battery drains surprinsinly fast after couple of stops to send pictures in the middle of my daily work, using raw files from a Nikon D850. So with full power, roughly 2-3 hours or less. And i tell you this downscaling the display to FHD, if you work with the native 4k display, expect half the time.
The color "thing" of this laptop (100% AdobeRGB is doubtfully true) is really confusing, even for a person who has been working with calibrated screens for years. With the laptop unplugged there is no secure way to know if what you see is really contrasty or not, there is some changing on the colors, hue and brightness that gets me mad. The same happened to me before with one laptop (Acer swift 5) and that´s why i did send it back. Working with couple of friends besides me (they use MBP) and i really envy their laptop screens, the clarity, the colors, the incredible display those laptops show... Nothing close to them with this laptop. I still cant say that i feel cheated for paying so much and getting this compared to apple, but i can tell you that what i expected from this ammount of money is not what i finally did get. It has more than enough power to work with big projects on Premiere (faster than those apple MBP i mentioned) but at the end i bought this laptop to enjoy the screen resolution and color accuracy and i definitely didnt yet. So, as much as i hate to say this, if you work with photo-video thing, get the apple MBP. This laptop is a beast in power and maybe is perfect for gamers also (who knows, i dont play pcgames) but to a professional level you cant rely on something that fragile and unsecure as this. Good try for MSI but not this time. Maybe next year.
Sorry for the bad news but think about me, i´m stuck with it, still paying it and dreaming about a newer version with better/easier interface to control color and a screen that finally has true contrast/brightness no matter if it´s plugged or not.
Cheers!

Quote from: anotheruser on June 08, 2020, 18:34:36
Not as great as I would have hoped.

The bad:
The screen's response time is bad. Extremely bad. Like something from the passive matrix era, every moving thing is super blurry.
The HDMI2.0 output (yes it has one despite the article saying it only has an 1.4) is not working with all devices. Internally its an active displayport to HDMI2.0 converter, thus HDR is not working, DDC/CI is not working (you cant control the monitor's brightness from the notebook for example if the monitor supports it), some devices simply refuses to go 4k 60hz, others drop the connection after a while, others work flawlessly (but still no HDR and DDC/CI).
The fans are LOUD. Shouting LOUD. At idle its good, you can hardly notice it, but once you load the system they spin up quick. And as loud as they are they do not move a lot of air. My old asus g551 moves a lot more air barely audible compared to this msi.
The accessories the article mentioned were not included with my unit.
The system is not stable at the default clocks, I had to down clock the nVidia GPU by 70MHz to not have random crashes.
There is no dedicated sleep button (not even an FN combo)... Apparently a screen flip button was more important (which btw could be easily done with a keycombo via the intel driver without the need for a dedicated button...).
The utility software is slow. Like the "creator app" (where you can control some of the functionality like fan curves, system modes, etc) takes up to half a minute to start up and 3-10 seconds to just appear if it was minimized. Sometimes it shows almost instantly, but this is not the majority.
The sound card is bad. Really bad. I know this is not mostly msi's fault but realtek's. It can only go up to 48khz/24 bit while even my oldest system (10+ years old) can do 96khz/24 bit, and my 5+ year old asus gaming machine can do 192khz/24 bit. Even my monitor's output is 96khz/24bit.
In general the realtek soundcard driver is bad. Why does it take a fullHD monitor to show two drop down boxes with 2 items? Why cant it recognize what type of device I plug into the jack? Why cant I set it permanently? Why does it need 2 "drivers" just for the combo jack to work? Why are the sound effects/enhancements enabled by default? I was wondering why my music sounds like s***, and turned out to be some default settings enabled "enhancements".
The microphone gets hit with the outgoing airflow from the fans resulting making a ton of noise.
The headphone and internal speakers are not a separate device/output. If you forgot to unplug your headphones before standing up from the machine good luck noticing incoming calls. All my other devices has these as separate audio devices so even if I forgot to unplug my headphones skype will ring on the internal speakers too.
Could have easily put a full size SD card slot on the side... Converters from micro to full exists but not the other way around, so its not possible to use full size sd cards without an external reader.
It heats up under load. Badly. Like the whole machine becomes painful to touch.
It heats up even under slight load. More than I would find acceptable.

The meh:
Keyboard: It's nor good nor bad. Definitely not bad, but it feels like its 10% larger than others and I constantly make mistakes on it. But its actual size is the same as any other of mine.
Keyboard layout is interesting. They tried to combine multiple physical layout to reduce the number of different upper case types they have to manufacture.
nVidia GPU is only connected by a x4 interface, this can be a bottleneck in some applications.
If you plug anything in the HDMI port it enables the dedicated GPU resulting in a much shorter battery life.
The power button is not on the side, but could have as its possible to dock the notebook via a thunderbolt cable, you have to open it up to turn it on if your dock does not have a power button.
Webcam is meh. Its only 720p and even at that it feels like upscaled 480p.
Coilwhine. Obviously they will send one for review which does not do it, but mine does. Not loud, but definitely audible.

The good:
Screen colors are good! Viewing angles are good.
The two ram slots and two m.2 are great! I put 32gb of ram in it and another SSD.
The performance is great, it does not throttles significantly under full load.
The general build quality is excellent, all metal chassis even on the bottom.
I feared that the WiFi antennas are in a bad place (bottom side, on the front of the device), but they work great, speeds are great.
Its thin and light.
Linux works on it. Only the fingerprint reader which does not work. Everything else does as far as I tested!
Battery life is great on light load.
The charge limiter is great! Its possible to limit to 60% which is awesome!
You can charge with either of the thunderbolt ports.
You can customize the fan curves, but it just shows "cold to hot" instead of actual temperature values.

Conclusion: its a good machine, but far from perfect. It would have not taken long/much to fix said issues.

Hi why u didn't try thunderbolt video instead of poor HDMi... Thunderbold is 3 or 4 it should run 4k@120Hz

Quote from: Oscar Pinal on September 29, 2020, 11:14:45
For those wanting a top laptop, if you can afford a 2.000€ laptop, buy another one instead of this. And i explain why...
I´ve been using it for months now (4k display, 32gb, 2TB, GFX 1650ti version) and after working on photography and video with it, with premiere and mostly on camera raw (almost no photoshop), even when plugged the laptop gets really hot and to stop this you have to start tunning the fans at top speed, playing with a lot of msi apps already installed that, i think, they are fighting to control what windows does once installed (drivers mostly) so you have two apps controlling your battery, two things controlling the screen resolution and color management, and so on.
The battery drains surprinsinly fast after couple of stops to send pictures in the middle of my daily work, using raw files from a Nikon D850. So with full power, roughly 2-3 hours or less. And i tell you this downscaling the display to FHD, if you work with the native 4k display, expect half the time.
The color "thing" of this laptop (100% AdobeRGB is doubtfully true) is really confusing, even for a person who has been working with calibrated screens for years. With the laptop unplugged there is no secure way to know if what you see is really contrasty or not, there is some changing on the colors, hue and brightness that gets me mad. The same happened to me before with one laptop (Acer swift 5) and that´s why i did send it back. Working with couple of friends besides me (they use MBP) and i really envy their laptop screens, the clarity, the colors, the incredible display those laptops show... Nothing close to them with this laptop. I still cant say that i feel cheated for paying so much and getting this compared to apple, but i can tell you that what i expected from this ammount of money is not what i finally did get. It has more than enough power to work with big projects on Premiere (faster than those apple MBP i mentioned) but at the end i bought this laptop to enjoy the screen resolution and color accuracy and i definitely didnt yet. So, as much as i hate to say this, if you work with photo-video thing, get the apple MBP. This laptop is a beast in power and maybe is perfect for gamers also (who knows, i dont play pcgames) but to a professional level you cant rely on something that fragile and unsecure as this. Good try for MSI but not this time. Maybe next year.
Sorry for the bad news but think about me, i´m stuck with it, still paying it and dreaming about a newer version with better/easier interface to control color and a screen that finally has true contrast/brightness no matter if it´s plugged or not.
Cheers!

You supposed to get 1080p one completely enough for little 15'' screen
4k is pointless even on 20''

DONT BUY THIS NOTEBOOK

After buying 5 more of these notebooks, I definitely DO NOT RECOMMEND IT.
Machine #1: nVidia GPU is bad, only works if you under clock it by ~70mhz. No other problem.
Machine #2: Random system freeze, even when idle.
Machine #3: Random system freeze when the nVidia GPU is enabled (even without load), thermal throttling under load (other machines don't do it), onboard audio failed, no output on speakers, nor the headphones..
Machine #4: Battery completely drained, refuses to charge it, does not start up at all.
Machine #5,6: So far these are working as far as I know.

So 66% failure rate.