The Intel Core Ultra 200H mobile CPU series has been out in the market for some time, making this review of the MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo a little late to the party. The laptop was provided to us by Intel and houses the top-shelf Core Ultra 9 285H, which should technically guarantee me a decent experience.
This rang true, to a degree.
Specifications
I should make it clear that the Prestige 16 AI Evo that Intel passed on is actually an engineering unit – the majority of the specifications matched the specs sheet of the final product save for the display, which was a FHD+ panel instead of 4K, as well as the CPU.
On MSI’s product page, the refreshed Prestige 16 AI Evo states that the highest tier CPU on this machine would be an Intel Core Ultra 7 ARL-HX CPU, which we’re going to assume is the 265H. However, as mentioned, the unit we have is equipped with the more powerful Core Ultra 9 285H.
Looks & Functionality
While not as opulent or as premium as the Stealth series, the Prestige 16 AI Evo does have some level of pedigree. This model, in particular, sports a brushed metal aesthetic but somehow still manages to feel plastic-ky.
It is also clear that MSI is adamant in making the Prestige 16 AI Evo and its ports placement follows in the footsteps of its more premium GE Series gaming laptops. I get the idea here; as a desktop replacement, placing all the main I/O ports at the rear of the laptop makes for a cleaner desktop and easier cable management.
But the Prestige 16 AI Evo is still a laptop, and placing all the ports behind the laptop and none at the side makes for a very inconvenient affair. At the end of the day, one of those said conveniences is the ability to connect a peripheral by the side, especially when you’re in the move. I don’t want to have to reach over the back of the display just to perform such a simple act.
Moving on, I know the Prestige is MSI’s more consumer-friendly tier of laptops, but I would be remiss in my job if I didn’t honestly tell you that the build quality feels cheap. To be more specific, the entirety of the Prestige 16 AI Evo feels hollow, plasticky even. Rapping my knuckles on any part of it returns a not-so-solid echo. Worse, the display’s hinges feel weak, to the point that the attached display wobbles if you were to jiggle the laptop as a whole.
What’s worse is that if you hold the laptop upside down, the display panel doesn’t stay tightly closed and looks like an animal with its mouth gaping open, an indication that the hinges are loose.
Performance & Battery Life
As I said, this Prestige 16 AI Evo is an engineering unit and as such, the performance I’ll be presenting here are as such, and not technically as a fully functioning consumer unit. To that end, my prognosis isn’t quite as cheery as I had hoped it would be.
Firstly, and to dispel any sort of bias, the 285H in here is chippy, chirpy, and zippy. As one would come to expect of Intel’s top of the line Arrow Lake-H boots up in a hot second, and shuts down just as fast.
Sadly, that’s all where all the magic and cantrips seem to be limited to. Throughout my use of it as a daily driver, it became a trend for it to show off its many quirks, some in an oft repetitive chain: lagging several seconds after opening an app; projecting an experience akin to the system hanging for the same amount of time; the inability to click on the Start button or any other app, for that matter, which ultimately leads to me forcing a hard reboot of the system. And the list goes on.
Gaming on the Prestige 16 AI Evo, at least with this unit, is out of the question. I tried booting up my usual suite of games to test, only for them to either load up right to their respective start screens and then proceed to crash the minute I try to pick up where I left off.
To my surprise, a familiar pattern occurred with UL’s 3DMark; the laptop was adamant that it would not run any of the tests or just failed to even start their sequence. To my surprise, it did manage to run PCMark 10 as well as the Cinebench tests.
On that note, the Prestige 16 AI Evo also gets very toasty when put through its paces. At full load, the 285H can and will hit temperatures of 104°C.
Battery life is both the CPU and the laptop’s most incredible trait.
The one impressive feat of the Prestige 16 AI Evo is its enduring battery life. As per my title, the power efficiency of the 285H CPU is, to put it simply, outstanding. As my daily driver, I was averaging around 15 hours of continuous use. In a general use case of answering emails, watching some videos on the fly at a cafe and then packing it up when the need to move arise – I was going up to four days before having to charge the damn machine.
Competition
ASUS Zenbook S 16
Until such a time comes and proves me otherwise, there is quite possibly no better 16-inch productivity machine I have personally tested than ASUS’ Zenbook S 16. Equipped with an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, it also comes with 32GB of LPDDR5X-7500 RAM, USB4 ports, a 16-inch 3K OLED Touch display, and an integrated Radeon GPU that just absolutely crushes it and runs, to boot.
Battery life was also one of the Zenbook S 16’s main draws, with the 78Whr battery providing close to 16 hours of continuous usage. Price-wise, this laptop retails for RM7,999.
Conclusion
As a vehicle for Intel’s Core Ultra 200H series mobile CPUs, it’s difficult to say that the MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo is an ideal machine to showcase the prowess of the Core Ultra 9 285H but once again, the unit that came into my possession was an engineering unit. As such, I cannot judge the overall experience too harshly.
That said, it’s not an entirely lacklustre experience. The quirks I mentioned were, for the most part, dismissed by simply restarting the laptop once in a while, and once it is snapped out of its slumber, it works fine. As to how much this laptop cost, I’ll have to get back to you on that – MSI isn’t currently bringing in this particular model of the Prestige 16 AI Evo and the only one being listed on the brand’s local site is the generation prior that runs on Meteor Lake.
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