MSI Prestige 16 Studio Review – miniLED 165Hz Display

Here we have a 16-inch laptop that sports a miniLED display running at 165Hertz the MSI Prestige 16 Studio, and it’s great for content creators laptops because not only does this have the 13th gen Intel 8 series processor, the Core i7-13700H, but it also has the Nvidia GeForce RTX4060 discrete GPU.

If you do things like video editing, Lightroom, Photoshop, this laptop is going to be a great for you. Also it has this miniLED display, so the display can get as bright as 1000nits in terms of the peak brightness.

Unboxing, Design and Build

First what you get inside the box, foreign. We get the MSI Prestige 16 Studio itself, a quick start guide and then power charger. If you purchase with the RTX4060, you get a 150-watt power charger that’s what we get. If you get the RTX4050 GPU you get a 120-watt charger, and It uses a barrel pin connection, and you have the power cord as well.

As far the design, holding Prestige 16 Studio, I’m impressed with the Urban Silver finish, It gives it a nice look, pretty understated pretty classy with an all-metal build. It’s aluminum, and I think it’s pretty rock solid. I saw a little given flex in the chassis but nothing to be alarmed about. As far as weight is concerned, it weight about 2.14 kilograms And with adapter, weight about 2.56 kilograms.

On the left side of Prestige 16 Studio, it has power port, two USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 ports, and the first one does support charge the second one doesn’t, and then you get your kill switch for the webcam. That’s always really good.

Moving over to the right side it has 3.5-millimeter microphone/headphone combo jack, a Micro SD card reader, a full-size USB-A port, and an HDMI 2.1 Port, which supports 8K monitors up to 60Hz and 4K monitors up to 120Hz. I do want to point out that those two USB-C ports are not Thunderbolt ports, not available on the miniLED model.

User Upgradeability

As far upgradeability inside the MSI Prestige 16 Studio laptop, you’ll notice that two fans for cooling, and then the battery. But as far as the RAM, that is soldered into the motherboard, and that is not upgradable by the user. They’re using LPDDR5 RAM running at 4,800 megahertz. This has 32GB of RAM, although you could get it with 16GB according to the specs. So, my unit does have 32GB it’s working well in dual-channel mode.

All	Read (MB/s)	Write (MB/s)
SEQ1M Q8T1	7037.22	5211.68
SEQ1M Q1T1	4492.37	4530.50
RND4K Q32T1	641.48	584.70
RND4K Q1T1	89.21	244.29

It has a two-terabyte PCIe NVMe SSD storage, and with these very fast reads and writes, they are certainly Gen 4 speeds we like to see in 2023 model. The wireless card is user-upgradable that is slotted in that’s always good. It’s using Wi-Fi 6E with a Bluetooth 5.2 combo card, and that has been working well in terms of the Wi-Fi and the Bluetooth, no issues on either front.

Display and Audio Speakers

MSI Prestige 16 Studio has 16-inch 16:10 aspect ratio miniLED display, a QHD+ resolution (2560 by 1600), and running at 165Hz. So you get the really smooth scrolling, the very fluid experience that comes with a high refresh rate. This does have some really deep blacks, some excellent contrast, really good color accuracy, and it also covers the color gamut really well.

So if you’re a content creator and you want to do Lightroom, Photoshop, video editing, color grading, this miniLED panel you can definitely rely on, It will get the job done. It’s a gorgeous display, and watching High Dynamic Range content has been superb, especially because it has a peak brightness of about a 1000nits. So when you’re watching that High Dynamic Range content I actually had to turn it down it was too bright, seemingly bright.

I had to go to about 50 brightness, When you’re watching standard dynamic range, you’re about 500 or so nits, and that’s still bright. That’s certainly one of the strong suits of this panel, so really kudos to them for using a really gorgeous miniLED display. My overall takeaway on MSI Prestige 16 Studio miniLED display has been excellent. I like watching High Dynamic content on it, on Netflix, Prime Video, YouTube it actually worked out really well.

MSI Prestige 16 Studio boasts two two-watt speakers, they’re high-res audio certified according to the specs and they have the DTS sound effect on them. I’m not that impressed with the speakers, it didn’t have enough bass, as I’m concerned. It sounded a little bit tinny, especially for a 16-inch laptop.

Keyboard and Touchpad

The lid you can open with one finger and the screen goes back 180 degrees, that’s been pretty good, the hinges are on pretty good. I didn’t see any screen wobble when it comes to typing, pretty good in that regard.

When it comes to the keyboard, I found it pretty comfortable for typing although a little bit on the mushy side. It’s still a decent activity and decent feedback, and it was comfortable for typing long documents or emails, it actually worked out well. And for those number crunches out there, you do have the numpad. It’s a little bit narrow and I’m not sure if I like the format.

It also has a nice white LED backlight on it, allowing you to get work done in a dark room or a dimly lit environment, worked well. As far as the Precision touchpad, I thought it worked out really well in terms of that touchpad for two-finger scrolling, all the gestures, everything worked out really well, very responsive, no issues.

Webcam and Fingerprint Reader

The Webcam on the MSI Prestige 16 Studio laptop 2023 is pretty impressive, it’s a 1080p camera that captures 30 frames per second. It’s also an IR camera which means you can log in with face recognition. There’s also a fingerprint scanner located on the keyboard deck that allows you to log in using your finger.

Performance

When it comes to performance, Prestige 16 Studio is going to be a good laptop, especially when it comes to content creation. Things like Photoshop, video editing, it’s going to do okay with it because it’s got Intel’s 13th Gen Core i7-13700H processor that’s a 45-watt CPU. It has 14 cores that’s eight efficient cores and six performance cores.

Platforms	Score
PCMARK 10	6,299
GEEKBENCH 6 (Single-Core)	2,413
GEEKBENCH 6 (Multi-Core)	11,898
CINEBENCH R20	5,157
CINEBENCH R15	2,353 CB, 206.62 FPS
CINEBENCH R23	1,830 Single-core, 14,869 Multi-core
3DMARK Fire Strike	18,420
3DMARK Time Spy	8,025

And as you can see above benchmarks table from the single and multi-core performance, definitely doable, definitely some of the really good numbers we’d like to see, especially out of this 13th Gen processor from Intel.

Laptops	Single-Core Score	Multi-Core Score
Dell XPS 15 19530 Core i9-13900H	1,980	14,457
Dell XPS 15 9530 Core i7-13700H	1,883	14,409
Samsung Galaxy Book3 Ultra Core i7-13700H	1,853	14,382
MSI Prestige 16 Studio Core i7-13700H	1,830	14,869
Apple MackBook Pro 16 M2 Max	1,695	14,855

And when I ran the Cinebench R23, which accounts for any kind of sustained workload, heavy sustained workload to account for any thermal throttling, you’re going to see it did well in both the single and multi-core performance. So, this is a very good laptop, as I mentioned, for content creation. And for everyday use you’re certainly going to get a lot of use out of this, Microsoft Office, email, web browsing, it all worked well.

Video editing in Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve is certainly aided by the fact that this does have the Nvidia GeForce RTX4060 capped at 55-Watts. So just keep that in mind temper your expectations with that GPU, although it will give you a graphics performance boost.

I wouldn’t categorize MSi Prestige 16 Studio laptop as a gaming laptop, but you can play some of the games. Obviously you get some playable frame rates thanks to the Nvidia GeForce RTX4060 discrete GPU. This is going to be good for those certain titles if you lower some of the settings, just depends on what you’re looking at here. But you definitely get some playable frame rates on some of the more popular titles, So just keep your expectations in check when it comes to the RTX4060. Remember, this is limited to about 55 watts of total power, so you’re really not getting the total maximum power capable in that discrete GPU.

Fan Noise and Surface Temps

When I tested Prestige 16 Studio to see if it will thermal throttle under heavy load, I ran the Time Spy stress test, and it got a passing score of 98.4, meaning it detected very little, if any thermal throttling. So really maintain good clock speeds even under heavy load, nice.

And as far as the surface temperatures are concerned, it got about 60 degrees Celsius in a couple of places, 55 on the underside, so definitely warmed up but never overly hot, never too hot to the touch, but something to keep your eye on. Again it did get a little bit warm there a few hot spots, as I mentioned.

And when it comes to fan noise under heavy load definitely noticeable, reaching as high as 60-61 decibels, which is quite noticeable, really got loud there at some points. But really when you’re in the balance mode doing everyday tasks, I didn’t find that the fan noise was too much of an issue. But under the load you will notice that fan noise reach, again, 60 decibels that’s pretty loud.

Battery Performance

The battery life, MSI prestige 16 Studio sports an 82-watt-hour battery, that’s a little bit less than the Dell XPS 15, which has an 86-watt-hour battery, and it certainly did less in terms of the battery life. When I ran the PC Mark 10 Modern Office battery test, it did 8 hours and 13 minutes. That’s about two hours less than what I got on the Dell XPS 15.

Laptops	PCMARK 10 Modern Office	PCMARK 10 Video Playback	PCMARK 10 Gaming
Dell XPS 15 9530 86Wh	10 hours 17 minutes	10 hours 21 minutes	1 hours 17 minutes
MSI Prestige 16 Studio 82Wh	8 hours 13 minutes	8 hours 07 minutes	1 hours 02 minutes

So not class-leading in terms of the battery life that’s for sure, as far as a 16-inch laptop is concerned. So don’t expect to get all-day battery life, it depends on what you’re doing. And the 8 hours and 13 minutes is not terrible but it’s certainly not groundbreaking either. So keep that in mind.

Conclusion

So What do I think about the MSI Prestige 16 Studio 2023? And I think if you’re a content creator who wants to do Lightroom, Photoshop, video editing, and needs a really great display, this certainly will come through for you. That 16-inch miniLED display is certainly stunning, especially with a 165Hz refresh rate. It’s competing with the likes of OLED, and it is so bright. I had to turn it down to about 40 to 50 percent most of the time because it was hurting my eyes; it was that bright. Performance was also very good, I didn’t detect any thermal throttling.

The negatives thing is that soldered RAM, no Thunderbolt support, some flex in the chassis, loud fan noise under load, and the speakers sounded a bit tinny, could use a little bit more bass. My overall takeaway is MSI did a really solid job on Prestige 16 Studio, and the star of the show, without a doubt, is that 16-inch miniLED display.

85%

85%

Impressive for content creator

The MSI Prestige 16 Studio excels for content creators with its dazzling 16-inch mini LED display at 165Hz. Despite some drawbacks like soldered RAM and speaker quality, it delivers impressive performance.

Pros

1. Amazing 16-inch 2.5K miniLED Display
2. 165Hz 1000nits peak brightness
3. Strong Performance
4. No Throttling Detected
5. Good Port Selection
6. Competitively Price

Cons

1. Soldered RAM
2. No Thunderbolt support
3. Some Flex in chassis
4. Loud fan Noise under heavy load
5. Speakers Sound tinny

• Design

  8
• Display

  10
• Hardware

  10
• Ports

  9
• Keyboard

  7
• Touchpad

  9
• Audio

  6
• Performance

  10
• Thermals and Fan Noise

  7
• Webcam

  9