MSI is one of the top laptop manufacturers around, typically producing solid machines across the board. We’ve tested the good, the bad and the ugly to find the best MSI picks across gaming, budget, 2-in-1 machines and more. Here are our top choices.
Here at Trusted Reviews, we review laptops from many laptop manufacturers, and MSI is just one of them. If you’re considering a machine from MSI, you’re in the right place. We’ve tested many MSI laptops over the last couple of years and our favourites have been selected via our rigorous testing methods.
Our testing ranges from the real-world experiences of our expert reviewers to using industry-standard benchmarks to make important comparisons and judgements up against key rivals. If a company touts big new features, we’ll drill down to make sure it lives up to any grandiose claims, as well as put the build quality and battery life through its paces. We also make sure the display is up to snuff by using a professional-grade colourimeter.
MSI has plenty of strong laptop picks available but, if none of them take your fancy then not to worry as we’ll be testing new MSI laptops on a regular basis so be sure to check back for new entries over the coming months. There are also our guides for non-MSI options. Check out our favourites in the best laptop, best ultrabook, best student laptop and best budget laptop lists.
Best MSI laptops at a glance
- Best overall MSI laptop: MSI Prestige 14 Evo – check price
- Best gaming MSI laptop: MSI Raider GE78 HX – check price
- Best 4K gaming MSI laptop: MSI Titan GT77 HX – check price
- Best budget MSI laptop: MSI Modern 15 – check price
- Best 2-in-1 MSI laptop: MSI Summit E16 Flip Evo – check price
How we test
Every laptop we review goes through a series of uniform checks designed to gauge key things including build quality, performance, screen quality and battery life.
These include formal synthetic benchmarks and scripted tests, plus a series of real world checks, such as how well it runs the most frequently used apps.
We also make sure to use every laptop we review as our primary device for at least a week to ensure our review is as accurate as possible.
- Better value than some
- Remarkable performance for its size
- Light and highly portable
- Weak speakers
- Better battery life offered by Apple and AMD CPU laptops
- Screen could be a little brighter
- High-quality display
- Impressive sound system
- Eye-catching matrix LED lightshow
- Improved build
- No support for G-Sync or Advanced Optimus
- Fans are loud at full speed
- No Mini LED option
- Incredible gaming and computing power
- Fantastic high-resolution Mini LED display
- Crisp, responsive mechanical keyboard
- Loads of ports and sockets
- Ruinously expensive
- Aggressively loud
- Several bad design missteps
- Huge, heavy design
- Affordable pricing
- Good performance for the money
- Looks quite slick for a budget laptop
- Poor colour reproduction
- 5.5-hour battery life
- Strong performance
- Reserved but sharp-looking design
- All-day battery life for light jobs
- Plastic touchpad
- Unremarkable display resolution and contrast
MSI Prestige 14 Evo
Best overall MSI Laptop
Pros
Cons
Our pick for the top all-round MSI laptop is the MSI Prestige 14 Evo. It’s a productivity-focused device that comes it a tad cheaper than many rivals in this space while still catering to all of your essay-writing and web-browsing needs.
The Prestige 14 Evo is a laptop full of smart decisions. Some rivals opt for a much fancier display, and that may be what you want, but MSI keeps the price below £1000 by offering a solid 1080p panel. It isn’t a display to write some about but it gets the job done. The screen is also a matte one, making it ideals for environments where reflections can sometimes be a pest.
The rest of this pristine package brings together an Intel Core i7-1280P chip, a thin-and-light build and an invitingly usable keyboard. Paired with 16GB RAM, the performance eats through productivity tasking with ease. MSI also offers custom power modes to provides more control over the system, a handy tool for those with the knowhow tinker with wattages.
The keyboard brings a surprising amount of travel for such a trim machine, making this a great pick for students or, even, as a business laptop. Rounding things off is a decent battery life that should get you beyond a full work day and just into the next.
Reviewer: Andrew Williams
Full review: MSI Prestige 14 Evo review
MSI Raider GE78 HX
Best gaming MSI laptop
Pros
- High-quality display
- Impressive sound system
- Eye-catching matrix LED lightshow
- Improved build
Cons
- No support for G-Sync or Advanced Optimus
- Fans are loud at full speed
- No Mini LED option
Few laptops pack a punch quite like the MSI Raider GE78 HX. MSI’s Raider laptops have focused on bringing immense power to mobile PC gamers above all else. The looks of the Raider may be an acquired taste, with its signature bold and bright RGB bar sitting at the front of the bottom of the machine, but those who love a splash of colour will be happy.
There’s extremely strong power under the hood, with our review model sporting a 24-core Intel Core i9-13950HX processor and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 GPU, but it can adorn the very top end RTX 4090 too. Our combination offers up some stunning scores, with this MSI laptop achieving 138fps in Horizon Zero Dawn, 94fps in Cyberpunk 2077 and 107fps in Borderlands 3, all at Ultra settings and a 1440p resolution. This is all before activating Nvidia’s DLSS 3 technology which boosts frames rates even further.
For gamers, the keyboard is a top-notch option too. MSI has a set of Steelseries keys built in and while it may not be mechanical, you won’t find many chiclet keyboards better than this. The keypress is smooth and accurate, as well as per-key RGB lighting to sweeten the deal.
The MSI Raider GE78 HX may be about gaming above all else, but MSI has added some nice touches to improve the overall experience this time around. First, more room has been made for some dual upfiring speakers and, for a gaming laptop, they’re surprisingly good. While we anticipate that most gamers will play with an external mouse, MSI has extended the trackpad for this latest model which feels like a necessary move if you’re going to use this outside of gaming too.
Reviewer: Alun Taylor
Full review: MSI Raider GE78 HX review
MSI Titan GT77 HX (2023)
Best 4K gaming MSI laptop
Pros
- Incredible gaming and computing power
- Fantastic high-resolution Mini LED display
- Crisp, responsive mechanical keyboard
- Loads of ports and sockets
Cons
- Ruinously expensive
- Aggressively loud
- Several bad design missteps
- Huge, heavy design
The Raider GE78 HX may be our favourite gaming laptop overall but it doesn’t prioritise the display quite like the MSI Titan GT77 HX. For its hefty price tag, this MSI machine aims to give laptops everyone they could want, being superb gaming performance and a top-tier display.
The star of the show is the 4K Mini LED panel. The luxurious technology is spread across 17.3-inches and offers up an ideal 144Hz refresh rate alongside VESA DisplayHDR 1000 and 1000 dimming zones. The brightness is stunning, with 617 nits offered in SDR mode and a whopping 1145 nits in HDR mode. For a device-focused on gaming, its an impressively accurate display as well, with remarkable contrast and eye-catching colours too.
There’s top of the line specs to back up this glorious screen too, with up to an Intel Core i9-13980HX and up to an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 available. We tested the very best model available and saw scores hit around 100fps and beyond in games with a focus of graphical detail, and that’s at 4K resolution, a remarkable feat. At 1080p, this machine could achieve upwards of 450fps in first-person shooter Rainbow Six Siege, if the display accommodated it.
The keyboard and port selection is up to snuff too. The keys are an absolute joy, with a crisp action and pleasing feedback. Furthermore, the wide selection of ports is headlined by two Thunderbolt 4 ports, an HDMI 2.1, 2.5Gbps as well as plenty more.
Reviewer: Mike Jennings
Full review: MSI Titan GT77 HX review
MSI Modern 15
Best budget MSI laptop
Pros
- Affordable pricing
- Good performance for the money
- Looks quite slick for a budget laptop
Cons
- Poor colour reproduction
- 5.5-hour battery life
Some may be forgiven for thinking MSI is solely a gaming brand but devices like the MSI Modern 15 show it can do traditional wallet-friendly machines too.
The MSI Modern 15 is a laptop that could easily fool you into thinking it costs a few hundred pounds more than it does, truly living up to its ‘Modern’ moniker. Instead, it comes in at under £500 but provides top-notch productivity capabilities. With the 12th Gen Intel processor onboard and 8GB RAM included, it’s a device that’ll get the job done if you’re after something for browsing around in 10-20 tabs along with some light multitasking.
We can’t say enough about the design of this machine, it’s a marvel. It doesn’t scream luxury but it matches up with devices in the £700-plus bracket, not sub-£500 where it should be. It isn’t the thinnest and lightest laptop, but you wouldn’t be embarrassed to take this anywhere.
It’d make itself comfortably at home in a hybrid working set up too, with a solid selection of ports on offer. You’ll find a USB-C, three USB-A, an HDMI and a headphone jack. There’s a 720p webcam as well, which isn’t great on paper but it does a decent job at this price.
Reviewer: Andrew Williams
Full review: MSI Modern 15 review
MSI Summit E16 Flip Evo
Best 2-in-1 MSI laptop
Pros
- Strong performance
- Reserved but sharp-looking design
- All-day battery life for light jobs
Cons
- Plastic touchpad
- Unremarkable display resolution and contrast
Laptops that you’d define as 2-in-1, whether they are a hybrid tablet or a laptop with a 360-hinge, feel like they are going out of style, but the MSI Summit E16 Flip Evo makes the case to keep them. There has been a mini resurgence, with a slant towards large 2-in-1 machines, like the 16-inch Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro 360.
The Summit E16 Flip Evo is another strong all-rounder from MSI, bringing good performance, pleasing looks and a capable battery life together in one package. Displays are key on 2-in-1 devices and this laptop offers a 165Hz FHD+ panel, meaning you’ll get smooth scrolling and a solid level of detail. We would’ve liked brightness to have been boosted beyond the max 324 nits it offers but it’s more than acceptable for use indoors.
The Intel Core i7-1280p processor is a capable one, allowing for bags of productivity work and even some light editing. The Intel Xe graphics also invite you to do some very basic gaming on this device. Even when pushed, the Summit E16 Flip Evo is pleaisngly quiet, meaning you’ll rarely disturb your family at home, colleagues at work or strangers in a coffee shop.
Battery life is impressive, coming in at over 12 hours for light use. The 82Wh capacity means that you should get beyond a full day’s work and have some juice left for the next morning.
Reviewer: Andrew Williams
Full review: MSI Summit E16 Flip Evo review
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MSI offers a lot of different laptops so it’s difficult to boil down the whole range as being good or not. There are plenty of good MSI laptops, but they don’t always hit the mark and strong alternatives can often be found.
The best all-round MSI gaming laptop is the MSI Raider GE78 HX, with its modern Intel and Nvidia components. However, those looking for 4K gaming should consider the MSI Titan GT77 HX.
MSI and Asus release a lot of different laptops each year, and both produce excellent devices and poorer ones. However, in our experience, Asus has a better hit rate than MSI. Alienware’s offering is smaller and often takes greater chances, this also makes it harder to find the exact Alienware laptop for you. MSI and Asus provide much wider choice.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.