The MSI Prestige 13 AI+ Evo Is Designed for a Future That Hasn't Arrived Yet
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The Good
- Beautiful OLED display
- Slim and lightweight
- Solid specs
The Bad- Expensive
- Lacks flagship AI features
Table of Contents
In search of an AI future
Artificial intelligence is dominating the zeitgeist these days, and laptop maker MSI has been quick to pile on the bandwagon with a slew of products marketed around harnessing AI’s potential. The clumsily named MSI Prestige 13 AI+ EVO is one such device: A svelte, ultra-lightweight machine designed to be a productivity superstar, small enough that you feel like you could tuck it into an oversized pocket and forget you’re carrying it.
It’s powered by Intel’s Lunar Lake chips, themselves created with AI applications in mind, as well as Intel’s discrete Arc GPU for a little bump of graphical horsepower. While it shines in productivity and efficiency, its spec sheet and features read a little like a machine looking for an audience that may not exist (at least not yet).
First impressions
My first thought lifting the Prestige 13 out of its box was “Wow, this thing is tiny.”
At 11.77 x 8.27 x 0.67 inches, it’s a smidge thicker but less wide and deep than the 13-inch MacBook Air. It’s also feather light at 2.18 pounds, noticeably lighter than the Air’s 2.7 pounds. It’s so light, in fact, that if you tucked it into a chunky backpack, you may not remember if you packed it or not.
Even the charger is petite. In lieu of a hefty power brick with its own detachable cable, the Prestige 13 packs a Thunderbolt 4 cable with a square plug not much larger than most standard USB-C chargers.
The machine feels snappy, and boots to the desktop quickly. While it comes with a handful of bloatware apps, MSI has been relatively restrained with the included software here, too. You get Norton and some Intel software, but there’s very little preinstalled clutter.
Intel-powered to accelerate AI
At the heart of the Prestige 13 is the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processor, one of Intel’s Lunar Lake series of chips. These chips are designed for ultra-low power laptops and other devices with a heavy emphasis on accelerating AI processes.
Importantly, Lunar Lake chips provide a neural processing unit (NPU) capable of delivering up to 48 TOPS, which surpasses the required 40 TOPS required to drive Microsoft’s Copilot+ AI applications. These include apps like the controversial Recall, which continuously captures your activity as screenshots and lets you jump back in time to see them, and Image Creator (previously dubbed Cocreator in Paint), which lets you combine your brush strokes with text prompts to generate images in real time.
There’s also the ability to generate live captions on the fly, an AI upscaler for games, and more. Bear in mind that some features, like Recall, require that you're signed up for the Windows Insider program and are running the developer version of Windows 11, and that many of them are still in a beta/testing phase. Also, while these features do require a Copilot+ compatible laptop, they are not unique to the MSI Prestige 13 AI+ Evo.
Lunar Lake is also the first series of Intel Core processors that features LPDDR5X memory directly on the chip package. It’s like a CPU and RAM combined into one. This means reduced latency, better energy efficiency, and a significant savings in space on the motherboard. However, it also means that you won’t be able to add additional RAM later on (although you usually can't do that on ultrathin laptops, anyway). Luckily, the Prestige 13 AI+ EVO I tested includes a relatively generous 32GB of memory out of the box. Some of the other Lunar Lake chips only include a scant 16GB, so be careful with your configuration when purchasing.
On the graphics side, the Prestige 13 is powered by Intel’s proprietary Arc iGPU, which is built into the CPU and enables ray tracing (an advanced lighting technique in games) and Intel’s Xe Super Sampling (XeSS). XeSS, like AMD’s FSR and Nvidia’s DLSS, aims to improve performance in games by rendering at a lower resolution and then intelligently upscaling in real time.
Impressive battery life
The efficiency of the build is evident in the impressive battery life. On the Balanced power setting under a moderate productivity load, the Prestige 13 lasted more than eighteen and a half hours before shutting down. In this case, the load was a continuous video streaming over the internet, not nearly as taxing as gaming, video editing or other processor-intensive applications, but also not as lightweight as just word processing or surfing the web. To ensure the first result wasn't a fluke, I ran the battery completely down twice while streaming video and got nearly identical results in both tests. It's an impressive result for a machine that seems best suited to productivity tasks.
Running a demanding, triple-A game like Black Myth: Wukong slashed the battery time, as you'd expect. On the highest performance battery mode, half the battery was depleted in just under an hour of gaming. If you plan on any kind of marathon gaming sessions, or even for heavier productivity loads, make sure you pack the (luckily very portable) charging cable.
AI appetizers
For a machine with AI in its name, the AI features available in the Prestige 13 feel short of a main course. And that's beyond the general features offered with Copilot+.
The MSI Center, which launches on startup by default, has some basic resource monitoring features, and lets you set the laptop's performance mode. For heavy loads, there’s an Extreme Performance setting, but to stretch out the battery, there are Balanced and ECO-Silent options, too.
More importantly, the MSI Center is home to the AI Zone, which surfaces the majority of the AI features available on the Prestige 13. There’s smart noise cancellation for calls and audio recording, with three settings available. In testing, it did a good job of intelligently cancelling background noise in both the Standard and Studio EQ settings (the setting for ‘studio-grade professional audio recording’). Unfortunately, the mic quality is fairly low regardless of which mode you’re using, so it’s not a good candidate for any kind of recording.
The Conference Enhancer mode did a fairly solid job of only capturing sound from the directions I chose and cancelling other audio, and “Speaker Phone Mode” captured 360 degree sound reasonably well, though again, the mic quality is a bit limiting.
A Smart Guard option is also available from the AI menu, which is supposed to automatically lock the PC when you leave, or wake it up when you come back. However, it rarely worked as advertised, regardless of how much I tinkered with the distance and Windows Presence settings. While it would recognize that I had come back to my laptop about half the time, it almost never detected that I had left.
The scant video features are just ways to access pre-existing Windows features. There’s also a link to Windows Studio Effects for the camera, which lets you toggle on AI-powered options like automatically reframing you during a video call, or making it appear that you're making eye contact regardless of where the camera is positioned.
Rounding out the AI Zone are features like smart brightness settings based on the amount of ambient light and an AI LAN manager for bandwidth monitoring.
Overall, as a core offering, it feels slight. Many of the features were underwhelming, and some barely worked. One of the main disappointments here is that a large number of these features already have options available in Windows. "Smart Guard," for instance, is similar to the existing Windows Presence option. While Presence does require specific hardware, it's not an MSI exclusive, and Smart Guard doesn't add much to it while also being generally less reliable.
The noise cancellation features are really the only MSI exclusives available in the AI Zone, and they're hardly game changers, especially given the quality of the built in microphone. Comparable versions of many of these features are also already available in software like Microsoft Teams or Zoom, or in recording software like Audacity, so you'll likely not even need them.
If Copilot+ features like Recall end up delivering on their promises, they could greatly expand the Prestige 13 as an AI machine, but at the moment, the AI offerings are mainly a novelty.
A gorgeous presentation
One of the areas where the Prestige 13 truly shines is its beautiful display. Though small at only 13.3” inches, it’s a beautiful OLED panel with a 2.8K (2,880 x 1,800) resolution. It’s crisp, sharp, and packs vibrant colors, in part due to impressive HDR implementation. Blacks are deep and pure and whites are bright and impactful. It’s a beautiful panel and makes videos and images pop, though the refresh rate being capped at 60Hz is a little disappointing.
The laptop itself is a slick package, too. It’s simple and unassuming, in matte black, with a stylized MSI logo in silver on the lid. It’s got some sharp, appealing angles, and the chassis is built from a durable magnesium-aluminum alloy, tested to U.S. military-grade standard MIL-STD-810H.
The webcam is also remarkably high quality. It’s five megapixels (meaning a resolution of 2,592 x 1,944), a significant step up from the HD webcams on many notebooks. It also captures a fairly wide image, and is smartly positioned on the top of the lid so it’s easy to point and position.
Solid productivity performance
While the key focus of Intel's Lunar Lake series is to power AI performance, the Prestige 13 turned in some fairly respectable general productivity numbers. That said, this is an ultralight laptop, so it's not going to match larger, better-specced productivity powerhouses for performance, nor is it intended to. The goal here is clearly to deliver a machine that's portable and featherlight and, with that in mind, the benchmarks for the Prestige 13 are reasonably impressive.
In the Geekbench 6 suite of tests, which synthetically emulates various common computer-based tasks, the Core Ultra 7 258V scored 2,735 in single core tests and 11,135 in multi core ones. For comparison's sake, the lightweight Asus Zenbook A14 that Lifehacker reviewed in March scored 2,128 and 10,222 respectively, while the MacBook Air’s M4 chip rated 3,813 and 15,048 in testing at Lifehacker sister site PCMag. That multi-core score puts the Ultra 7 in the ballpark of high-end chips from previous generations, like Intel's Core i9-9880H, for instance, and low to mid-tier chips from more recent models, like the 12th generation Intel Core i7-12700.
The single core performance is more impressive, elevating the Ultra 7 to the ranks of higher-end chips like the Core i9-13900. Those results also bore out in Cinebench testing, where single core performance clocked in at 1,899 and multi core performance hit 8,513. What this means in layman's terms is that the Prestige 13 is very well suited to older or simpler applications and games, but still quite competent for more modern use cases.
I also encoded a 12-minute video from 4K to 1080p at 30 FPS, which puts a sustained load on the CPU as well as taxing read and write speeds of the storage. The Prestige performed admirably, completing the encode in six minutes and 45 seconds (compared to five minutes for the MacBook Air, or the aforementioned Asus Zenbook 14, which is limited by its Snapdragon X chip and took 12 minutes to complete the same test).
Given its name and how MSI is trying to position the Prestige 13 AI+ EVO in marketing materials, however, I was especially curious how it would perform in AI testing. In Geekbench AI, the Lunar Lake chip scored a single precision score of 2,400, a half precision score of 1,273, and a quantized score of 4,889. While the single precision score is typically most important for AI training and inference tasks, the quantized score is the one most often used in hardware comparisons, and represents the performance in AI workloads that have been optimized through quantization.
To put those results in perspective, the MacBook Air (driven by Apple's latest generation of silicon, the M4), achieved a score of 6,239, significantly outperforming the Prestige 13. By comparison, the Zenbook A14 managed a fairly comparable score of 4,398. For a machine sold on the promise of its AI capabilities, the Prestige 13's numbers are pretty underwhelming.
For further context, the 13-inch MacBook Air retails for $999, and the Zenbook A14 has an MSRP of $1,200. With the Prestige 13 coming in around $350 more than the Air at $1,350, it becomes painfully obvious how much of a premium is being asked for that OLED panel (the Air uses Apple's Liquid Retina version of LCD). How much you prioritize display over performance will be an important factor in whether or not the Prestige 13 is worth the price tag.
A mixed bag for gaming
While no one's going to mistake the Prestige 13 for a cutting-edge gaming laptop, it showed surprising promise in the built-in benchmark in the recent title Black Myth: Wukong. At full resolution (2,880 x 1,800), albeit on Low settings with AMD’s FSR enabled, it managed to hit an average of 34 FPS. The game was playable and responsive, and looked nice on the Prestige 13’s OLED panel.
By contrast, however, it struggled to hit 25 FPS in the Assassin’s Creed Shadows benchmark, even at the lowest resolution (1280 x 768), also at Low settings with FSR enabled. This may be due to AC Shadows’ extensive use of ray tracing techniques, which can be set to low but not disabled entirely.
In testing other titles, performance in triple-A heavyweights varied significantly, and whether or not a game will be playable may depend on optimization in individual games. That said, for lightweight games that aren’t graphics intensive, like Vampire Survivors or Rogue Legacy 2, the Prestige 13 is a great fit.
The small screen is also actually something of a boon here, because it makes lower resolutions look better on that attractive OLED screen, especially with HDR enabled. Wukong at full 2.8K looked especially nice on that crisp 13.3 inch panel.
Interestingly, I got better results in both the AC Shadows and Wukong benchmarks with AMD’s upscaling technology, FSR, than with Intel’s own XeSS, despite the Prestige 13 using an Intel chip. Luckily, both are available on this device.
Pricing and miscellany
Before closing out this review, a few quick notes. Around the edges of the machine, the Prestige 13 offers a fairly generous I/O package for such a small notebook: one USB-A, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, an HDMI connection, headphone jack, microSD slot, and a Kensington Lock Slot (for attaching a cable secured to something else to avoid theft).
However, it can also get very noisy for such a small package. Under load, the fan can really start screaming, loud enough that it’ll make you glad that the speakers can be raised to a high volume. The speaker quality overall is pretty solid, as built-in laptop speakers go, delivering fairly clear audio without a lot of the tinniness you get from similar machines.
One other feature I appreciated was that the trackpad is split, with the left side dedicated to left clicks and the right side dedicated to right clicks. It’s a nice little quality of life feature if you don’t want to fuss with two finger clicking and other fiddly trackpad eccentricities.
Pricing is a bit confused at the moment. In the product information MSI provided me, there are retailer links to two models, the only difference between them being one has 1TB of storage and one has 2TB. The 2TB model is only listed as being available at Amazon, and is listed for $1,350. Oddly, the 1TB model isn’t available at Amazon, but is more expensive at the retailers where it is listed (typically $50 more).
Regardless, that’s a fairly steep price point. It’s not excessive, but it’s hard to imagine the use case where you’d want to pay that much for a productivity machine (outside of maybe an Apple device, or a heavy Photoshop workhorse), and it’s hardly positioned to be a killer gaming laptop. While it’s got a really beautiful OLED display and some reasonably solid internals, the Prestige 13 feels like a laptop that’s waiting for the AI revolution to catch up with it to make it a sensible investment for most. Even then, whether the high cost is justified will come down largely to how much you crave a crisp OLED panel, and how much in terms of performance you're willing to sacrifice for it.
