MSI PS42 (8RB) Review - Review 2022

MSI sells a gaggle of gaming laptops, but only 1 ultraportable: the new PS42 (starts at $899; $1,299 as tested). It'south a svelte fourteen-inch conventional notebook in silver that seeks to compete with category titans like the Dell XPS thirteen, the Apple MacBook Pro, and the HP Spectre 13. The PS42 is an beauteous attempt from the Taiwanese PC maker, and information technology gets a lot of things right, including a well-designed keyboard and an excellent display. There'southward a lot of room for comeback, though. From ho-hum styling to lackluster audio output to a minuscule touchpad, the PS42 fails to brand a compelling argument for why you should choose it over more-established competitors. As a result, information technology's best suited to MSI loyalists who might want an ultraportable to tote around so they can exit 1 of the visitor's first-class but often beefy gaming rigs at dwelling.

MSI Prestige PE42 8RB 15

Thin and Light, Not a Looker

At two.64 pounds and measuring 0.62 by 12.6 past eight.74 inches (HWD), the PS42 is thin and lite even for an ultraportable. Anything less than 3 pounds is in the vanguard for this category. You lot can certainly notice thinner xiv-inch machines; the gorgeous Acer Swift 7 ($889.00 at Amazon) is just 0.35 inch thick, although at two.6 pounds information technology weighs about the aforementioned as the PS42. The Dell XPS thirteen, Razer Blade Stealth, and the HP Spectre 13 all have smaller displays, which makes their chassis a chip smaller but doesn't accept much effect on weight. The XPS 13 is 2.68 pounds, and the Spectre 13 is simply a few ounces lighter at 2.45 pounds, while the Blade Stealth is actually heavier, at ii.98 pounds.

One of the downsides of the PS42's lite weight, despite its additional inch of screen existent estate, is that the build quality doesn't feel as solid as you might expect from a premium ultraportable. There's pregnant flex if you press on the large speaker grille frontwards of the keyboard, and even more than flex on the bottom border of the display, where the MSI logo is. These aren't areas where you lot'd normally place your fingers, and thankfully the keyboard deck is much sturdier, but information technology'due south articulate that some flimsier material was used to accomplish weight savings.

That textile is etched aluminum, which lends an air of composure to the otherwise stodgy-looking design. In that location's nothing sleek about the PS42, especially when yous compare it to the museum-worthy chassis of the Spectre 13 ($ane,499.77 at Amazon) or the iconic chiseled, symmetrical edges of the MacBook Pro. An MSI shield is etched into the back of the display, which evokes the laptop's gaming heritage and will certainly stand up out in a higher lecture hall that is likely full of half-eaten fruit logos.

Etched Aluminium

The pattern isn't helped by the black power brick, an off-the-shelf blackness block that prominently displays its series number and electrical certifications. Information technology wasn't subjected to an industrial designer's critical center in the same way equally adapters from Dell and Apple have been. (Either that, or the designer lost the statement.) The kludgy power adapter is every bit sure a sign equally any that in designing a premium ultraportable, any lapse in attending to detail will exist glaringly obvious.

This is certainly far from MSI's first stab at creating a laptop, though, and its feel shines through in a few key means. The first is the first-class 14-inch full HD (1,920-past-i,080-pixel) brandish, using In-Aeroplane Switching (IPS) technology to prevent washouts at off-center viewing angles and a matte finish to baby-sit against distracting reflections from ambient light. Matte finishes are mutual on gaming laptops but rare on ultraportables, which tend to support glossier screens that make colors appear more vivid. Merely the PS42's very brilliant matte brandish still manages to display crisp text and bright colors. In fact, they're the crispest and most vivid I've encountered recently from a not-glossy screen.

Excellent Screen Quality

If you lot adopt a glossy finish, a 4K resolution, or even a touch screen, still, you're out of luck. The display on our review unit is the but option. The lack of touch support is especially glaring, since information technology'south offered on all of the PS42's main Windows competitors.

Considering the borders around the display are and then thin, there's no room to stick a webcam in the conventional spot, centered above the screen. Instead, MSI makes the aforementioned compromise that Dell makes with the XPS 13: The webcam is mounted beneath the screen in the hinge, where information technology mostly captures a view of your knuckles if you happen to be typing during a Skype session.

Awkward Webcam Placement

Other than this obstructed view and a lack of infrared sensors for face-recognition Windows logins, the photographic camera is really quite decent. It has good picture quality, and MSI offers you the ability to disable it at the hardware level past pressing the F6 key. Verify it's off past opening up the Windows camera app, which should display an error message explaining that it can't detect a photographic camera. This disabling feature is not quite as comforting every bit a concrete door to people who are worried about webcam snoopers, but it'south better than simply hoping that the camera is off.

Big, Well-Spaced Keyboard

The chiclet keyboard is another of the PS42'south vivid spots. The backlit keys are big and well-spaced, although they have the short travel distance that you'd wait from such a thin laptop. Best of all, the directional pointer keys are arranged in the preferred inverted-T organisation, and they're fifty-fifty total-size instead of the upwards and down arrow keys squeezed into a unmarried row like you'll detect on the MacBook Pro or many HP laptops. This organisation necessitated some rearranging of other keys and the elimination of the left Function key, but this is a worthwhile compromise that I wish more than laptop designers would brand.

MSI Prestige PE42 8RB 12

The touchpad beneath the keyboard is woefully small. I found my fingers frequently slipping off the edge, and a few times I inadvertently pressed the spacebar located extremely close to the pad'south meridian edge. A diminutive touchpad isn't unique to the PS42, since the Spectre xiii besides suffers from this trouble, but it'south specially acute if you tin can't use a bear on screen as a fallback input pick.

Comfortable Keyboard

A fingerprint reader is built in to the upper left corner of the touchpad. It is among the more accurate readers I've used, failing to recognize my print only twice during several days of testing.

In addition to wireless connectivity (802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.2), input and output options are very generous for an ultraportable that'southward this sparse and light. On the right side, you get a full-size SD menu slot, a USB Type-C port, and two USB iii.1 Gen 1 ports. On the left are the power jack, an HDMI output, another USB Type-C port, and a headphone jack.

Left Side Ports

Right Side Ports

Two USB iii.ane ports and two USB Type-C ports is a very generous USB complement for any laptop, allow alone one that's this meaty. And then is including a total-size SD card slot. For comparison, note that Apple's MacBook includes just a single USB Blazon-C port, a headphone jack, and naught else. Stepping upwards to the entry-level MacBook Pro gets you zippo more than than an additional USB Type-C port. Yous won't fare much better with the XPS 13 or the Spectre 13 ($1,099.99 at HP) , both of which lack USB Type-A and HDMI.

The PS42 boasts upward-facing speakers that occupy a meaning corporeality of space in a higher place the keyboard, but their lackluster quality is about what y'all'd expect from a thin-and-light laptop. Bass is almost not-existent, and the laptop failed to fill our living-room-size audio-testing room even at maximum book while watching several movie trailers on YouTube.

Meet the MSI PS42

MSI offers a 1-year warranty for all of its consumer notebooks, including the PS42.

Some Familiar Components

Because the mainstream ultraportable market is so crowded, laptop manufacturers don't take a lot of jerk room when information technology comes to choosing internal components like the CPU, the graphics chip, storage, and the retentivity. If it were economically and physically possible to squeeze a total-power Intel Core i9, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 10-series GPU, and a 1TB solid-state drive (SSD) into a thin $1,299 laptop, someone would have done it already.

MSI therefore sticks with a very common configuration for the unit I'yard testing, which includes an Intel Cadre i7-8550U, an Nvidia GeForce MX150 defended bit, a 512GB Grand.2 SATA SSD, and 16GB of retentiveness. The U-series Intel Core processors have low power-depict requirements, run at low base of operations clock speeds (one.8GHz for the Core i7-8550U), and generate little heat in order to fit into extremely small spaces. That ways the U-series Core i7 in the PS42 is less powerful than a Core i7 that you might find in one of the company's gaming laptops. Nevertheless, it'southward more than powerful enough to handle everyday tasks such as word processing, spider web browsing, and videoconferencing.

MSI PS42 Performance Chart

The all-time evidence of the PS42's everyday capabilities is our PCMark viii benchmark test, which offers a proprietary score based on simulated versions of these activities. The PS42 scored an excellent iii,416 on this exam. The fact that it is 100 points lower than both the Lenovo IdeaPad 720s and the HP Spectre thirteen doesn't thing in the existent world; I experienced no sluggishness during several days of casual browsing in Google Chrome and typing in Microsoft Word. The Razer Blade Stealth and Huawei MateBook X Pro'south lower scores on the PCMark eight benchmark are due in part to these laptops' higher-resolution displays. Pushing more pixels is taxing on the CPU, especially when it's coupled with an integrated graphics processor like the i in the Bract Stealth .

MSI PS42 Graphics Performance Chart

While you can club a cheaper PS42 with Intel integrated graphics, the discrete Nvidia chip with 2GB of defended memory in the version I tested makes a huge difference when it comes to gaming performance. The PS42 far outpaces every machine shown on the chart with Intel'south integrated graphics scrap on both our synthetic 3DMark gaming tests and our Sky and Valley gaming frame-rate simulations. With frame rates hovering around threescore frames per second (fps) on the Heaven and Valley tests at medium quality settings, you might be able to enjoy graphics-intensive games at lower quality settings, which is all simply impossible with the sub-30fps numbers that the HP, Lenovo, and Razer put upwards.

Be warned, though: the MX150 is not a substitute for a high-finish graphics carte from Nvidia's GeForce GTX series. Truthful to its roots, MSI said that is exploring the possibility of adding a GTX 1050 Max-Q GPU to the PS42, but that version isn't on auction nevertheless.

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Nor does the MX150 offer better functioning on specialized tasks similar editing photos or rendering video. On our Handbrake and Photoshop CS6 tests, which involve exporting a short Hd video into a smartphone-friendly format and applying a series of filters to a test epitome, the PS42 performed almost exactly the same as its competitors (ane minute and 27 seconds for Handbrake, iii:04 for Photoshop).

Battery life is too average for a premium ultraportable, though at 10 hours and 26 minutes on our bombardment rundown test, it's a flake on the low side. The Spectre xiii clocked in at more than than 12 hours, and the MacBook Pro, renowned for its longevity away from an outlet, lasted for more than 16 hours.

The Dell XPS 13 is conspicuously absent from the charts above because the most recent version nosotros tested, which received an Editors' Choice award, is significantly more than expensive than $1,299.

Thin and Light

A Lite Opening Salvo for MSI

An ultraportable change of pace from a visitor that fabricated its proper name in the gaming PC concern, the PS42 is a solid first shot. Information technology offers mid-level gaming performance in a very slim package, merely information technology suffers from a boring design and a tiny touchpad, and a few other deficiencies. It'south a worthy contender if you lot're an MSI loyalist looking for a laptop to tote around while your gaming rig remains safely at home. It's also an okay selection if yous just want a sparse-and-light machine with a good keyboard, don't intendance about bear on screens or 4K, and can live with a tiny touchpad. Otherwise, the Dell XPS xiii ($784.78 at Dell) offers more than customization and meliorate looks than the PS42 does, and and then remains our Editors' Choice.

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