Top 5 reasons to BUY or NOT to buy the MSI Prestige 14 (A11Sx)

With MSI having two lineups, that are less gamer-y, the job is distinguishing between the two becomes harder and harder. The Modern and the Prestige lineups both offer relatively thin and light devices that have a decent amount of power inside them.

MSI is really trying hard to make the Prestige brand stand out and be the premier brand when we don’t talk bout gaming laptops. They have achieved that with the MSI Prestige 14 by offering Tiger Lake hardware from Intel and a dedicated GPU, which makes for a pretty good 14-inch ball of awesomeness.

Today we are presenting you with LaptopMedia’s Top 5 picks about the MSI Prestige 14 (A11Sx).

MSI Prestige 14 (A11Sx): Full Specs / In-depth Review


3 reasons to BUY the MSI Prestige 14 (A11Sx)

1. The Design

While it packs quite powerful hardware, the MSI Prestige 14 manages to do it in a very portable and lightweight package. Weighing only 1.29 kg and being just 15.9 mm tall, it is definitely one of the most portable and powerful 14-inches out there. MSI states that the body is made out of aluminum alloy, which we can confirm, as the laptop’s base is very sturdy and resistant to bends. The lid, however, is made of plastic, and you can definitely tell. Thankfully, its saving grace is the way it opens with a single hand and lifts the body so that the fans have ample room to breathe.

The keyboard is good, with long key travel, backlight with three brightness settings, and LARGE keycaps. However, the feedback is a bit dull and soft. We would have loved a more clicky sound to come out of it. The touchpad is just amazing and while the shape of it is a bit strange, it has a big surface area plus it is made of glass so gliding is excellent. It also has a fingerprint reader on it, which comes in contrasting black.


2. The Display

The MSI Prestige 14 uses a 14-inch Full HD IPS panel, which has comfortable viewing angles, a good contrast ratio, and decent maximum brightness. Additionally, the panel covers a whopping 97% of the sRGB color gamut. However, we found that the display uses aggressive PWM to adjust the brightness levels, which is harmful to your eyes. Fortunately, our “Health-Guard” profile completely gets rid of this issue.

The color accuracy was horrendous with the factory settings but with our “Gaming and web design” profile, we managed to get it to a quite good level. Below you can check the results from the color accuracy test with both the factory settings (left) and with the “Gaming and web design” profile applied (right).


Buy our profiles

Since our profiles are tailored for each individual display model, this article and its respective profile package are meant for MSI Prestige 14 (A11Sx) configurations with 14.0″ BOE HV140FHM-N61 (BOE06DF) (FHD, 1920 × 1080) IPS.

*Should you have problems with downloading the purchased file, try using a different browser to open the link you’ll receive via e-mail. If the download target is a .php file instead of an archive, change the file extension to .zip or contact us at [email protected].

Read more about the profiles HERE.

In addition to receiving efficient and health-friendly profiles, by buying LaptopMedia's products you also support the development of our labs, where we test devices in order to produce the most objective reviews possible.

Office Work

Office Work should be used mostly by users who spend most of the time looking at pieces of text, tables or just surfing. This profile aims to deliver better distinctness and clarity by keeping a flat gamma curve (2.20), native color temperature and perceptually accurate colors.

Design and Gaming

This profile is aimed at designers who work with colors professionally, and for games and movies as well. Design and Gaming takes display panels to their limits, making them as accurate as possible in the sRGB IEC61966-2-1 standard for Web and HDTV, at white point D65.

Health-Guard

Health-Guard eliminates the harmful Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) and reduces the negative Blue Light which affects our eyes and body. Since it’s custom tailored for every panel, it manages to keep the colors perceptually accurate. Health-Guard simulates paper so the pressure on the eyes is greatly reduced.

Get all 3 profiles with 33% discount


3. The Performance

With such a small body, we were very surprised to see that the laptop was offered with up to a Core i7-1185G7. The Prestige 14 is quite powerful both on the CPU and the GPU level, with the GTX 1650 Max-Q and 1650 Ti Max-Q. Below you can see some results from our tests with the MSI Prestige 14 along with other devices in its price range.


2 reasons NOT to buy the MSI Prestige 14 (A11Sx)

1. The Upgradeability

Unfortunately, small devices tend to suffer the same fate when it comes to upgradability. The MSI Prestige 14 comes with up to 32GB of RAM, but it is soldered to the motherboard. The only thing that you can upgrade on it is the storage and even that is through only one M.2 PCIe x4 drive. Beware though that in some countries upgrading the storage means breaking the factory seal, which will void your warranty.


2. The Cooling

The Prestige 14’s cooling didn’t hold up when we were doing CPU and GPU stress tests. However, the Core i7-1185G7 maintained pretty high clock speeds, even though it reached 91°C. In the CPU stress test, we use 100% of the CPU cores, while monitoring the clock speeds and temperatures.

Average core frequency (base frequency + X); CPU temp.

Intel Core i7-1185G7(15W TDP)0:02 – 0:10 sec0:15 – 0:30 sec10:00 – 15:00 min
MSI Prestige 14 (A11Sx)3.80 GHz @ 94°C @ 53W3.48 GHz @ 95°C @ 42W3.22 GHz @ 91°C @ 35W
Lenovo Yoga 9i (14)3.08 GHz @ 92°C @ 42W3.14 GHz @ 96°C @ 34W2.28 GHz @ 76°C @ 19W

In the GPU stress test, the MSI Prestige 14 performed the worst out of any laptop with the GTX 1650 Max-Q. This shouldn’t be a surprise, however, as the small form factor and low TDP of 23-24W.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Max-QGPU frequency/ Core temp (after 2 min)GPU frequency/ Core temp (after 30 min)
MSI Prestige 14 (A11Sx)1235 MHz @ 74°C1148 MHz @ 74°C
Microsoft Surface Book 3 (13.5)1480 MHz @ 66°C1476 MHz @ 68°C
MSI Prestige 151408 MHz @ 70°C1388 MHz @ 74°C
MSI GF63 10SCXR1230 MHz @ 77°C1250 MHz @ 78°C
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 21345 MHz @ 69°C1343 MHz @ 72°C
ASUS ZenBook 15 UX5341229 MHz @ 77°C1221 MHz @ 78°C

Gaming comfort

The laptop was pretty loud when running at max speeds, and the outer temperature reached 51°C.


All MSI Prestige 14 (A11Sx) configurations:

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